The year was 1983, when I moved to NYC. Among the art supplies I had brought with me was some used copier paper. The place where I worked had a copier that had to be cleaned once a week. When it went through the process, I noticed it spit out long sheets of paper embedded with striations and splotches of gray. I started collecting them to use as a base for drawings and paintings. The piece I choice to use here — only a couple of months after arriving in the city — had a darker background than the usual copier-cleaning sheets, so I planned accordingly with lighter strokes of yellow ochre, violet and white gouache. Controlled scribbles of black, blue and violet pencil completed the composition. This piece straddles that world between painting and drawing, and uses the positive/negative, push/pull interplay that I still employ in my work today.