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12/16/1993 14:44  2124313252   STEINBAUM KRAUSS  PAGE 14

any relationship. I was just trying to get this overall textural thing and they were just these marks. But now they are important and I like to think I've created a conversational script. Now it's an integral part of my work. 
EF: How do you feel about my calling the marks a childlike scribble?
BB: It's okay because some of [[strikethrough]] Walter's [[/strikethrough]] words- even though you couldn't figure out what the words were - some of the designs of the words you could call a scribble. And what I thought about in his scribbling was an interior image. It took me a long time to absorb that part of his writing into my work. I guess maybe I'm incorporating what I want to choose from his type of markings, condensed scribble versus not so condensed scribble or a combination of both. And I can also see the relation of his markings to sea grasses, the tall grasses, the marsh grasses that I paint.
EF: I'm interested, too, in what modern artists you feel your strongest kinship to.
BB: Brancusi, Louis Nevelson, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, Milton Resnick, and for some reason, Betty Saar.

EF: What do you feel?
BB: I'm not sure. I think maybe not so much the objects but I'm going to call it the collective assembly, how she puts what she does together. Norman Lewis was a big influence on me. I saw his work before I knew he was Black and I said that to him. Of course Romare Bearden. Do you know how I met him?
EF: I had heard that you once followed him into a men's bathroom.
BB: Everybody knows that by now. He had done this poster for the David Frost jazz series. Dizzie Gillespie was one of the musicians and a friend of mine knew him. So we went to Alice Tully Hall together. She

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