What It Is is based on something I learned from my teacher, Marilyn Frasca, at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. I studied with her for two years in the late 1970s. Her idea seemed to be that everything we call art, whether it’s music or dance or writing or painting, anything we call art is a container for something she called an image. And she believed that once you understood what an image is, then the form you give it is up to you.

The question “What is an Image?” has guided all of my work for over 30 years. Because of what I learned from Marilyn, there isn’t much of a difference in the experience of painting a picture, writing a novel, making a comic strip, reading a poem or listening to a song. The containers are different, but the lively thing in the center is what I’m interested in.

It’s the living thing we activate when we read a book. Like Scrooge, for example. I know Scrooge came from a book, came from the hand of Dickens, but where is Scrooge really? Where is he right now? He’s not inside a book. If I say Scrooge and you know just who I’m talking about, and so do the first 1,000 people we stop on the street to ask if they know who Scrooge is, where is Scrooge located?

Scrooge is an image. Batman is an image. The alphabet is an image. I’d say Abraham Lincoln is an image, too. Although the bones of Lincoln are in a specific location, that’s not what we mean when we speak his name. We don’t mean his bones. Images are entities with no fixed location, they can occur to us at any place at any time. You and I can talk about them, though you and I have never met.