Saint Helices 55, 24" x 18", acrylic on canvas, 1993. Artist's collection.

The Museum of Fine Art in Montreal has a Corot painting in their collection that inspired me greatly. Corot as a landscape painter would render the foliage of a tree as diaphanous brushwork, but would render the branches and limbs of the tree as interspersed, gestural, three-dimensional elements within the diaphanous foliage. This, to my eye, was an abstract figure/field interplay which I am certain was incidental to Corot, but I found it to be remarkable. This version, incidentally, was painted as a monochromatic under painting with overlapping colored layers of glazes applied within an evolving stratagem of overlapping colors.