The Matisse Series (1983-1987) - Like many artists, my paintings frequently have a dialog with paintings from the past. It is possible to pick out visual echoes. It wasn’t until I painted “Shaped Moroccans”, however, that I fully appropriated an image from another artist. I had been making geometric, abstract paintings on shaped canvases at the time and on a whim I added the grid from the floor in Matisse’s “Moroccans”. Over the subsequent twelve months the geometric abstraction morphed into a reworking of the “Moroccans” onto the shaped canvas – all the while with me asking myself if this was a legitimate thing to do.

What interested me was taking a known image and relating it to the shaped canvas.