My current paintings begin with an inspiration from a 19th- or 20th-century painting, outlined as an abstract. I pour or scrape paint, then sometimes scrape that down, then add layers of acrylic paint and pencilled lines and geometric shapes. The nudes in my "Odalisque Series" -- taken from well-known works by Ingres, Van Gogh or Matisse, or sketched from life -- were outlined over a base abstract work. I play with the ideas of figure and ground, color and line, the studio model or organic shapes (here) and a landscape foreign to her, straight lines (there). I paint the world I know against the world I imagine, and this duality has, I believe, the promise of real power. I have lived in places where the light has been radically different: upstate New York, the island of Malta, and the green fields of Normandy, France. I am now in Northern California, yet another kind of light, where I have recently seen Richard Serra'a drawings, the paintings that Gertrude Stein collected, the work of Cézanne’s teacher and friend, Pissarro, and a collection of Japanese screens. This is the nexus of stimuli for me that now shapes my painting and my life.