I think especially after my second divorce, I felt like what I had been doing was a real peculiar practice. It was something where I wanted to make paintings that were alarming, but somehow also soothing. Paintings that remind you that there was a Pompeii, and there was a Herculeum, and there was something grand and beautiful in Italy in the 15th century—something that was like a window to a world more beautiful than ours. But I got exhausted by it, because people were seeing them as cartoons and didn’t realize the skill involved in making them. Whereas with a portrait that takes me five hours, they’d go, “Oh, wow, that’s really skillful.” But it’s easy, and I think it changed the path of my art. I was at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and there was a woman there named Elaine Greenstein. She was a very nice young woman with an incredibly sinuous nose, like a nose out of an Italian painting or a Modigliani. I sketched her outside my studio, you know, a couple times. It refreshed my memory of what it was like to look at someone and draw their face. I remember thinking, “What a great face.” I wanted to do something where there was more tangent to people. What I discovered was I liked to paint women more than men. Women are just softer features and they give more attention to their haircuts and the glasses they buy and the costumes they wear. Gents seem not to. And men’s faces are more angular. I guess tended that way. And it was pretty much just anybody who would sit. And if somebody would sit at another time, I’d do it another time. That started in the mid ’80s and now it’s the mid something elses. I think it was trying to make my practice more tangent to humanness, because I had been in the studio by myself with all these little faces for years and years. It was lonely. I mean, it’s just me and my radio, basically.