Mia & Lencho in the River

This is the first painting I did after leaving the circus. I plunged right into figurative imagery after years of making abstract pictures and odd forays across the border of minimalism, coming back with cuttings from their garden to plant in Wolffian dirt.
It is based on a memory of a deep creek that ran between blond hills in the southern inlands of California. There, on a rare day with no shows, I went swimming with my boyfriend, Florencio (Lencho for short). I was just beginning to do paintings about actual places and things, still a bit shy to try and put everything in (like I do now)-thus the spare set design.