A million years ago, when I was in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, the program left New York City for what I believe was the only time and spent the summer in New Mexico. David Diao, Ron Clark, and a few others visited Agnes Martin.

What they may have thought would be a studio visit became something else.

Instead of taking them into the studio and showing them paintings, Martin took them on a long hike on a very hot day to see a remote tree she insisted they had to see.

From the start, I knew that I wanted to make paintings from the broken television "grid" photographs, but they posed a lot of technical difficulties. To begin with,  I paint in oils. Making a clean stripe in oil is more difficult than with acrylic paint. With acrylics you can mask out your stripes with tape and then seal it with a clear acrylic layer, then add your color and it won't bleed. That pretty much insures that you will have a sharp edge.