Ralph Gibson, 2008, oil on canvas, 12 x 10 in. (25 x 20) cm

Index 2 Icon evolved from my third-year project Painting the Already Pictured because I wanted to bring my two visual languages together. For most of my artistic life, I was a photographer and filmmaker. My eye and habits of working with images were informed by what is essentially a serial process. When I began as a painter, I tried to have nothing to do with photographs, thinking that I needed to train my eye for "real" painting and that relying on photographs was cheating. As I became more sophisticated about painting and my own processes, I realised that I was still seeing and operating photographically. Like everyone else coming of age in the 1960s, I was a creature of an image-aesthetic that could not be divorced from photography. So instead of fighting photography, I decided to force it into a dialogue with painting.

It is a dialogue with a long history. See the Documents link for more.