Insomnia

"'Insomnia' is an interior. One of the things that was in my mind in terms of the subject matter was the following little thought: when the prince can't sleep, the whole city is worried. When powerful people suffer, when powerful forces are troubled, it affects everyone's life. but what happens when the most insignificant and powerless people suffer from the same troubles, what implications might there be? I don't necessarily know, but that was the animating thought for making this picture. I can't talk about my pictures as if they were prose poems, it's the only other really close analogy I can think of to the way I think about my work and the way I try to work, that is, there's a theme, it means something to me, it has implications of some kind, I can't forget it, and it crosses over at some point with a pictorial possibility which in itself has some kind of artistic value, I hope. This picture is one of a group of pictures I've done over the years of unimportant people in unhappy states of mind - bitterness, rage, sadness, defeat of one kind or another. ("transcript 2", Issue 3, p. 15.)