ike most people who end up in L.A., I am a transplant. In 1973 I moved here for what seemed like sound professional reasons: having received no encouragement in New York for either my painting or my first novel, I figured all I was good for was acting, so I came to Hollywood. L.A. scared me at first. It was so full of blank space, and my response was to fill it up by painting colorful and increasingly nightmarish narratives.

In New York I never used color, but here I couldn't use enough, and although I was supposed to be acting, all I did was paint. When I met other girls we would compare notes while fixing our hair or sharing a joint in restaurant rest rooms: no one seemed to have a clear course, and the air was packed with dreams trying to find bodies to crawl into.

Of course we blamed L.A. for our confusion. She wasn't what she pretended to be: for all her promise of paradise her real weather was fire, and the glitter on her streets just crushed glass from some car wreck. Yet Los Angeles is the only muse I have ever taken seriously, and she is the subject of my art. Although I do not paint from real life, using actual models, still the paintings emerged like an eerie hologram of the city's subconscious, vaguely familiar but with dream-like exaggerations.