The Post-Impressionist Maurice Denis (1870-1943) said a painting, figurative or conceptual, was "a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." Artist Skip Lawrence, an abstract painter such as myself, is "painting what you cannot see." To paraphrase Jackson Pollack: 'contemporary abstract artists work with space and time, and express their feelings rather than illustrating.' I paint to capture a sense of a time, place, experience, or emotion with color, line, marks, form, and texture as my tools. My paintings Ambiguous Loss, pictures unresolved loss; Reflection #1 and #2 address place and time — aerial views above the cloud cover reflected on the water below.I write mysteries involving art crime and can spend hours working in my garden. My painting, writing, and gardening involve adding texture, color, and form and subtracting everything redundant or superfluous to arrive at a nuanced expression of an idea or state of being. On ProcessI begin with a small brush and add lines of color on the blank canvas or paper. With larger brushes, I vary hues, shapes, light, and dark as an image emerges. Forms appear, disappear, and reappear. Lines, color, and texture disappear under layers of paint, yet their energy remains. I use brushes, palette knives, mediums, collage, tools from the hardware store, and tree branches to lay down layers of paint, creating a historical record of my efforts to create harmony, conflict, and meaning. On Collaboration, Group Exhibition with Wendy Weldon Painting is a solitary enterprise. Artist collaboration has been described as two or more artists working on a single canvas, responding to what the previous painter has put on the canvas. According to Wikipedia, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michael Basquiat, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray were examples of conscious collaboration. Collaboration as a cross-fertilization of intent and method has a rich track record. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, close friends, created "combines" by separately incorporating objects in their respective pictures. Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, and Motherwell and art critic Harold Rosenberg shaped each other's work.Wendy Weldon and I are examples of cross-fertilization. I challenged my reliance on a neutral palette because of Wendy's devotion to intense color. An example of this the painting Carnival. Wendy and I alerted each other whenever our pursuit of harmony risked ending in a one-note hum rather than a complex symphony.