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It was during this second stay in Paris that you made your first oval pictures, right? What brought you to the shape of the oval?

I did my first oval in Paris in 1968. It came to me the same way the shaped painting did in 1956. The oval had nothing to do with me thinking of it, you know. I was painting my regular way, and one day I made a circle; the circle came first. The first shaped oval began as a rectangular painting; it looked good, but something didn't look right. I might have, in the beginning, made a stencil over the painting, because this was a big picture, about six feet, and thought that didn't work. Then, I remember this, I went to Vetheuil, where carpenters made me an oval stretcher. They didn't know how to do it, but they did it from a freehand sketch I made. (I didn't know the mechanics of making one then either, but I learned later.) I thought I'd just do one oval, but then I couldn't get out of it and did more. 

I would try to justify why one should paint ovals. I would say, "We do not see rectangles. Our eyes are oval shaped. Why do we do rectangles?" Now I'm doing rectangles again, but I was saying that then, in 1968. I saw ovals in 1968. People used to say all kinds of things about them. They would say things like, "If you turn them like an ellipse, they look celestial." I like what the art critic April Kingsley said in an article; she said she liked the oval shape because it suggested to her something feminine, that it could be a woman's sex. But I'm not thinking consciously about any of this. The association is unconscious, you know?--that the shape resembles a female, in other words, a woman with her legs open.


Yes, I can see that it could remind you of that.

I think it is sort of Freudian. You accept what you like. I know I'm partial to pink. That could be the inside of a woman. This is all unconscious, but it's lke I like that, right? And maybe, pink, on some level, in general, means that in all kinds of cultures--the inside of a woman. But in my work, it's also there through the stroke and through the roundness, and sometimes through the oval. And I've been obsessed with ellipticals for years.


And then, you started to put the ovals on rectangular canvases.

It became a contradiction, because I got into putting the oval back onto the rectangle because I could control the background. I was making ovals, and then I got the idea of creating the illusion of volume. I was using big brushes, so why not tape the canvas. Now we're talking about rectangular canvases. The oval would be made and I'd tape over it, block it out and then paint over it. Just before the paint dried, I'd pull the tape off. You get a kind of etched look.