Lana Jokel: What was your relationship with Neil? When did you first know him? Frank Stella: It seems as if I always knew him as long as I was in New York. I remember meeting him with John Chamberlain. He was also friends with Dick Bellamy. This crowd that hung around with Ivan Karp and Dick, we used to call the Central Park Crowd because they used to have the gallery on Central Park South in the early 60s. Lana Jokel: How would you characterize Neil's works? Frank Stella: Neil was pretty much of a free spirit in those days. There was a big contrast in his personality, however. He would be quite patient and be with the work whereas when he got out of the studio he was a wild man. He had a very nice touch; a real sense of the overall design of things. He seemed to really put paintings together. When I first knew him, he made a lot of drawings and a lot of plans for working the pictures up. I still own a piece which was basically a blue and yellow piece where he was using fluorescent colors, and where they overlapped it made a fluorescent green the fluorescent colors were transparent. He had a nice idea with fluorescent colors early on. Lana Jokel: Did you all start on the shaped canvas around the same time, simultaneously independent of each other? Frank Stella: I think we were fairly independent of each other. We were all working on basically the same idea around the same time. Lana Jokel: What was Neil like as a person? Frank Stella: As a friend he was a lot of fun. What I remember most was when Neil and John would build these race cars and have these little circuits running around. They were like kids playing with toy trains: big and childish at the same time. I mean they worked hard at having fun and they seemed to be quite good at it. Lana Jokel: Tell me about that reclusive period when he went to live in Sagaponnack, Long Island? Frank Stella: I think he was having trouble with his ears and he was a little sick by then. It was a kind of semi-retirement, but he seemed to work awfully hard on the paintings. They are quite worked over and worked on. They have a passionate worked through quality. Lana Jokel: Why do you think he seemed to shun the gallery scene and the art world? Frank Stella: I don't know. It is not that interesting. I wouldn't call anyone staying away from it shunning it. After you have been doing it for 20 or 30 years, a little of it goes a long way. So, I wouldn't say he shunned it all that much. We all saw his painting, and he was still selling paintings. Lana Jokel: What impact do you think Brazil had on him? Do you know that he was just about to move there to live kind of like Gauguin? Frank Stella: We never talked about it. But, it seemed as if it represented a kind of opening up away to get untrapped so that he wouldn't be so bogged down. There is a kind of openness. A kind of exotic quality to us who don't live in Brazil. Lana Jokel: Do you have any anecdotes that you can specifically remember about Neil? Frank Stella: We used to see a lot of each other in the '60s, but I can hardly remember anything from the '60s. When he moved to Sagaponnack in the '70s, we had spaces side by side in the same building. I was always going to set up my studio out there, but I never got around to it. I would go out there to visit him, but I never worked there. I miss him. I wish he were still here.