Artists and writers carry ideas around with them all day. These half-formed thoughts and random pieces of information jostle against each other, mostly making no sense. This is the quandary of the creative mind, full of inspiration but staring at a blank page, into an empty room. Then a pathway appears, an opening suggests itself. I suspect that Stephen Prina carries around more ideas than most, ideas about art and architecture and music and the relationship between high culture and pop, and a lot else besides.

In this brief extract from a long discussion of a painting career spanning several decades, Pat Steir describes her first visit to Los Angeles and the four years she subsequently stayed there on and off, both painting and teaching at CalArts.

In the November 2000 issue of Artforum, Richard Hawkins concluded his ‘Top Ten’ list — which included everything from Robert Altman’s 1977 film Three Women (number 6) to ‘Good stuff on TV this summer’ (number 2) — with a rave for ‘Any painting made without using masking tape’, immediately followed by this zinger: ‘If the masking tape factory burned down, there’d be no painting in LA for at least a season.’ If you were cruising the galleries in southern California circa Y2K, you’d know he was hitting below the belt. Ouch.

In downtown Los Angeles, the history of whitewashing controversial public murals is persistent and oddly echoic. After a half-finished mural by Italian street artist Blu was erased from MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary in 2010, Thomas Lawson revisited the troubled saga of América Tropical, David Alfaro Siqueiros's 1932 commission on Olvera Street.

Last spring I went to a dinner in New York at the loft of the artist Don Dudley. In the seventies he made some great Minimalist works that literalized flatness as structure as well as surface, and he exhibited a modular piece at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972. By the eighties he was exploring the space between painting, sculpture, and design by producing object-like works that embodied a sense of imminent functionality. I’m not sure how, but the conversation that night drifted around to the subject of Dudley’s having come east in 1968 from LA. This was perhaps a strange time for a young artist to leave, just at the moment when Southern California was emerging with an art-world identity of its own.