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the bowl with a spatula. The genesis of this painting is typical. 

[[block indent]]At one time, a loft with another painter. He would paint all day long. Then at night he would study his work, shake his head in disgust, and proceed to scrape the paint down from the canvas. This went on for days. He would paint all day and then scrape everything down at night. This process seemed to make the artist an unnecessary middleman. Why not just pour the paint on the floor and leave the canvas clean? 

One day, while thumbing through a magazine, I saw a picture of a bowl of whipped cream. The image of the whipped cream being scraped out of the bowl gave me the idea of doing a painting of that painter scraping an illusionistic rendering of depth onto the floor.[[/block indent]]
 Occasionally, an idea presents problems that challenge the ingenuity of the artist. The creation of Rosenquist's free-standing sculpture entitled "Capillary Action II" provides a good example of this experience. 

[[block indent]]A few years ago, I saw a photograph of a meadow with a tree standing in the middle. I couldn't get that image out of my mind, where it kept flashing on and off-extremely artificial in one phase and then completely natural again. This experience made me aware of a startling aspect of our present landscape in which nature becomes increasingly modified by man until the natural and artificial blend into each other. This awareness prompted the creation of an art work that could somehow project these two opposite feelings - naturalness and artificiality. My first reaction was to paint a landscape as realistically as I could make it while retaining the artificiality that one sees, for example, in the Museum of Natural History exhibits. After thinking about the problem, however, I decided that I could achieve my ends best by using an actual tree - a small sapling, perhaps - in a freestanding sculpture. I had a very definite idea as to how that tree should look. I wanted to saw a slot down the middle of the tree and insert a canvas with an electric neon rectangle into the slot. Finding the tree that would agree with my notion of what a tree should look like proved to be extremely difficult. Ray Donarski, a close friend, and I spent a whole day and part of a night driving all over Westchester and New Jersey looking for this tree. We couldn't find it and had to settle for a reasonable facsimile. 

This experience became a bizarre exercise in asserting oneself as [[/block indent]]

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