[In the early 1960s] I did writing paintings, you’d call it, you know, I was writing but they included pasting, like I would do—

Paul Cummings:  —like Burroughs cut out and paste poetry?

RS: Not exactly. I would take a magazine that had, oh, a lot of boats in it and then paste all these boats on a piece of wood or something like that. There was a lot of nebulous stuff I was doing then.

PC: Testing materials?

RS: Oh, I know what I was doing. Actually, there was a show at the Castellane Gallery which sums it all up to a great extent. I started working from diagrams. I would take like an evolutionary chart and then paint it somewhat in a Johnsian manner, scientific diagrams and paint those. But it was a very confused period around 1961 or so. It [had] a lot of these paintings of—not only paintings but also—oh, it was a curious mélange of things—I took a stuffed pigeon and took it apart and pasted it on a board. Things like that. I took pickle jars and made up specimens and labeled them with curious scientific names. Then I started pasting all these similar photographs.