No. 86: Conflagration. A friend gave him a thousand wooden, poly-chromed dowels. At first he was delighted. The colours were rich and fine. In the end, they annoyed him, probably because they didn't appear to need any further adjustment or manipulation on his part. The dowels seemed, in fact, more like competition. At one point, he bundled them up and drove to the lake. There, on the beach, he sat in their midst, feeling like a dark flame in a rainbow-hued bonfire. When the sun went down, and the fire went out, he felt like a nesting shore-bird.

No. 85 Saint Anthony. He woke up this morning determined to construct his own hagiography. Every studio needs a book of saints. It isn't a about religion, he decided; it's about wonderment, about the inexplicable. The idea came to him in the course of his browsing through some of his older notebooks. He found this little plum-coloured St. Anthony, standing in the door to his cave, in a notebook from 2012.

No. 84: Philip Whalen. He had always kept notebooks. He drew in them and copied out the passages he liked from his reading. It was while browsing through Ron Padgett's How to Be Perfect (Coffee House Press, 2007), that he found this: "When asked what he wanted done with his body after his death Philip Whalen (1923-2002) said, 'Have them lay me out on a bed of frozen raspberries'." He found this so winning, so poetically irreverent, so disturbingly charming, that he decided to paint huge text pieces--like handwritten billboards. The Philip Whalen comment was the first one.

No. 83: Nest. Almost felled by an attack of anxiety as sharp and heavy as an axe, he set about desperately winding and weaving a mile of red cable into the semblance of a capacious red nest. It had been like knitting on a more or less obtuse scale. But his resulting nest was as warm as a fire in the fireplace, and offered the pulse, the resilience, of a bodily organ (at first he was irrationally afraid he had knitted his own heart).. Sometimes, when he lay stretched out upon it, he could feel its circulatory beating. Good, he thought. If his scarlet nest were alive, so was he.