My paintings bring my two unruly households, painting and theatre, into the same room and let them argue, flirt, rehearse, and remember.

Made primarily in graphite and oil on canvas, and some over acrylic base, these portraits and studies return to actors, playwrights, dancers, composers, and performers whose work I have seen on stage as early as circa 1993, and studied, loved, or carried around in the private spaces of memory for decades. Some entered through the old building of the Stella Adler Conservatory at 31 West 27th Street when I studied theatre circa 1989-90. Some through stage left, some through film, others through books, archives, and memories diluted with art historical and museological adventures of nearly quarter of a century. None of them arrived politely. They came with timing, costume, appetite, silence, wit, injury, radiance, and the dangerous habit of remaining vivid long after the curtain fell.

As a playwright, I think in scenes; as a painter, I think of casting before a character speaks. These works are not simply portraits of famous people, nor are they exercises in theatrical nostalgia. They are encounters with performance as a form of haunting. Flowers, masks, glances, profiles, and fragments of costume are all part of the staging. They are props, witnesses, interruptions, sometimes accomplices. In these paintings, theatre and film become archives of feeling, and portraiture becomes my way of asking who remains with us, who keeps speaking, and who insists on stepping back into the light.