I wanted to take a softer, gentler tone with this piece. When I first envisioned this painting, it was in the soft mossy green background that you see, with small white houses dotting the landscape---all look similar from a distance, but when you see them up close, you can tell they're all unique---different brushstrokes, different slant of a roof, different space between houses... The center "connector road" was slightly off center, the houses not spaced equally apart. Uniqueness in the middle of sameness.

After I painted the houses, I saw that although I was looking at what appeared to be a "cookie cutter" creation, it was still a network, a community. This was the essence of the neighborhood of the fifties --- a network, a web of civil resources where everyone was connected. Neighbors gathered together in backyard barbeques, at one another's pool parties... Their children played with one another: lemonade stands and treehouses in the summer and snow forts and snowball fights in the winter. Through it all, there's a sense of connection, and innocence too... something I tried to represent by the network of lines running throughout the community, like a vast switchboard, and by the white dots at every contact point.