After painting the Beaches I started an ongoing sequence of Dining Rooms where crowds are eating and drinking beneath black backdrops with enormous, cellular shapes. TS Eliot’s poems of social unease are an inspiration, especially The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock where unable to make small-talk, Prufrock exclaims “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”. My dining rooms show people collapsing in the presence of each other with the neat structure of tablecloths set against untidy diners morphing into grotesques and molecular drops as if everything is reverting to a kind of biomorphic soup.
