Fruit and Flowers was the mate of Wine and Cheese as a commissioned pair of still-life paintings. Here, the composition is dispersed and elegant and emphasizes the sensual nature of the various objects. This ability to infuse the natural world with my own sensibility is actually what encouraged me to keep moving toward abstraction in my work. I desperately wanted to know what my inner feelings were all about, and was extremely restless with the more obvious, artificial compositions I’d done before.