...Certain artists of the past - Blake, Turner, and Ryder, above all - have increasingly served as the lodestars of his aspiration to create a visionary art that moves easily from abstraction to representation and back to abstraction without any appreciable breaks in aesthetic continuity. Several paintings make specific reference to the work of these artists - After Petworth, for example, with its allusions to Turner's Petworth interiors, and the two versions of Blake's Passion Play and many other pictures ...are likewise nocturnal dreamscapes that employ a mode of painterly chiaroscuro that hasn't been seen to wield such poetic effect in American painting since Ryder himself...
