That whirring sound you hear is probably coming from the grave of Stuart Davis.

A good friend of mine just finished rehabbing a building near my studio and he asked me for a painting that could be hung in the entry stairwell. The only kind of painting I can do is done with tape and flat colors, and a lot of touch-up.

Lately, I’ve been looking at Stuart Davis’ paintings and reading about his life and ideas. His work appeals to the graphic designer in me, and it seems to me to be an accurate reflection of American urban life. It also seems to me that Davis developed a style of painting that has been largely forgotten, and that I could maybe extend it a bit.  So my idea was to use Davis’ vocabulary and make a picture of the Pasadena neighborhood. There’s a pawnshop on one side of the building and a porn shop on the other. Main Stem is a jazz phrase that means any main drag of any town. The main street here is called Colorado. Davis put the words “lines thicken” in one of his paintings.