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The tapestry-like quality of the portraits of Baba Muktananda titled The Guru and The White Sisters took a while to evolve from their beginnings in 1976 as both went through a long metamorphesis, and consequently, mark the culmination of the series of grattage portraits made in New York in the seventies before my going back to brush painting in the spring of 1979 with The Barren Womb.

It all started in the autumn of 1976 when a friend introduced me to Catherine Kirkwood who then invited me to her early morning meditation group held at the painting and dance studio of Robert Kushner and Ellen Saltenstahl's loft in TriBeCa. It was a very small group of Syda Yoga members which had Baba Muktanada as their guru. He was away in India, and it would be well over a year before I would attend one of his intensives, as they called his full weekend retreats of meditation. But I enjoyed the meditation and the chanting afterwards and soon became a regular.

From the disappointing results of a heavily layerd grattage portrait that I had made into a sort of Buddha, I started scraping away the paint down to the threads and completely transformed it into an icon of Muktanada from photographs and hung it on a wall with prayer rug below in my appartment on East Seventh Street.

There are several black and white photographs of me sitting in front of the painting by J. Nightlinger taken once I moved to Brooklyn several years later. One is on a two-page ad spread in The New Criterion, January 1983; the other an invitation card for my exhibition at 29 Downing Street in the West Village, reviewed by Judd Tully, Flash Art, summer 1982.