This painting and "Parents of Narnia" — which I worked on simultaneously — may be the beginning of a new direction for me. They represent a return to figure painting, but verging more toward abstraction . This one began with a drawing taken from "Triplets," a computer art image I did a year earlier (which was, in turn, taken from a much earlier painting called "The Last? Gerbils"). All three paintings are versions of the same subject: three women sitting in beach chairs. Using that image as a starting point, I kept pushing the figures more and more toward complete abstraction, stopping just short of losing the figure completely.

I titled it "Champagne Summer" because it looks all bubbly like champagne. And since the women were wearing bathing suits and lounging by the pool, I figured it must be summer.

It's a big painting, with a lot of layering and scraping and transparencies that do not reproduce well in a photograph, so I've included a detail (bottom left) of the figure that appears in the upper left-hand corner in order to give just a hint of the surface quality that can only be fully seen in the original.

To see all three versions of this image go here (opens in new window).