They hang on the wall, but they're sculptural. So they're wall sculptures. But they're paintings first--they're more about color, pattern and line than about shape. What's the deal here? Are they a floor polish or a dessert topping?

Both, actually. And here's why.

For those of us who've never had to suffer through a university art department lecture on the critical theory that's been expounded to justify and explain 20th-Century Modern Art, here's a brief lesson.

The biggest challenge facing modern painting is that its chief mode of operation (in Western, non-Islamic civilization, anyway) has always been the making of likenesses, usually to tell some kind of story. But that function is better performed by the new art of photography. Since photography records reality so easily and so well, painters are told that making paintings that are only "pictures OF things" is a losing game. Modern paintings must be unique objects in themselves, whatever else they may portray. In my university art department, students were repeatedly informed that the chief problem for modern painters is the question of how to reconcile illusionistic space, such as in the figurative/realistic tradition, with the essential two-dimensional nature of a flat canvas. Cezanne is said to be a significant painter in the context of art history because his fruit and mountains look flat. (As the comedic metaphysician Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.)

"Always acknowledge the flatness of the surface--respect the picture plane," I was told. To do otherwise was to risk being branded a reactionary; bourgeois, old-fashioned. Uncool.

The implication was that you'd never make it into the Art History Books; you'd be in the Low Art category, along with the sad clowns, big-eyed kids and dogs playing poker. Your chance for immortality would be shot.

Well, I had bought the High Art Paradigm and wanted to make it into the books with the Big Boys, at least as a footnote. So I thought about how to really engage this "problem" of flat surface versus illusionistic image. The result was a series of sculptural paintings that are truthful three-dimensional objects, yet also are loaded with 3-D painter's effects. And since the rectilinear format is also a convention, I attacked that too. Not only are they not flat, physically, they're also not square.

There are serious academic concerns being addressed in these playful, seemingly silly works. I treated the painter's job as one of "problems" to be solved, as I had been taught. The results were the explorations you see in my sculptural paintings.

And did I receive significant critical recognition for them, for being a "serious painter" and nice, obedient Bohemian poseur-in-training? No, not really. I'm not in the art history books yet. Maybe because I'm still alive. They always like you better after you're dead. And maybe the real meaning of modern art is that it provides intellectuals like my old professors with employment that is not manual labor.

But what most puzzles me about my college experience is how I could have managed to go all four years, in a liberal department, in the anything-goes decade of the Seventies, without getting laid.

Now that's a rare achievement. Maybe I qualify for the history books for that.