Vija Celmins: I always liked planes. And I wanted to be a pilot for a while.

Gary Garrels: Suspended Plane catches one’s eye immediately because of this huge object suspended in the sky. It's floating, and then I think fairly quickly one understands that the propellers aren't moving. So it's, again, a kind of preposterous situation.

Vija Celmins: I consider the painting, one of the great parts of it, that it's still and flat and, and that it has a picture plane that stays where it is all the time, and that I had this moving thing in there, and then I had somehow subdued it.

Gary Garrels: Celmins made a number of very deliberate decisions in making her early paintings. She wanted to get rid of color. She didn't want to invent compositions. So all of the subjects are taken from something observed in life or from clippings.

Vija Celmins: I was looking for images everywhere. Or they were looking for me, I don't know. Anyway, I found these pictures from World War 2, it was like my whole life from when I was five and six opened up and I thought – and then I also like the grayness, I fell for the greyness of the reproductions. I document the image from the photo. I'm not really mimicking it, I'm putting it in a totally different world.