All Images. I decided to place a stop order to my abstract painting program. I was getting a little tired after working this way since 1962. I had never had a good look at Willem de Kooning's work contemporary to 1968. At that time he had a big show at Museum of Modern art covering his historical work, and a show of very recent paintings and drawings at Knoedler Gallery; both venues located in NYC. I went to see both and got bitten by the de Kooning bug. Why not start my figure project using de Kooning as the model? I had done this in the summer of 1967. Using de Kooning seemed logical in my mind as a place to get it all going.

I executed 100s of drawings but only took 35mm color slides of a few; most of which are now lost. Image #s 4 - 9 were flat bed scanned days ago from my sketch books created in 1968-69. These drawings come close to looking similar to a de Kooning drawing, but if you really look at the differences, my drawing is no where near his. I came to working with the figure from a different place than de Kooning. My drawing shows this.