A typical day is probably lots of meetings and stuff. But if it’s an idea that we’re developing, what might happen is I might talk to some of the people in the lab, maybe have them come in the office and brainstorm with them, and say, “Well, here’s a problem that we need to solve,” or need to solve better. So just as an example, when I had this idea that we could create better materials, I got about four or five people together with different backgrounds — chemistry, engineering, safety, toxicology — and we started putting chemical structures on the blackboard and say, “Well, this might work,” or “This might not be safe,” and ended up with certain structures that we thought would be good. And then, one of the guys would go out and try to make those structures, and we’d go from there.

Usually one of two ways. Either I see something in the world and I’m like, “I want to make that picture,” or I see a picture and I’m like, “I want to make that painting.” And then I look for a way to make it out of stuff in my world. So I guess the first process is more, like, self-explanatory; you make some sketches, take pictures. I usually make notes about color, particularly try to get one color relationship true in the sense that the distance in terms of value or temperature of those two colors is true. Not necessarily the colors themselves, but the way they relate to each other. Make notes about that. Then come back to the studio, and maybe 10% of the time I just start working on a painting. And then maybe 30% of the time I make drawings and start that way. And then the other…is from looking at a painting and seeing a question and a solution posed by someone else, and trying to pose the same question and find the same answer, or a similar answer. And my way into that is to find a subject in my surroundings that seems structurally suitable, I guess.

Sometimes a title might occur to me. And a title will just stick out in my mind. And then I will think in terms, everything I think of I will think in terms of that title. For instance, I did a painting called Four New Clear Women . It meant, if women became powerful, and they are, like women who own large stock in the stock market, or become president like Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi, will they be “New Clear Women” or “Nuclear Women?” Will they blow us up, or are they smart? Something like that. So, then I met — there was this actress named Liv Ullmann, and she started painting. And she said, “Oh, what are you going to do next?” And I said, “I’m going to do The Persistence of Electrical Nymphs in Space .” And she said, “Oh, what’s that about?” and I said, “Well, that’s the sound of all the souls after the earth blows up.” And she says, “Oh, yeah.” That was very… she probably talked with Ingmar Bergman about that. But that was great. So those are titles that I would think about, before I would start working.

Thank you. Yeah, I don’t write collections. Maybe someday that will happen, but Mercury is based on the Goldberg Variations and so it’s riffing off of that and that Baroque mode of theme and variations. And it is very much structured.