When In graduate school one of my fellow painters showed me how to prime my canvases with a mixture of gel medium and modeling paste using a trowel to achieve a smooth, non-absorbent surface. Once settled in teaching at NSC, I decided to explore this mixture's textural possibilities. Surfaces was a long series of small, 18" X 14" paintings playing with gel and paste mixture in every way I could think up. The series created a texture vocabulary I would use through the 80s, 90s, and come back to for the long Untitled series, 2016-2021. Below, the first 10 are canvases, the next three, screen prints, and the final two, related drawings. The last image is one of my first "table painting." The top of the sculpture used a variety of textures discovered with the Surface series.