I had an impossibly great teacher at RISD in 1975..His name was Si Sillman and he was a printer of art books and editions and an associate of Josef Albers, with whom he collaborated on several projects...He came down from New Haven to Providence one day a week and taught most of the day and then went back..There was always a sense of urgency in his classes as a result.

His course of instruction was the ‘interaction of color’, but the emphasis was on the colors in the grays...The construction of action-reaction color studies and gray scales became a seemingly unending project for all of us..The work would be placed on horizontal trays at the front of the class and he would walk down it flipping pieces on to the floor..At the end the few remaining comparative studies would receive a “Bravo.” We worked very hard to achieve that.

He left me with an enduring respect for the subtlety and power of the limited palette and an acute awareness of how colors change the colors around them..In my work I try to give the viewer a lasting and nuanced impression of objects and images in an often low-contrast world.