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“You realize that brown doesn’t exist, don’t you?” So began my friendship with Paul Grobstein many years ago.   Color theory, color perception, color linguistics filled hours of discussion.  And as he did with others, he challenged me to doubt what my eyes told me was out there and instead acknowledge the role of the brain.  But serendipitously (!) this happened to coincide with my development as a watercolorist, and it is here where Paul probably influenced me the most.  He and his ideas inspired many paintings. 

One of the first was my attempt to capture his mental image of the unconscious: a deep pool from which emerged triangular blue “tabs” (he called them): those were ideas that floated up and out.   He loved to critique what I came up with in my paintings and he examined them as windows on my unconscious.  Sometimes even an argument would generate painting ideas:  this pair was done as a rebuttal to his assertion that ‘becoming’ meant the same thing as “being”. 

So for me, Paul’s insistence on thinking outside the box—actually, just forget the box altogether!—became a terrific muse for the synthesis of my images.