Drawing made sense of the world for me from the time I was a young child in San Francisco until I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Then I saw a high contrast photograph of an etched black line against a white background, and that did it for me. I started working with photography, although it was a fairly disparaged medium in the art department at Cal in the late 1960's.

I had grown up with Life Magazine and loved the documentary nature of the photograph. But I also wanted to explore the spatial aspects of picture making that I had learned in my painting and drawing classes. I began to print on clear film instead of paper, and suddenly a world opened up behind the image. By adding paint, collage or pastels, I could build layers from the ground up behind the film plane. I still wanted a to keep working with my hands, to have a physicality in the process.