Whether in an ever expanding series of “Opening Night” pieces I have created for the various casts and crews of Public Theater productions (I have painted scenery for the New York Shakespeare Festival since 1987) or my visual interpretations of the fables of Aesop or even my series of Saints and Sinners, there is always at the root of my work a quiet call for interaction between the art and the viewer. Sometimes the call goes unheeded but the invitation to play is always there. My work as a painter has always been inexorably linked to my life in the theater. Each piece is a little (sometimes not so little) play: the painting is the performer and the frame is the stage. Some plays are best presented on a bare stage and some on stages with varying degrees of scenery. And to further beat this metaphor to death, under the best of circumstances a performance is enhanced by the surrounding scenic elements and not overwhelmed by them. It is that balance which I seek and it is that balance which I sometimes find.