In the seventh grade, I had a classmate who wore a brown sweatshirt with gold writing on it, and she had matching little gold hoop earrings.  It sounds terrible in retrospect, but trust me, it was 1989, and she was really cool.  I wanted to dress just like her, but I didn’t want it to be obvious that I was copying her.  It was my first encounter with what I would later learn to fear as one of the big no-no’s of art school:  BEING DERIVATIVE.

I have an art crush on Richard Diebenkorn.  In making the “Scissors” paintings, I faced my fear of being derivative, and used Diebenkorn’s still-life paintings as a direct influence.  I created a still-life of scissors on top of my Diebenkorn book, which was open to the images of his scissors paintings.  This is the source for these paintings.