"The Sophisticates"
(oil painting on canvas, 16X20, 1999)
"Winston, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee."
Lady Astor to Winston Churchill
"Nancy, if I were your husband I'd drink it."
Churchill in reply
Sometimes I come up with ideas for my paintings in most surprising ways, (I mean surprising for me). “The Sophisticates” was just one of those paintings. One night, after a very long and tiresome party, a friend of mine was playing around with a wire hanger, twisting it into different shapes. At some point he made a loop at one end of it and at that moment I confiscated his primitive toy, because I saw the wire for what it truly was – a monocle on a face of one prissy gentleman (whom you’re now observing along with his prissy date, although I suspect that she might be his fiancée. Either way they’ll end up having two very annoyingly proper and overly well-behaved* children).
*I have absolutely nothing against well-behaved children. In the matter of fact I'm thoroughly annoyed by the lack of proper behavior in many American kids. I know that in modern society spanking became a taboo and that’s why I would like for the Congress to pass a law which would allow people to slap the parents of children that misbehaved in public without any legal consequences.
