The Card Players II was a projects in the planing stage when I started NYU in 1980.. I had spent 10 years learning how to build a grandiose painterly project from the ground up from sketches and cartoons. The Card Players II had an excellent preliminary sketch and a detailed earlier painted version to work from. Admittedly  my primary thought process was a means to propel my works into the realm of modernism by the use of "devices". The card player had real cards and the Marlboro Pack I stole off the table during the gamewhen I made the drawing! I decided to make little cut out cards from paper for the mirror as well.

The View Out From the Toy Shop was packed full of all of the devices and  rules I had made for myself in the previous 10 years. The figures are low relief tooled cutouts that have been adhered to a flat wooden panel. There is a window which is full of oversized Oriental sculpture and hand painted ceramics. The allegorical message/subject of the painting is the hand painted figures are "more" real/emotive than the figures outside the window. In many ways the original sketch for The View Out From the Toy Shop has as much allegorywith less effort. The man on the vase on the right- is the primary subject of the work. He is truly the prisoner in the Toy Shop Window.

Homage to Patton and the Uniform took the best drawing of my Surrenders of Great Armies of the World Series -The Recalcitrant Hussars and mated it to their larger than life ceramic doubles.