Since the circus is a recurrent theme, you'll see paintings in this vein once in a while. Here he painted the roogh and tumble buffoon and the quiet and gentle sad clown with a lot on his mind. Tony Mafia liked clowns, till the day someone told him that we laugh at clowns basically because we feel 'better' than them. Art is a bit like that, you exaggerate, aggrandize or miniaturize. You change the perception of reality or try to show at least different sides of it. One day in Postdam, former Eastern Germany, briefly after the Berlin Wall came down, looking at some castle and the artwork it held, he felt good about the fact that the artists being the buffoons of those in power, speaking the truth in their own way, were the ones to outlive the rulers.
This particular painting was done in Chloride, Az in 1996.
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