Quinn commenting about his art to Marina Cain from whose gallery this work was purchased states the following. "After having worked with letterforms for a number of years, I started investigating organizational structures and latched on to two things: hiearchy and the space between reading and seeing. The E is simply a way to borrow the organization of a language. In a way, text is cleaned of one single overt meaning and becomes a pure Language. It's just an abstraction. But E? I did notice that it is placed on the top of each seeing-eye chart of every optometrist's office in the United States. And it's the most commonly used letter in the English language...the list goes on." The passage from "Moby Dick" for this piece is taken from Chapter 35, The Mast-Head. The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun- set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner -- for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable. In one of those southern whalemen, on a long three or four years' voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.