Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.

The sexual is part of everything, and it's highly formalized. I hadn't done figure for a long time. And I thought to myself, "Why not the erotic figure?"

I got a little studio in Chicago and practiced. I realized I had to earn some money. So I went to work for an advertising agency where my job was mostly drawing insects for a company that sold an insecticide spray.

The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.

I got a job as a dishwasher in Oakland, and I would draw all day. It was nice because the lady who ran the boardinghouse where I worked let me live there for nothing if I gave her some drawings every week - mostly park drawings of birds and such.

I just started to do my own thing for about a year and a half, and I worked in the evening selling phonograph records. Then I said to myself, "I'm afraid I have to go to New York after all."

The thing about the ray gun is, you pick up anything you see on the street that's the shape of a gun.