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and do something with. It was a place to learn and I had an opportunity to paint a lot of gallons of paint and drop a lot of it.

Nevertheless, certain images are recurrent, for example, body fragments, particularly hands, automobiles, and food. Why did you choose them?

Hands for me have always been sort of an offering, a suggestion saying 2 cents off, buy this, try a new steam iron. They had to do with advertising, and advertising, as I said before, was like the power on the street that a lot of money was poured into, to make something bright and flashy, to make something go. And that was a powerful gesture that people would recognize, so if I put them in a painting, they would see them and they couldn't mistake them for a crucifix because it would be a hand offering something. I used that imagery so it wouldn't be mistaken for something else.
As for automobiles and car parts, I was brought up with automobiles in the Midwest and I used to know the names of all of them and I came here and spent some time in New York and I didn't know anything that was stylish, and I didn't have any affiliation with anything that was stylish, and I found myself standing on the corner, and things going by, and I couldn't recognize anything and that wasn't only automobiles. There were a lot of other things and I began to feel that what was precious to my thing was what I could remember.

Perhaps car parts appealed to you because of their simple, geometric shapes.
It's like you're born with your own living room furniture and in Russia they're born with another set of living room furniture. This has to do with whether you like the shape of an automobile or the shape of horses and a wagon. As they say in Eastern philosophy, energy turns to ethics and to me a human being is tied to some kind of humanism and that has to do with ethics and I could think of ethics of a stone or feelings to-wards a stone. And I like to ask the question - are people really part of the living room furniture of their own community or aren't they? it's the idea for a film I'm making now.

The light bulb seemed to be a particular favorite. A real light bulb appeared in one of your first pieces, Floor Plan, and it was reborn in the form of a GE label in later paintings and prints.

Floor Plan came from knowing an ex-convict who, when I visited him in his home, used to wander around the house looking out the curtains and knocking over the furniture and going from room to room turning on and off the lights

- he was very nervous and watching out for people. So I tried to invent a randomness machine like a tilting pinball table that would light up in sequence and then go off again, but I always came up with a sequence that would return very quickly, so it ended up as a painted floor plan with light bulbs hanging from it like a chandelier.
In the later paintings and prints I was interested in why a person's eye is like a camera and do things happen in a camera the same way they do in the eye. When you look into the sun with a camera, you see a phenomenon called "circles of confusion" which are little balls of color that start moving around or the aperture is reflected inside the camera into a circle, the same way in your eye - there's a reflection in your eye that causes strange things to happen. And it was like trying to find something while looking at a light bulb. Also it was trying to see something while a person was looking into a vacant area like straight up into the sky, at a plain white wall, meditating What happens if you look and look and look - you see spots in front of your eyes.

[[image]]
James Rosenquist, "Hey, Let's Go for a Ride," o/c, 34" x 36", 1961. (Collection: Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine.)

You had a special way of fragmenting images, cutting them into large, sharply angled, irregular shapes and then fitting them together in a way that simulated collage. Why did you do that?

That has to do with identifying a shape of something that you're looking at. For instance, if you're looking at something at a long distance, say, over the plains in the West, you might think that's all trees there but it might be blue smoke. Or you might think you're seeing two people walking, but you're only seeing one person with an umbrella in the wind. So, if you take an image and fragment it - let's say you take a beautiful straight-on photograph of somebody's face and you cut out a section of this face, you could change the character of the feeling of part of that person by the edge of the shape so that if you take two ideas and you connect them and you identify a part of the two ideas, you might unleash what the other part of it is instead of disguising something.
Or say it's raining and two people are standing on the street and they're embracing each other - let's say it's two people in a raincoat, and there's a fragment of them that's identifiable. You might find out that it's something more than what you think that it is. And it may not be two people embracing each other. It has to do with the edges of what you're seeing. The shape of what you see can suggest one thing and you're still - right in your face - shown something else and it becomes a very peculiar mind bender.
I began to get interested in that when I painted figures for movies like South Pacific and there would be an actor kneeling on the ground with France Nuyen or Suzy Wong embracing one of them, and I was to paint the photograph of these two people. Someone would take a scissors and just cut out the shape and sometimes their shape would look like a what of a sea otter or something else and I thought, here I am painting two kneeling figures embracing for South Pacific but they really look like whales. Now on the other hand, two faces looking like two whales would really look like people. It gets very, very peculiar. I'm not into mystical things or mystery. I'm only interested in how you see things. So it gets to be how and what things look like. Like the shape of things to come. It has to do with what shape are your ideas going to take and that's very peculiar and I hope that my ideas don't take any shape like anything before. Being a painter I would like them to be completely something else.

In The Lines Were Etched Deeply on Her Face, the images float more freely.
I set things in planes in space to be identified