My Interior Life

My Interior Life was an afterthought title for this painting. I was searching for a title, and for a while I was calling it Prometheus, because there’s the Greek myth of Prometheus on the wall to the right, which I copied off of a Greek vessel, and you can barely see it. There’s Atlas holding up the world in Prometheus.

Prometheus, on the right, it’s pretty hard to see, and so Prometheus provided fire to the world, and there’s a candle burning in there on the tabletop, and that was the gift of fire, which made it possible for humans to survive, because we’re essentially helpless without it. Of being crafty because I mean physically helpless compared to the other animals who can either fly or run or have giant teeth or something like that and we don’t have any of that so we have to use resourcefulness and we wouldn’t have it without Prometheus but that’s a side issue this was painted during the pandemic in my apartment.

I have a studio in another part of town. There was really no restriction about mobility through the city, but I stayed there for a long time, kind of in solidarity with people who were confined to their houses. The real reason is that the subjects are just beautiful to me, and the light is great in there.

It’s north facing, and it stays stable all day, and I’m able to paint this, the table and the shadows of the table. There’s a little family reference in there. My brother Tony. And it’s one of my most valued possessions for that reason. And the cast shadow of the table on the couch, and the objects on the floor are not usually there, but they helped bring the sweeping movement in there.

My mom looked at this painting and she said, “Dan, your apartment’s not that big.” And she was quite correct, and I give her credit for her perceptiveness. The reason I painted it, that way, it was because it would be a super wide angle and there would be a much steeper two point linear perspective, which is unnatural to me.

So I widened two point linear perspective. Just has to do with vanishing points, you know, like the railroad tracks everybody’s familiar with. That would be single point perspective and two point as the vanishing points are off the picture and you see it all the time in your daily life. Well, I put those vanishing points much farther apart than they really were, and that’s what made the room look good.

I don’t like the look of wide angle pictures, but that’s what I would have had to do to get both couches in there. And so I changed the angle of perspective, making it much more natural looking, as far as I’m concerned.