Autumn

Oil on canvas
2004

This is one of a series of paintings of the four seasons. There is a long tradition in the canon of Western art of a female nude or nearly nude reclining on a bench, bed, or alter. I wanted these pieces to be seen in that tradition.

I have often been drawn to the rubric of a series. Perhaps the very nature of a series has its own built-in muse, in the sense that when one painting is complete, there is the obvious task at hand of creating the next painting until the series is complete. When developing a series, it is often the case that the paintings will develop a kind of dialogue with each other if they are all being done at the same time. In this series, I completed them in succession rather than all together. In fact, I only did the painting in its corresponding season. I began with “Autumn.” It was complete in one season. However, I did not complete “Winter” before Spring arrived in Seattle, so I skipped on and did “Spring.” But I put “Winter” and “Autumn” away and did not look at them until the season returned, so the pieces did not really talk to each other or to me. Perhaps I did it this way because of my own arbitrary rules for the series developed and were firmly in place by the time I completed Autumn.