These paintings are about history and memory. To what degree of each is questionable: in "Aunt Mary's Hats," perhaps there is more memory, in the "Vergilian Lots," more history. But maybe not.

     My aunt Mary Shoemaker was my father's younger sister, and she was what some people like to call a "crazy lady". In her youth she had been brilliant and beautiful: she had studied at Radcliffe and the Peabody Conservatory, and traveled to Japan with the USO during World War II. Later, after she moved to New York City, her religious beliefs seemed to overcome her and displace her musical accomplishments. Still, she remained a compelling figure. Alice Neel painted her in 1965 in an orange hat with a garland of grapes. When Aunt Mary died, she left many hats, and I found them in her room on Madison Avenue. I had been in touch with Aunt Mary for only a few years then, so my decision to use her hats in my paintings was for my memory, and her history.

     The Vergilian Lots, a series of eighteen of which eight are shown here, were made by historical method. In ancient times, if people wanted to solve a dilemma, answer a question, or tell a fortune, they would open a book at random - often one by the poet Vergil, hence the name. The first text they saw would theoretically provide a solution or have significance to the problem at hand. I applied the method to making these small paintings, choosing six ancient books: the Old Testament, the New Testament, Vergil's Georgics, fragments of Sappho, a book of the principal Upanisads, and the Tao Te Ching. I opened each one in three different places, and as a fragment of text appeared, I visualized an image from it. Some of the images that surfaced were as random as the fragments, but even more came from memories of housewives in Venice, a park in Paris, young vagrants in New York's Chinatown, part of a Sienese painting.