No.95: Knossos. He took a short ab-ex holiday yesterday and worked all day long on a big, knotted, very rapidly executed painting titled Knossos. He had been to Knossos in 1987, had visited that lugubrious palace on his way to see the Nikos Kazantzakis Museum in the little Cretan town of Vavari, which is just 12 km. from Knossos. Kazantzakis remains his favourite writer. Knossos is not, however, his favourite place. It had never felt like King Minos’s Pleasure Place to him. For him, Knossos was a dark, sinister place, more like a gigantic mortuary than a resort for athletic, pleasure-loving Greek youths. As he painted, the shadow of the Minotaur kept crossing before his reveries, blocking out the sun.

No. 94: The Ball Game. His admiration for the work of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was now of very long standing--and continued unabated. Lately, he had begun a project called "The Modernist Romance" (suggested by Freud's "The Family Romance") for which he selected, isolated and, as far as was possible, duplicated certain details--painterly stage props--from modernist paintings he loved. This week, he was happily plundering de Chirico's "The Song of Love" from 1914, excerpting the green ball and building one for himself. Unable to maintain de Chirico's purity, however, he added white stitching to his, thus making it, pointlessly, into a giant baseball.

No.3. Points of Order. He had recently made a wildly romantic painting called--how the title now galled him!--"Monk Under the Stars." It was a triangular work, an isoceles canvas with pigment caked onto it so thickly and so tightly he could no longer lift it onto his easel for a final disparaging look. He was pleased for a moment by the upward-pointing of the canvas and by the echo provided by the upward pointedness of his easel. Too bad he wasn't a theosophist, he thought. Then he could make a big rapturous Lawren-Harris-like fuss about the wonders of the transcendental, and the upward thrusting of the spirit. Clearly, he was beginning to annotate his every feeling and every fleeting thought and so, as an exorcism--and as a penance--he carved and painted a giant marker which, when he leaned it against his easel, he liked better than anything he'd made for months. How neatly we are cleansed by vulgarity!

No.92. Bluebottle. He decided that despair embraced more motivation than despondency did. Every day he would try again, and by the end of the week he was painting on a large wooden panel, working it so relentlessly that it finally groaned and gave him back a field of images, one of which appeared to be a gigantic blue beetle-shaped, carapace-like object that he he found both beautiful and repulsive in equal measure. The landscape in which the Bluebottle rested appeared to be on some cold and distant planet. The pink, reagent-like cylinder at his left was perhaps, he thought, some kind of life-support canister dredged up from the wetlands of his unconscious.

No. 91. Eyes R Us. His most recent foray into sculpture had upset him. He had wanted to go on exploring sculptural modernism, intending to make something clean and hard like one of Malevich's Suprematist architectural models in plaster--something like his cold, exquisite Arkhitekton Gota from 1923. But no matter what he did, every one of his new works ended up being a goddam face. He would look at it and it would look back. It made him crazy..