Tonight as I worked and the wind whipped and howled down summer street I conjured countless ghosts of painters. Most are likely apparent here: Lichtenstein, Matisse and drawing with scissors, always Gorky with any type of linear organism type abstraction, Pollock and Kenneth Noland as I consider the nature of their relationship to redefining emotional and physical landscape… but over and over I went back to that story of de Kooning. The one where the man himself, the virtuoso of rendering and craftsmanship in the New York School, bursts into a neighbor’s loft bug-eyed and dejected, explaining to his friend that he simply cannot remember how to paint hair.
