Claudia
I can't remember Claudia's last name, and neither can anyone else who knew her. For a while in college we called her by her middle name, Tyace, although I'm not sure why since she didn't seem to like it. Anyway, she was one of the oddballs of the college that I went to, the sort who got into a debate one day with the literature teacher, insisting that Burroughs was a write, not a pornographer.
One morning I went into the college cafeteria to get some coffee and there sat Claudia with no good explanation of why she had white pancake make-up all over her face, a pair of white gloves, sunglasses, and a black suit with a very oversized jacket (and this was a few years before David Byrne had made oversized jackets so cool.) That was just the sort of thing that Claudia did. She sat there in this get-up visiting and drinking her coffee.
That was the inspiration for this painting, which I didn't do for another year or two afterwards. Again, the style is something between de Kooning and Hannah-Barbera. Her teeth really were very pronounced, and her hair was cut short. There is one found object in the painting, which is a glove that represents her lower hand.
The last I saw of Claudia she was working at a skull shop in Oklahoma City. This place had the skulls of every sort of animal that you can imagine, both exotic and common (and human.) She took me to the back room where they were fleshing a gorilla hand for the zoo. There were also several containers of bugs eating the flesh off of road kill. The place is still active. Claudia, on the other hand, has long since disappeared.