I have always enjoyed lyric opera, especially works composed in the baroque and classical periods. I don’t know why this is, I was never really introduced to the genre, but spontaneously began following the stories by reading the libretti. This helped me later when I went to Europe and had to learn different languages- it wasn’t as difficult to understand people.

When I started the street painting festival in Fresno, California, I created an original composition based on Mozart’s The Magic Flute.  It was such a success that a couple of the city counsel members decided to commission the piece as an oil painting for the new city hall. Although they raised private funds for the work, there were some community members who protested the acquisition because it was not considered a work of art that followed the conventions of modernism. Once the mural was presented, the protesting stopped and the art was widely accepted. In the years that followed, I worked on numerous large-scale commissions of permanent works almost exclusively for private patrons in order to avoid these situations. Without street painting, the general public would have had little chance to see my work.

The original tonal drawings for Papageno and the Queen of the Night are available as print editions. They can be found in the print edition section of my store. Click here for more information.

I did this drawing for a series of murals that were to be executed in fired ceramic tile. They were to be placed at the entrance of an elegant stable that housed award winning Arabian horses. The client changed residences, so the works were never completed, although I eventually did a ceramic mural on another subject for the new residence.

I drew this portrait from an extremely impressive bronze bust in the Naples Archeological Museum. At the time it was simply labeled Seneca, but I later learned that the attribution was disputed. The online presentation of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples describes the state of discussion in the following way:

Nowadays the prevailing interpretation is that the head is a portrait of a dramatist due to the presence, on a copy now at the Museo delle Terme at Rome, of an ivy wreath, the prize for theatrical contexts: some scholars specifically identify him as Aristophanes, because the type in question is associated, in a double herm of Villa Albani, with the portrait of Menander; according to other experts, it could be a portrait of Aesop, Hesiod, Callimachus or Apollonius of Rhodes. We can therefore be quite certain that the person depicted must have been extremely famous, as is proven by the large number of copies to survive, which number a total of forty. From the qualitative point of view, the head displays excellent workmanship; rather than a copy, it might well even be the original from which all the others are reproduced, and should be regarded as a portrait of reconstruction in which the accentuated wrinkles and folds of the face and forehead of the man, the intentionally unruly locks and the wrinkly neck contrast openly with the unwavering, penetrating gaze. The original should be ascribed to the trend of realistic virtuosity, dateable to between the third and second century BC.

It is nice to have a portrait drawing that you can label as any of a number of fabulous classical writers, depending on your needs. I have made this drawing into a limited edition print, click here for more information.