March/April, 2025 The play is over Acrylic on Canvas (20" x 24") This work is based on a poem by Bertolt Brecht and is the new one in a series I am painting interpreting various poems that I like. Here are the words -- The play is over, the performance committed. Slowly The theater, a sagging intestine empties. In the dressing rooms, The salesmen of hotch-potch mimicry and rancid rhetoric Wash of make up and sweat. At last The lights go down, which showed the miserably Botched job; twilight falls on the Lovely nothingness of the misused stage. In the empty, Still mildly smelly auditorium, sits the honest Playwright, unappeased, and does his best To remember I often return to this poem, when something ( a textbook, a solo ar show etc.) is finished after working on it for a long period of time. As I am rapidly heading towards retirement from my academic job, I thought it appropriate to interpret this poem as a self portrait, set afterone of my solo art shows, with two of my major academic textbooks besides me on the floor.