After my initial discovery of On Kawara back in 1998 (in the University of Tasmania library) i was perplexed by his art and any relation it might have had to my (at the time) constructed abstractions. There seemed to be no link between his early and late work, the former of which were mostly highly figurative paintings of a rather ghoulish nature. Somewhere between the late fifties and the early sixties his work took a dramatic shift from macabre, apocalyptic compositions to more austere, cerebral works including his postcards and paintings. I can't say for sure what happened to the artist but it almost seems as if he had an epiphany, a "road to Damascus" revelation, where the ghosts of the past (atomic devastation in Japan) were washed away and he took a sharp right turn in his thinking toward his art and the future.