The most frequent question I am asked is “How and why did you first start working with these materials?”  Two things motivated me initially.  In the late sixties, no one was producing any imagery.  It was assumed that art had moved beyond such simple concerns as imitating or reflecting the visual world.  It was all about creating a new world of paint and gesture.  Figurative work of any kind was considered retrograde -- the opposite of avant-garde.  Important art was non-objective.

 But I liked to draw and felt that I wanted to be referential rather than abstract in my work.  It was a convergence of that impetus and another, my interest in materials, that lead me to Polage.  I loved art supplies of all kinds.  I loved to experiment with different media and also with materials that were not considered traditional art supplies.  It was a kind of scientific curiosity about how materials behaved.  I learned how to make paper by soaking and crunching rags and paper in my blender.  I found I could create watermark-like images by juxtaposing thicker and thinner areas. I experimented with print making and fabric shapes applied to canvas.

I realize now that a major influence on me at the time was the work of Robert Rauschenberg.  He was using imagery in an almost incidental way in his constructions.  Found images silk screened on other materials.  Unusual materials, not traditional art materials.  I felt very in tune with his work.  Art did not need to be made out of traditional art materials.  The materials themselves could be part of the expressive content of the work.

Around that time I read Marshall McLuhan and became aware of his statement:  “The medium is the message.”   I was just beginning to experiment with polarizing filter and it’s magical properties.  It could create color out of no color.  It could conjure magically the most beautiful vibrant colors from simple layers of colorless cellulose sandwiched between its own drab grey transparency.  Here was a 20th century invention that potentially rivaled the most impressive stained glass  of the middle ages.  But most exciting for me was the idea that I could easily cut and layer these materials to create images.  And, like the silk screened images of Rauschenberg, they would not look old school, but new and never seen before.

It felt like I was inventing a new medium, one that loudly proclaimed its own messages.  It drew me in and led the way.  I wanted to see what this medium could best express.  To a large extent, that experimental attitude continues to motivate me.  I imagine some things I could do with the medium, some methods of cutting it, some methods of attachment or assembly or viewing it and I imagine what effect it will have on the viewer.  I then try out my idea to see how it works and to see if I was right in my imagined result.  This seems to me more of a science minded way to work than purely artistic.

As a medium, these materials definitely conveyed a message.  I wanted to understand what that message was and how best to use it.  My earliest explorations were made in the 1960’s, before the proliferation of color television, computer monitors and lighted signs.  The only analogous medium was stained glass.  Light coming through the image in brilliant color seemed to reference the spiritual qualities of stained glass, used to great effect in 12th century cathedrals.  Another similarity was to photo transparencies or slides.

There were two other potential attributes of this medium that I wanted to explore.  One was the mysterious quality of appearing blank and colorless until suddenly springing into brilliant color when viewed through a polarizing filter.  It was a magical effect, a mysterious action at a distance, that, even today,  never fails to elicit exclamations of surprise and delight from anyone who experiences it, especially the first time.

The other attribute is it’s ability to be changed by the rotation of a polarizing filter, either in front of the work or behind it, either automatically or by the action and control of the onlooker.

My very first creations in this medium did not make use of these attributes.   I played only with the brilliant color and ability to create images in a new and thus hopefully “acceptable” way.  Initially I explored the reference to photo transparency, and working in very small sizes created  images of “snap shots”. 

I worked at a make shift light table wearing polarizing sunglasses so I could see the colors and still have my hands free for manipulating and cutting the cellophane.  When I was happy with the image, I placed a covering of polarizing sheet over the piece so that the colors could be seen without polarized sunglasses.

While I was still working on the piece, the colors remained alive and shifting as I moved my head this way and that, subtly changing the wavelength (color) of the light that came through my polarized eyeglasses.  It always seemed a little disappointing when I was finished and the colors no longer responded to my every move.

It soon occurred to me that the most exciting part of working with these materials was the way they could be affected by the viewers movements.  I wished I could let everyone see them the way they looked to me through the polarizing lenses I wore when I was making them.  (That dream actually came true about 30 years later when I was commissioned by Maui Jim Sunglasses to make art to demonstrate the quality of their polarized lenses).

In the mean time I decided to leave off all or part of the fixed filter I had been attaching to the front of the finished art and instead I created little viewer filters for onlookers to gaze through and manipulate.  This way I was able to share the experience of being able to change the color relationships in the Polage that I found so exciting when I was making them. 

This way of interacting with a Polage remains for me the most significant.  It physically embodies Marcel Duchamp’s maxim that the onlooker completes the art.  It immediately resonated with me that this was a fundamental feature of communication which is deemed to consist of three parts: sender (artist), message (art) and receiver (onlooker). It has always been very important to me to consider that third element, the receiver or onlooker, without which the act of communication is incomplete.  I think many in the art world today fail to pay enough attention to balancing those three components which make a work of art a real communication. 

Too much emphasis on the first part (sender/artist) and the result is self indulgence with little connection made with onlooker.  Too much emphasis on the  third element and you get sappy commercial  work that contains no genuine feeling or message of significance.  Even too much concern for the perfection of the art object itself can render it sterile and devoid of communicative content.

I felt that allowing the onlooker to be genuinely surprised by their first encounter with my art and to experience a multitude of different images and color combinations was to involve them in a genuine act of communication.  When displayed in this interactive way, my work hardly ever fails to elicit exclamations of surprise from even the most jaded individuals.  It stimulates questions and interactions between strangers as they feel compelled to share their surprised reactions.

Although this physically interactive way is my favorite way to show my work, over time, I have experimented with other methods to take advantage of the quality of change inherent in the use of these materials.  Some of my work incorporates motors rotating polarized disks behind the art or, more recently, specially-constructed liquid crystal panels behind the pieces that rotate the light beams in response to a programmed series of electronic signals.  I am just now starting to explore the limits of this new mechanism.