Seeing the cyclorama in relation to my own artistic development, as well as to a broader history of art and especially to site-specific painting will perhaps clarify its significance. My first working venue as a young artist was in Rome, Italy, in 1963. I went to Rome to paint, following my studies at Dartmouth College where I majored in art history and prepared for architectural studies, at the invitation of my brother Michael who was there on a Fulbright grant to study architecture. I was developing abstract art forms, and together with Michael became extremely interested in Roman baroque art - specifically paintings in situ. This started what has become a career-long interest in such art. I traveled extensively in Europe to see and to study, not only renaissance and baroque examples, but also more contemporary integrations of painting and art with architecture. This led to a more primary interest in studying the issue of the use of color in painting. On returning to New York at the end of 1965, I spent a week in the Museum of Modern Art library studying the original edition of Josef Albers' Interaction of Color a book I later acquired as a present from my brother. This proved to be just the beginning of my continuing research into historical and contemporary color theory and the psychophysics of color vision.

My first one person exhibition in the spring of 1968 included the presentation of painted wood columns and clusters of columns (each 15'' wide x 90'' high) meant to be circumambulated to take in the entire experience. These three dimensional "continuous paintings" were based on my evolving ideas about color in art and were intended to relate to the site, but my assumed site was a white room. By shifting to physically transparent materials in 1969, my next group of three-dimensional pieces attempted to deal with the issue of a specific architectural context. These works effectively color-structured space as one walked around them and saw the environment through the color combinations which shifted with each angle of view. The last of these pieces, a color maze made from 21 of these transparent subtractive primary color sheets, was designed in drawings and a small model made in 1970, but was only recently exhibited.