Julie Karabenick conducts an in-depth interview with painter and sculptor Ed Mieczkowski. Mieczkowski discusses how he came to be an artist, his career, the artist group Anonima he helped found in 1960, and development of his work.

Asked about the label "Op Art", Mieczkowski says: "I have always favored the term 'perceptual abstraction.' I didn’t reallly mind the term Op art, but I certainly didn’t intend my work to be optical demonstrations. I was far too ingrained as a painter. After all, in high school I had studied Cézanne, and by my first year in art school, I was into Picasso. I really was first and foremost a painter, and as a painter I think your work leads the way. Whatever you want to verbalize about it is somehow tangential, not completely the case. What can you say about the impulse to work? You want to make another painting. You want to make it larger, better in color or composition – all those ambitions for it come together for better or worse."