The original sketch for Two Pianos was made in 1999. The original painting was a gift to Doris Bardon for her 39th birthday. That painting, depicted above, had only four colors in a Stuart Davis style abstraction of the subject using his palette of reduced colors. The two artists who have had the most influence over my work are Stuart Davis and Fernand Leger. Although the "art historians" place these two artists in the category of "abstract art", they really headed off in their own direction and should be classified "stylists" as there really has never been any work like theirs before. They actually created their very own style working in a continuous mode of one idea leading directly to the next.