But, of course, my relationship with writing goes much further back—from my avid reading in childhood to studying art history in college. More particularly, after college, I became personally involved with writers and poets working on the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E—as its designer and as an occasional contributor. And my involvement with the work of poets and prose writers extended to attending numerous readings and participating in many discussions of writing. (I also married a poet.)

Writing has always fascinated me—because its use of language is so different from the language of visual art. However, I actually hate to write—to me it has as much pleasure as a trip to the dentist. I've gradually built up my vocabulary as a painter—as my paintings became a space for a layering of images, marks, textures, and colors. My paintings are a fusion of disparate elements—an uneasy marriage of abstraction, surrealism, and popular imagery. In the work of the poets that have surrounded me—I have seen the same mixtures of collage elements such as the use of quoted material, advertising jingles, or business letters juxtaposed with lyrical passages and children's rhymes.

Currently, I'm working on an artist's book to be published by Granary Books in 1997 called Little Orphan Anagram. In it I incorporate Charles Bernstein's poetry within my collages. This proved to be very challenging, though we had collaborated before on several books. It is difficult not to be too illustrative, to allude to the poems visually but not to overwhelm them with my own interpretations of their content. I hope the result of this collaboration will be an echoing expansion of the language into the visual so that both are expanded and allowed to breathe.

In painting I adhere to the surface, to the tangibility of paint, the drips, the spatters, the thickness and materiality of the pigment. I seek the visual pleasure afforded by the painting process. Each of my paintings is a blank to be mined, layered, and filled—a battleground of contested contents, a sphere for artistic imagining.

My collage paintings are fueled by a desire to include the ordinary and extraordinary within the painting, to alter the space and context of the painting, to set up a disturbance or disbalance, to encode the marginal without eliminating its utility as margin. The paintings become like a stew of many ingredients cooked for a long time until all the flavors mingle. The paintings play out dramas and gender roles, psychic states, and visions. To narrate a story, set a mood, to break out of a role—I see painting styles as swatches of possibility creating permutations of scale and surfaces.

In Fighting Women, I layered over the 19th-century imagery to bring the background into the foreground. I cast a net of spun and dripped enamel paint over the surface to reflect the conflict of the two women. In Red, Black, and White, the expressions and actions of the characters collaged into this space set up a dramatic and comedic contrast with the playfulness of the enamel paint abstraction surrounding them. I believe painting is an inclusive totality. Rather than narrowing my focus, I want to expand and encompass more. I want to be overwhelmed by the force of paint and the images.