Paul Mogensen opened his first one-person exhibition at the Bykert Gallery, New York, in March 1967. In the late summer of that year, he traveled through Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. In early 1968, Mogensen boarded a rivet-plated British passenger ship in Madras (now Chennai), India, which sailed six days to Penang Island, Malaya, off the west coast of Malaysia. He carried a notebook in which he drew a few impressions of what he’d seen on his journeys and worked on the arithmetic that continues to inform his paintings.