I believe that among the primary functions of artists are to observe and to interpret the world around us with as much truthfulness as we are capable of whether still life, figure, or completely imagined. The work in this exhibition is the documentation of my most careful scrutiny of my internal world as it represents the emotional reaction to the events and experiences of the external.

These paintings have been paralleling my figurative paintings for my whole life as an artist. This particular group, which are generically called 'The Minor Pantheon', began in 1998 with The Circus of the Golden Egg and have been cross-pollinating ever since. They are a meditation on the randomness of fate. Thematically they present history as a game, a puzzle. Things are not what they seem, are fragmented and transformed into what one least expects.

The 'Circus of the Golden Egg' is a painting about hope, expectation, and, if nothing else, an Easter egg hunt. It looks for what the golden goose has laid through a maze of possibilities.

The set of 4 small paintings subtitled Cat's Cradle represent, metaphorically, birth, youth, maturity, and death. 'Head-dress' and 'The Headless Juggler' are studies on contradiction. The triptych 'The Juggler' is from a new group of monotypes with painting that continue the theme of the nature of fate.

The 'Milk of Human Kindness' is a continuation of the Minor Pantheon and also possibly the beginning of a series of new paintings looking at history as metaphor. This painting plays with the ideas of desire and birth and the hope inherent in those states. It also shows the contradictions, and yet again, the randomness of fate.