Gary Garrels: In some cases, Celmins spends years working on a single work. It goes through a long process of looking, changing, looking again. Thinking about it, remembering. A relationship develops, I think, between Celmins and the work so that it becomes a very living experience.

Vija Celmins: I had done this little tiny painting in 1986. The woman who owned the painting died and I got the painting back, which hardly ever happens, which is so great.

Nancy Lim: She hadn't made paintings of the ocean in a really long time.

Vija Celmins: So sometimes you see a work you've done a long time ago and you forgot that maybe it was, kind of had some terrific qualities to it. Uh, but I had it in my studio and I thought, “Oh my gosh! What a great image, a complicated image.” I was like almost 30 years older. And I wanted to see if I could do it again. So I did it again.

So this work is the same image done with a totally different kind of beginning every time. Different colors, different time, different age. It took me another four and a half, almost five years to do the other five paintings. But it's an homage to the first painting that I can still manage this very knotted surface that I found about 50 years ago in a National Geographic Magazine.