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.