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You've moved a lot, from New Orleansand Baton Rouge to Chicago, to Paris, and then to New York, and taken several trips. All these places are seminal to your life. I mean geographical spaces, at least four of which have fast movement. They have rapid subways, els, streetcars, people moving--the whole idea of traffic. I want to know about the relationship of this to your work.

What you're saying is right on.That's probably what an instructor of mine noticed when he commented that my work has "a certain knack to it, a movement." I moved so much as a kid, from home to home, from place to place. While I respect the construction of space as it is in a Vermeer, I'm into the movement that goes on in the space. All this movement is about the stroke for me. But even thngs like the Cape Canaveral rocket launches, and I've never seen the rockets, are part of our experience--these kinds of breakthroughs of movement, the jets of our time. 

And all this enters into your colors?

When I was in Paris from 1966 to 1969, I didn't have a studio, so my dealer there let me paint in a chambre de bonne, a maid's room. I was painting basically in the same vernacular I had been doing in New York, but I couldn't believe that my colors had completely changed. I hadn't noticed it until I watched the canvases leaving the studio; they were totally changed in some unconscious way. In other ways, you also would have noticed that I painted these in Paris. I used to wonder why they talk about Picasso's blue period paintings, pink period pictures, you know. Thar was about the periods in his life when he found those colors and experiences.

But I really noticed something different about my work, about it becoming something else, when I went to Crete. The painter Jack Whitten had said, "Ed, come to Crete," and so, in the summer of 1971, I went. Jack has a house in a little village called Guerdilini. His wife has a Greek background. I wanted to do somw work while I was there. I knew I wouldn't be able to paint, so I took pastels and paper. I found a little four-dollar-a-day room on the beach, and it was really nice. It had a stone floor and there was a shower upstairs, which was fine. I did the work, rolled it up, and then unrolled it when I was back in New York and looked at it. I could see that there was no way in the world I could have used these colors in New York or in Paris. I was still doing ovals, but the colors were totally different. I hadn't been thinking about it; it was a change I made unconsciously. It was the colors of Crete I was painting, and it was called my Crete period. Then I began to test this idea, and I could see that even though I wasn't thinking about it, my colors changed in different environments. Then, after Crete, I knew I wanted to go to Africaand work there, you know, see how it would affect my work. I knew it would in some way.