Vija Celmins: I think I just came upon this photograph of a web and I was thinking, “My God, this guy, the spider, was, you know, doing my drawings, reflecting a beautiful two-dimensional plane.”

Nancy Lim: She found this image in the early 1990s. One of the things that she liked about it was that it felt a little bit lonely and she's always liked that quality in her source images.

Tony Berlant: They're very seductive in making you want to look at them. It's understated, but it is that Vija thing of drawing you in.

Vija Celmins: I found myself sort of remembering about lines. I'm not a line person. You know, I'm a mass person. I kind of organize masses.

Nancy Lim: She realized there was something too exciting about the spider web. You know, its connotations of despair and of breaking down and of age. There was something that seemed so sensational, she wanted to leave all of that behind.

Vija Celmins: I wanted the images to stay more bland so you would focus more on really how they were made or how were they were not made. So I stopped. Because I'm always stopping and starting and thinking about what painting might be.