When I started out as an artist and got my first studio at that point I was an abstract painter. I had studied with a number of very important abstractionists…Canadian abstractionists here at the university like Otto Rogers and Eli Bornstein and I was completely taken with abstraction. And in the course of my evolution I went from painting totally abstractly to painting totally figuratively and now in 2007 I’m back in the realm of abstraction.

But there was a gradual progression into full blown abstraction and full blown colour abstraction, so the painting Whatever Happened to the Goebbels’ Family that is in the collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery was sort of the transitional period between representation and abstraction. And you’ll notice in that painting that there is a large format painting and then smaller paintings that go along with it. And that was simply again in this transitional phase one of the ways…and the smaller panels that are connected to that larger panel, and even the large panel, some parts of it are easier to see than others. I had basically poured a wash over the images so that only certain parts of these figurative elements would be visible. And it was very…now in retrospect I can see it was very much an easing into full-blown abstraction where there were no more recognizable images in the paintings.