I was little. Standing in the open doorway of the plane looking out at the shimmering tarmac in New York, I noticed that America’s colors were different than Europe’s––somehow. I tried that summer to match the colors I saw using my Crayolas on that soft tan coloring paper that they give to kids. It was frustrating.

I found some really soft crayon-like sticks that had a certain oily smell and made kind of a stk, stk, stk sound when you picked them off the paper after laying down a thick solid band of bright color, leaving those little balls of wax behind. They were the best! I hoarded every color I could find.

The local Kroger store in the little town where we stayed during that Appalachian summer was air conditioned. The chill was new to me. Nothing like that in Luxembourg! The bright fluorescent bulbs and the still, cold air gave the place a sharpness that was hard to process. The open meat refrigerators vibrated with pinkness. My soft sticks with their bright colors were just perfect for capturing the jumping-out colors of that store. That vivid summer of color set the tone for my life’s work.

My paintings are foremost a study of color. Observing from life allows for a greater breadth of identifiable color. Studying at RISD with Sewell Sillman, a colleague of Josef Albers, was a pivotal point in my recognizing the power of color and its ability to manipulate perception.