In 1957, Ike was smiling at the country and the country was smiling back. Everyone seemed to be busy planning room additions and accruing major appliances. Detroit was making cars which looked like chromed torpedoes. I was newly committed to art. Without a whisper of a style and very unsure of myself, I began to explore and, with a kind of tenuous enthusiasm, to mimic the art I saw everywhere around me.This was Abstract Expressionism, the most significant development in art in the late 1940s .and 1950s. The impact of this movement was shifting the capital of the art world from Paris to New York City, and its influence on artists around the country was becoming pervasive and in many areas, dominant.

To those of us in the distant province of southern California, far from the great art capital, the principles of Abstract Expressionism seemed to arrive like liberating directives from headquarters, usually in the form of rumor or innuendo. Rightly or wrongly, we in our little circle came to believe that the correct approach was to stand before a large, or even better, an enormous stretched canvas, and empty oneself of any contaminating preconceptions or visualizations of the prospective painting. This attitude, we believed, would provide the best opportunity to create something original, even personal. If not, at least it would free us from the taint and confinement of repetition, or worse, the black curse of being derivative.

Originality was the key to a style of painting recognizably one's own and a personal style was like a prize which would only be awarded to the most sensitive, tenacious, and industrious among us. I think it was Marcel Duchamp who said, "I force myself to contradict myself so that I can avoid conforming to my own taste" For some of us, this idea became a part of the process of creating an abstract expressionist painting. In practice it worked this way: the artist would stand before his work in progress wondering what to do next (and what to do next was the everlasting dilemma). When he finally decided to act, then that would become the thing that he would not do. Imagine patting your head and rubbing your stomach while driving your car blindfolded and you will have the idea.