"Roxbury in Autumn"

Oil on canvas, 2010, 56" x 72", owned by boloco

Click on image to enlarge.

This is one of my most important painting to date. I hope to one day be able to express what the piece means to me in words. For now all my energy has gone into the creation of the visual part. I have written a preliminary summary which I included on my website. Here it is:

This painting has been over twenty years in the making. By that I mean when I was working in a parking lot on Huntington Avenue in 1988 with a young gentleman from Roxbury named Mike Murphy I started to want to paint Dudley Square. You see I always want to go places I'm not supposed to go and do things I'm not supposed to do. Mike always said         "Believe me, you shouldn't go to Dudley Square". Boston is a great city and I don't want there to be any parts of it to which one shouldn't go. Of course I took his advice and never went there.... until last September (2009). I came one weekday morning with my paintbox looking for a good vantage to immortalize on canvas. I felt very welcome and safe just like I do in most places I've ever been to in Boston and had a great experience painting (literally) in the middle of Dudley Square. I set up on the pedestrian island between the Warren Street Splits and the westbound Dudley Street. There was a slight affect on traffic as people at the light next to me were watching me work instead of going when the signal turned green.