This painting had a long, undistinguished career as an unfinished work, standing on its head. It was over in a corner of my studio one day, minding its business, when, fresh from a trip to Wyoming, I took a look at it and thought, "upside down, it sorta looks like Thermopolis" (that's a town in Wyoming, in case you're not up on Wyoming geography). So I went to work on it, and darned if I wasn't right. It just needed the signal as a dominant vertical to anchor all those horizontals.