On a New York City street, a few months after the attack on the World Trade Center, I found a pile of discarded art supplies. There was a group of small, unpainted canvases, crudely stapled to the stretchers and splattered with paint. I took the whole pile not knowing how I would use them. Eventually, I was compelled to paint about the events of September 11th. I found a photograph, an aerial panorama of NYC with the World Trade Center in the distance and the Atlantic beyond that. I used that image for all eight paintings, but let the original artist’s splatters direct me to eight different interpretations. I took what that artist gave up on, that fellow New Yorker, and together we made these paintings.
