Pursuit, 1984, represents the most significant turning point in my 30+ career. While painting this life-sized 7 x 5' work, I was living in a hideous one bedroom apartment in a cheap area of Staten Island, living frugally off sales from my 1983 solo exhibition in New York. I was 27 years old at the time. I truly love all my work but my works before Pursuit had something of the not fully realized. I was pushing envelopes everywhere and in anyway I could but I was groping for a work that would integrate all I knew up to that point.  Also, there was a little something haunting me at that time: Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Vermeer, and the French Impressionists, they all, rocked my world. I hadn't yet made a work that rocked me as the best of their works did but I knew I was very close.

With a passion bordering on insane somnambulism I poured everything I had into pursuing the furthest reaches of my art. It was wild. I worked 16 hours a day for six months, somewhere I remember the crunch of ice outside under my shoes. I worked to integrate: the fantastic dramatic spotlight affect of Rembrandt; the wet-clothe technique of ancient Greek sculptures; the romantic themes of Delacroix; and the pure vibrant contrasting colors of the Impressionists (the painting has no black). I made more studies than I can remember. And it slowly took form. Once, for this piece,  I went into Wall Street late at night to make a pastel color study of  the granite wall of a skyscraper; got very curious looks from a patrol.

A dear friend, now a well-known writer, modeled for the woman and I modeled for the man. Pursuit is the work I am most proud of.