 The space in it felt as active as the space in Howard Hawks’ "Red River", which had entered his imagination when he was a child and stayed there.Rachel Kushner discusses his indebtedness to Newman and Hawks, and much else in the work and practice, going on to say that she made an “automatic and instinctive” association of his painting Hottest Part of the Day (2001) with a poem of Sappho's, and that it is her “sense that Gilbert-Rolfe has some uncanny mesh with feminine sensibilities… (His) electric verdure pulses—seductive, then bewildering, then seductive.Boucher, then radiator coolant, then Boucher.” 
Flattered by Kushner's suggestion, he is however inclined to resist her further suggestion that “A line is a kind of violence, cutting the canvas as though it’s cutting a body.