-known figures and his work is insane. When he paints, he paints like one painting a year.
22: Following that you took a really interesting trip with Sylvia Sleigh? RL: It was actually multiple trips. Sylvia Sleigh is a really interesting character in herself. She was a
very important member of the woman’s movement in New York in the early seventies. She was a figurative painter but she would paint men in these languid poses, nude on the couch or seated. Sort of reversing the male gaze. It was super relistic as well. She was also married to Lawrence Alloway who was the first curator of the Guggenheim and also coined the term “Pop Art” and wrote about all the Pop artists and women artists. We ended up being in the same gallery in Chicago and she was friends with Dennis Adrian. I was talking to her, and she was talking about this trip she wanted to take to the South of France. Jokingly I said, “Pack me in your suitcase!” and she said, “Well, do you know how to drive?” I went with her to London and the South of France for five weeks. Then she decided we need to go to Eygpt. We did multiple trips in a short amount of time. We went to Greece, Indian, Rome, Venice, Paris, and Spain. All the major capitals. Since we are both artists, we really only went to museums and major architectural sites. I was in my late twenties, early thirties. I saw so much art in that time. We would spend hours in the Louvre and the Prado. The biggest influence of all was my trip to India. It exposed a whole other art history. One we are not often exposed to. When I went to India I thought, “I want that art history.” The flat abstraction, the attention to detail. It was an approach to painting that really changed my work.
22: Was there any specific piece that really spoke to you while you were there? RL: Kind of yeah. We were staying in this hotel and within this hotel was this gallery that had old In-
dian miniatures. I was looking through all these paintings and I spent a long time there. I came upon this painting and it was one of those moments where you just gasp. It was this face of a maharaja but his face was in gris. I put the face in two of my paintings, one was a self portrait as maharaja, and then there is one called The Torrent, where the maharaja painting is in the background.
22: Do you still have it? RL: I do, just not with me. 22: On that note, many of the figure artists you’ve shown with put their subjects in really direct straight on poses, almost confrontational. Was that part of style the Chicago Imagists movement as well?
RL: Yes, Richard Willenbrink was a very close friend in Chicago.There was also David Sharpe, Anne
Abronsand Sylvia Sleigh of course. These were mainly the artists I worked with. I dipped into figure painting, in a way because it was in the air, but even during that period I was more interested in painting still life. I didn’t always want to have someone with me when I paint. I enjoyed being alone. I