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After all these years of painting it can still be somewhat daunting after spending days milling the wood and building the stretcher, stretching the canvas and preparing the surface with several coats of primer, to place that first load of pigment on that beautiful white surface.

When I begin a painting I have a vague notion of basic sense of movement, rhythm, gesture, and color. I begin by blocking in the colors I have chosen for the painting.

I begin to introduce line to the composition. What I am paying particular attention to at this stage is to develop as great a variety of line - shape, movement and density as possible. I have a general idea of the direction and perhaps the density of the line I would like, but the line is affected by the speed of the stroke, the amount of paint the brush carries, the distance the paint is carried and the amount of pressure I apply.

At this point, those first thoughts of form, gesture, line, and color become engulfed in other responses and layers of other relationships so now I am responding completely to what is happening on the surface rather than to any pre-planned composition. My canvas is a stage upon which my actors - color, line, texture, shape, space, and gesture - act without a script, constantly improvising with each other until the second act, when the director, who would be me, directs them into relationships that begin to reveal clarity and focus for the common good.

From this point on painting is a constant evaluation of what I just did and assessing it in terms of its surroundings on the micro and macro level. As adjacent areas develop, previous painted areas may remain or require complete reworking until the elements of the composition begin to create unity and balance.

You may try to allow the sub-conscious to reign supreme in the creation of a painting, but it will always be tempered and eventually given form through composed relationships that are the result of all the artist's experience and the mastery of their concept and craft.

Blue, being a cool color, which will recede in a composition, was working too much like a background and I wanted it to be more integrated with the other colors on the surface. So I began reducing the scale of all blue forms so that they might become more oriented to the surface.

Abstract painting is about love, birth, death, and all the great ecstatic experiences of being human. It is like those first wild marks we make as a child, which announces to the world, "I am here!" You don't have to paint a figure to express human feelings. When I paint I am organizing moments of feelings and these moments of feelings become issues of color, light, shape, airiness, weight, lyricism, violence, etc.

I spend a great deal of time going back and forth, strengthening some of the black lines and then eliminating some and adding others. These lines are the directional skeleton of the painting and they will continue to change and adjust until the composition is finished.

Art comes from deep within our mind and soul, from the meeting place of the reasoned, the felt, and the observed, where knowledge becomes true understanding. A place where thought and feeling ferments, sometimes for years, turning concepts and our felt response to them into something that must be released and made visible.

I feel there is too m uch yellow in the composition so I begin to paint over sevearl of the yellow areas with white to break up the yellow forms and try to unite them to a greater degree with the white forms. I over paint these yellow areas with a gestural application, which allows me to have some yellow break through the top white coat and also to introduce some white strokes to balance the many black strokes throughout the composition.

In these final stages of the painting I look for areas where I need to strengthen the blacks or add a new black line. Then touch-up some whites and lastly strengthen the bright cadmium yellow medium where needed to add some intensity in areas that have become too subtle. Over the next day or two I will examine every inch of the painting section by section to make certain the composition is balanced, unified, and most importantly, that it "makes visible the unseen" as I had hoped it would 42 days earlier. Last summer I was watching a PBS special on one of my favorite R&B, Soul singers, the late Marvin Gay. During the program there was a taped interview from the 1970s where Marvin said, "My music is my story. I don't know if it is an important story or a valuable story, but it my story." The same can be said of my paintings.