No. 61: The Death of Marat. He'd been taking a swipe at French Classicism recently. His latest foray into that august territory was his version of Jacques-Louis David's La Mort de Marat from 1793. He used an old packing crate for Marat's bathtub, and persuaded his least favourite art critic, Wolf Blitzkrieg, to pose as the unfortunate Marat--a wry bit of wishful thinking.

No.60: Big Red. In one of his infrequent forays into sculpture, he laboriously carved and then carefully painted a large wooden representation--as tall as him--of a tube of red acrylic paint He was especially pleased by his rendering of the bits of old dried paint on its surface. And he was proud of the way he was able to reproduce a swipe of black paint lying across the tube's middle. His original intention had been to produce an entire rainbow of carved tubes--a visual chord-organ--the next one being orange, then yellow, then green, then blue, and then violet. But he could see it was going to be a gigantic undertaking--and besides, he was eager to get back to painting.

No. 59: Bound East for Cardiff. His visitors pretty much ignored his giant paintings, so he took refuge, for a few weeks, in the making of a series of small monotonal sea pictures. This one, of a freighter smoking out into the open ocean, he called Bound East for Cardiff, after a play by one of his idols, Eugene O'Neill.

No. 58: Big Bird. His large painting of a monumentally-scaled red bird was almost finished. He was both pleased and apprehensive about the bird's authoritative presence. He could almost hear its shattering call, echoing through the mountains he had imagined for it. Curious about its possible reception, he invited a few friends to the studio to take a look. They talked about everything except the painting...