I spent my early teens painting my way through modernist art history. These works were the result of my discovery of Frank Stella's stripe paintings and other great american painters like Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Al Held. Although I was preoccupied with illusionistic space it was not the illusionistic space you find within the confines of the Greenbergian picture plane - the gallery wall had already become "the picture plane", putting me within the realm of artists condemned by the Greenbergian critic Michael Fried as "theatrical". At the same time as I was painting these, Central Street Gallery opened and I suddenly found myself with a group of mentors, particularly Tony and Elizabeth McGillick and Gunter and Jenny Christmann, who introduced me to the art world.