"I HAD THE IMAGE OF A BLUEGOLD DOME"

" I had the image of a bluegold dome , those colors weaving in distinct

strands to the center of an oculus. But the painting came out blue

upon blue. Lovely, yes, but lovely in a way I have already

put behind me. It is too much of a time when I believe that
Paradise was nearby, in bliss, and now though I am not as sad

as I was, or jaded as I was once, I am puzzled...should a painting

affirm what one is unable to?

There is this blue Paradise. I did not know I was nostalgic for it

---if I am--and there it is. It may be done.

As I drove to the gym, I wished for someone else to tell me yes or no.

And thought of Francis Bacon who also wished for another painter--

working on the same problems--to verify or question the work

performed solitarily, without a yes or no. Who would this second self

be? It is impossible to imagine him or her considering what

one knows of other peoples' views. And earlier in history a common

language was shared, and to some degree a commonly shared criterion. ..

--No, that is not so; think of the sterile classicism which faulted Rembrandt

in Amsterdam c 1630. We think of earlier times as being simpler in their

demands, which was not at all how it must have felt.

Of one thing I am sure: art historians always oversimplify WHERE things come

from ,"influence" . Who would have thought that Rembrandt loved Mantegna

and faithfully copied an etching of his ? But he did, and such a thing is

in your hand thereafter. For the record, I remembered a Jean Fouquet,

and The Fall of the Rebel Angels in the missal illustrated

by the Limbourg brothers for the Duc De Berry, and the Oculus of the

Camera Della Sposi , and the Safavid Dynasty illustration of Mohammed's Descent

on the back of Buracq to the Throne of God.

My sacred blue paintings.

How well I remembered them, and to what degree,and to what ends is a

different matter, nor was this an attempt at a concious synthesis.Rather it was called out

and into being by a certain blue itself in some ambiguous zone between ultramarine cobalt

cerulean and that greeny-blue which is so different from them each

that in Russian color theory it counts (so I am told) as a different color

altogether."

(from a notebook of 1997)