Buck's Bar

BUCK'S BAR Acrylic on Canvas | 54" × 34" | 2024

Hey big spender. Spend a little time with me.

Buck's Bar is painted from one of the great scenes in American musical theatre — the dance hall hostesses of Sweet Charity lined up at the bar at the Fan-Dango Ballroom, waiting, bored, magnificent. Bob Fosse's choreography frozen in paint. The red dress. The platinum blonde. The brunette with the expression of someone who has heard every line ever delivered by every man who ever walked through that door and has formed her opinions accordingly.

They are not performing for you. They are simply there — existing with the particular, practiced composure of women who have learned to wait with style. The red dress commands the left of the canvas with the authority of someone who arrived first and claimed the best seat. The others arrange themselves along the bar in various states of magnificent disengagement — earrings catching the light, hair architecturally committed, the whole tableau painted with the warm, affectionate energy of someone who loves these women and this scene and this song unreservedly.

The painting has the quality of a memory of a film you love — slightly heightened, slightly golden, the colours more saturated than reality because that is how the things we love actually look in the mind's eye. Fosse's genius was making the ordinary extraordinary through pure style. This painting does the same thing with paint.

Exhibited at Maison 10, Manhattan, 2024 — where it held its own in the company of the most considered objects in one of New York's most celebrated design destinations.

Buck's Bar. The big spender hasn't arrived yet. They are completely fine with that.