An earlier send-up of these pieces was sold to a friend of mine, who mentioned that he was taken with "all the little stories."

That hadn't really been my intention, to spiral out seven or eleven little tales, one per figure, in each piece, but it did get me thinking - the way the floating bodies are suspended in their watercolor nebulaes, seemingly oblivious to one another and often appearing to have been plucked out of particular activities, like the frozen animal specimens in that Isaac Asimov story. I've done other work recently where I was playing with lifting images that seemed bound up in specificity, and either replacing their context, or diffusing it past the point of recognition. Their blurring and retouching of an existing narrative was simple and bold, but I've changed my

style, and my medium, for these pieces. Even the physical foundational elements, the figures, are invented, (though often researched).

Consequently, there is more to play around with, though also more to contain. Mentioning a delicate balance would probably come off cliché. These drawings, I guess, are the result of those earlier methods distilled. Character minus context times a dozen or so. Slap them down in a way that looks good. But the piddling little choices pile up with startling speed. Where the crook of the elbow? A fisherman's hat or baseball cap? On and on. And in the end, half the point is to make the most painstaking decisions seem effectively arbitrary. And to exponentiate the baggage, each

one of these humble homunculi has a narrative tangent of its own. Each little man has a little story.

So maybe the reason I made such a mess for myself was to see how clean it could look, see how well I could expect visual logic to defy logic logic - Sherpa catawampus to a certified public accountant? Hey, it looks good. But the one element isn't just there to nullify the other. No matter how far the viewer may push his mind to see a pleasing convergence of line and shape, the eye still says it's a CPA, with a calculator and a clip-on tie and everything. The recognition of the depiction tugs a little against the composition, color arrangement, negative space, etc.

In spite of this, the figures build the framework, and they have to be

respected as such. They are illustrations secondarily at best, primarily compositional anchors. Small and wispy as they may be, their coherence as individuals and their relationship to other figures is crucial. So it's all slightly at odds and anxious. The narrative organ goes places the visual one can't, and vice versa. But in spite of all that (I hope), it reaches an overall harmony, one that is familiar to the point of being conventional.