At Indiana University they made very clear distinctions between painting, sculpture, printmaking etc. and what I was doing didn't seem like painting to them. They kept saying I had to acknowledge my influences. When I finally told them I liked Richard Diebenkorn (the Cincinnati Museum had a retrospective of his work that year) they were really confused. They were expecting someone much trendier. I didn't particularly want to paint like Diebenkorn -- I'd already tried that -- but to develop a more object-oriented way of working that gave me more freedom.

I asked myself what would happen if, instead of putting paint on canvas, I started more in the middle (in medias res) and considered the canvas as a vehicle that could go forward and backwards. Diebenkorn did this in terms of his subject matter when he abstracted the landscape, then reconstituted the figure/ground, then reabstracted that into a language of space in the Ocean Park paintings.