Are the police providing assistance? Are they making an arrest or giving a ticket? Are they trading recipes with the young woman in the white sweater and red scarf? It is a proto-narrative. All of the elements of a story are there, it is just the story itself that is missing.
It was done in part as a response to a John Nava painting, an overly dramatic and emotionally manipulative image of a police officer standing over a dead person, with the implication that the policeman was the agent of death. After the fashion of 19th century Realists, I was trying to undermine the hierarchy of moments, where moments involving death took precedence over all others. In truth, death is not really the ultimate mystery. We barely know what life is, except that we are in it. That is why I was engaged by this image, a story without a plot, a narrative without a dramatic arc.
The title was a slight nod to Whistler's painting of his Mother. The intention was to emphasize that it was an image, a painting, perhaps based on a real happening, but one that had been taken out of the continuity of time and enlisted for other purposes. At least those were my thoughts when I did the painting.
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Arrangement in Red, Blue, Black and White, oil on canvas, 35 X 50 inches, copyright ©1992
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