After I left art school with a BFA in painting, I started painting for a living. I painted the outside of a small group of tiny Caribbean shacks for a Derek Walcott production at the Hasty Pudding. It was a musical and I painted them pink and blue and yellow. I painted the inside of a make-believe submarine for a film called Sphere, so that Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone could pretend to be 1000 feet under the sea looking for aliens from the future. It was mostly gray-green and built on a real-life naval base. I painted Don Johnson’s bathroom (off-white) on the set of a TV show called Nash Bridges. It was not a fictional bathroom for fictional bathroom activities, but a real bathroom for real bathroom activities. I painted “old master” paintings for an upscale whorehouse 20 miles north of Boston, Massachusetts. The house had a deep red carpeted stairway and the paintings were made to look 17th century Dutch, more or less. I painted out the yellow traffic lines down the middle of the road at the Frank Lloyd Wright Civic Center in Marin, California so that Uma Thurman’s space vehicle in the film Gattica would look sufficiently futuristic. I used three different shades of grey. I painted my friend Gianno’s face onto the body of Mercury on a fresco in Italy. Mercury’s real face had been scratched out by vandals. His mother was pleased by this. I painted an almost life-size model of a Catholic church inside a Sheraton Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts for a luncheon for Cardinal Law. It took three weeks to build and one week to paint. It was white and the lunch was short. I painted a stage, red, white, and blue for Ross Perot’s embarrassing run for the presidency. That was a real low point. I painted a starry sky for an Aretha Franklin concert privately held for health insurance executives from around the country. I painted the outside of Professor Brainard’s house in a Disney film called Flubber. My French friend, Doucette (not her real name) was incensed that Disney would make a film about Flaubert. I assured her the film was about flubber, flying rubber, and an absent-minded professor’s search for a new energy source and not about Flaubert or Madame Bovary or anything like that.
I even painted the main ring for Barnum and Bailey’s circus, where the elephant mostly stands. This was red, white and blue and smelled badly of elephant dung. I don’t paint much anymore, I mostly draw.