About Shoes

My particular motivation began not so much with any love or obsession with real shoes as subject matter but with seeing the way shoes were depicted during certain periods.  When I was young many shoe repair shops had big, neon shoe signs hanging out in front; usually a man’s dress shoe in some kind of slightly skewed, perspective.  I thought that these signs were a dumb kind of wonderful, a form of under-appreciated commercial art. At one point I tried unsuccessfully to remove one from a building in San Francisco where a shoe repair shop had gone out of business.

A few years later I was in Brooklyn and got to go into the basement of an out-of-business shoe store and came into possession of dozens of shoe catalogs from the 1930s and 1940s . I loved not only the styles of women’s shoes but the stylized art as well, the way that advertising art of the time flattened them out and created a little drama with just black and white.

I think shoes are in some ways like cars in that they are ‘vehicles’ . A vehicle to me means something that helps us to go somewhere, take us to our destination. If you follow that idea it’s easy to see how we imbue our vehicles with imagination, our ideals, values of the present and hopes for the future. Shoes, like cars take us where we want to go and in that sense their designs embody all of these things. Shoes were the first human-made vehicle and you can see throughout history how styles have changed so radically though our feet are the same as they were 5000 years ago.

Artists through the ages from Van Gogh to Andy Warhol. have painted, drawn and photographed shoes. And then there are also the glass cases of thousands of shoes that remain of those who perished in the concentration camps. They speak of the human soul in a way that no words can: the possibility that each shoe is you or me or someone, a metaphor for our individual being.