5 hours. That's how long it took me to make this painting, the night I moved into an exceedingly small apartment in Palm Springs, Arizona. I was feeling antsy, crazed, energised—definitely a bit of hypomania there.

I was hit with a sense of, “Oh my god look at that lamp look at that table I need to draw it from all angles I CAN SEEEEEEEEEEE IT FROM ALL AAAAAANGLEEEEEES”.

So knelt and crouched and craned my head under and over and attempted to sketch what I saw. It wasn't a table I liked very much, but I was captivated by the “exposed” exoskeleton of the thing, the glass allowing light and shadows to pass through  in ways that a solid table would not. How do you see the table? How do you arrange it?

I’d never done a piece of Cubist art before, (though I did do a landscape years ago that was Cubist-influenced,) and part of my... zeal... in creating this painting, was to prove I could understand Cubism and make a Cubist piece of art. Even though I didn’t like Cubism at all.

I had been spellbound by Georges Braque’s Violin and Newspaper, which I had seen in Robert Hughes’s Shock of the New, some fantastical yet blueprint-like breakdown of a solid wooden form and the various leafs of a printed journal—though in form and content, my Composite Lamp was probably closer to Juan Gris’s Still Life with a Guitar (though I had never seen the painting at the time).