One day while painting, I was struck by the beauty of the leftover paint on my palette. I immediately started to draw and paint individual little sections of this paint mass. As I started working with the pieces of paint I felt the absurdity of using such material for my subject matter. After all, the paint left on the palette is leftovers, remains, garbage. So at times, this work seems to me to have an affinity with Dada or Fluxus. In a sort of variation on this theme, working with the pieces of paint became a meditation on the overlooked details of life, on seeing the world in a grain of sand.

Although this work is strictly representational, it appears to many to be abstract. That inherent antithesis interests me. I've enjoyed learning of the shift that occurs when people view the paintings and drawings. At first people have taken the work for anatomical drawings of musculature, paintings of vegetation, or even spacecraft. But on closer look there is a moment of confusion or uncertainty. What is it? The ability to cause that moment of reflection and uncertainty is to me one of the most enjoyable things about this work. One of my original names for this series was Ostranenie, a word that means defamiliarization. It embodies the idea that an artist's task is to make the mundane seem strange and so cause the viewer to pause and step out of daily time.