James Rosenquist: That was kind of a culmination of a number of ideas, and one was visiting an amusement park in Texas and seeing a B-36 airplane just sitting there rusting. And then going to an amusement park that had a lot of unnatural things about it as a theme park. And then talking to Barnett Newman about “it” and about seeing something which turns out that a person, whatever one looks at, is relegated by peripheral vision — what you see through the side of your eyes makes what you think you see, that color for instance. Or color can change other colors, according to the whole surrounding of senses of color, light, dark, everything. So that I wanted to make a room where wherever you look, that color would be that color, because everything else made it that color. And that was it. I could really set the knobs and really do that. I learned that income taxes were started by the Chinese as a donation to make a humanist donation to a community or a society. And just at that time, I met Paul Berg from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, who had just come back from some combat missions in Vietnam. So the culmination of all these things. I thought of the economy that this war weapon supported in Texas and in Long Island. So that was the beginning idea to get me off the chair to do this painting. And later it was taken as a great anti-war picture, and everything. But it didn’t start out that way. It was really more of how illogical it was to be an artist in this century, and this time. What a joke it was to be an artist. I mean, if one thinks that they have any power — political power — by being an artist or saying something or doing anything, it didn’t seem to be. The artist’s role in society seemed to be silly at that time.