Portraits in Oil

Portraits

These portraits are all pencil on smooth Bristol, done as gifts and given to the subjcts. The two on top are two special workers from India who cleaned my art room for two years. The next is the son of a freind of mine. All works were given to the subjects as presents.

Watercolor

This was done while on a trip to Angar Wat in Cambodia, in the winter of 06. I had just heard about the tsunami and was so worried about fellow teachers in Phuket that I did this lttile watercolor postcard size.

Pen and Ink

The first is a cowskull I noticed at our safari base camp, Intrepid camps,in Kenya. The second is our hotel room for two nights, a tent complete with a hot water shower.

Works on paper

These were all done while I was living and teaching in lahore and karachi, Pakistan. The first is charcoal and conte on newsprint, a young boy chained to a desk in the madrassa because he tried to run away.

The middle piece, inspired by a camel safari I took in the remote area of Baluchistan, is oil stick and chine colle on Arches watercolor paper.

I developed the last piece after a discussion with a teacher friend who is Pakistani American, with arms in both worlds, yet belongng fully to none. Perhaps it is more about me than her, and my feeling torn between the worlds of teaching and making art.

Bali Color Fields

Done in the winter of 2006 near Kuta.

Murals painted in New York, Kuwait

This first mural, painted in my apartment on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, NYC, owes its inspiration to Jabberwocky,the nonsense poem from Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, as well as a verse written by Joshua Persky, "Jungle joggers, and tiger taxis, and slithery sneaker snakes"-a perfect description of New York, circa 1985.

Three views of the same living room wall in my penthouse suite in Maydan Hawalli, a suburb of Kuwait. Because I could see the sun every morning from my balcony, as well as the waters of the Arabian Gulf, I chose the theme of a "sun-fish."
During Ramadan of 2004, I was in another apartment, so on a different wall I painted this mural, using laytex paint. I was trying to fast during the day, so to keep from eating, I painted. It worked for a few days. The design is of a mosque, based on a silkpainting done by an Englishwoman.