In works such as Sunbather and Portrait of Nick Wilder, the effect of light landing on water is as much the subject of the paintings as their human figures.

I had become interested in the more general problem of painting the water, finding a way to do it. It is an interesting formal problem, really, apart from its subject matter; it is a formal problem to represent water, to describe water, because it can be anything—it can be any color, it’s movable, it has no set visual description. I just used my drawings for these paintings and my head invented.