Four Rooms

I. Interior
II. The Rape
III. Interior (Window)
IV. New skin for the old ceremony
V. Personal Effects

In the background, a bright fire casts golden patches dancing over pale sea green wallpaper. The air is thick and smells of cigarettes. A reclining figure, female, is in-between worlds, exhaling a muffled wheezing sound. Behind the glowing laptop screen, a poisonous shadow moves in like a cloud, outlining her naked shoulders and bruised legs. A carpet of purple masks the stains. Here, every surface is a painting turned inward… building a trap of color with no way out except into the flames. He sucks. Nauseated by a view of bloody sheets or himself, he shifts his gaze to an image on the wall above the body. Curtains fall with heavy pink brushstrokes over raw linen. An off-balance female figure is grabbed and groped by various outstretched hands. Perched on the floor between her spread legs, a sailor-ghoul devours the situation with red-ringed eyeballs. The man reflected in the glass doubles the viewer, surveying the scene from both inside and outside the painting, surveying the surveying.

In her valise was a ticket for the 7:00am train to Antwerpen,
a train she would never catch. Also found were eye shadow powder, lipstick, underwear, dresses, a computer charger, a golden bracelet, a notebook, passport and prescription pills. The two halves of the open valise are painted across two adjacent canvases, making a packed but available still life or a feminine landscape seen from above.