PLEASURES OF THE HEARTH 1, 2, 3, all 7/91, 40" x 40"
A trio on one theme: the pleasures of being at home, of being with your family, and with yourself. Plate 37 includes stuff in my studio: coffee cups, a pilgrim painted by a nephew when he was six, a photo of my wife Anne at six jumping, an image of a centaur from Plate 34. In Plate 38 I sit at breakfast: a picture of Anne as a very little girl, coffee, wine, being in the kitchen. Plate 39 takes the kitchen theme to the Nursery Rhyme Hallucination level: the smiling sun and a man in a top hat wave hello, the dishes and the spoons dance and sing, cheerful fire spouts from a cup at lower right. Everybody and everything happy. This vision is probably influenced by the black-and-white movie cartoons of the 1930s in which all the buildings and trees and bicycles and inkwells sing and bend to the music. Inanimate objects are psychologized. When we are depressed even objects seem not to be our friends and when we are happy even a teapot seems like an object of inexhaustible energy.