CHICAGO SUNDOWN, 8/89, 40" x 40"
I stay a week in a top floor of a Chicago hotel and paint this from memory on returning home. The tall buildings are melting, or dancing. Something is either on fire or radiating its own orange glow. At the bottom left a large green animal paw is enclosed in a cage surrounded by faux-greek bank pillars. Orange streetlights diminish into the distance and the whole city is dripping and vivid and oozing and vital. Memory remembers the most intense parts of an experience. Therefore memory is like "hallucination." I rely on this theory. It gives me courage to exaggerate, because remembering is really very close to imagining.