No. 123. The Emptiness of the Long-Distance Painter. So long had he sojourned in the realms of Malevich, Mondrian, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin and, lately, Canadian painters Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant, that he had come to a point of absolute evacuation. He was sitting for hours, gazing at a blank canvas and finding it to be unneedful of anything from from him. This, despite a clamorous, carping visit from three watchful muses, whose upbraiding of him was clearly coming to nothing.

No.122. The Artist's Studio. He accepted the fact that his ambitions often outran his performance.

No. 121. Cynar. All week he'd been working at his stylized artichoke. It was made of wood covered thinly with plaster and then cloaked up in so much resin it was almost slippery to the touch. Although he greatly enjoyed the bitter Italian liqueur, Cynar, the origins of the piece actually lay in his enchantment with the ancient Greek story of a girl from the island of Zinari who, inadvertently awakening the libidinous appetites of the insatiable Zeus, was carried her off to his airy Olympian boudoir as a plaything during times of his wife Hera's absences. The girl's name was Cynara. As the story goes, poor Cynara grew homesick for her family and, ignoring the high honour Zeus had seemingly bestowed upon her, fled back to her parents. Zeus was predictably angry and turned Cynara into a perennial thistle--the artichoke.

No.120. A Personal Architekton. There were times when the complexity of his life--a complexity he knew we all shared, albeit unwillingly--approached the realm of the unremittingly trivial. At times like these--which seemed more frequent lately--his hunger for solidity, for the elemental, became urgent and thus impossible to deny. During one of these bouts of need for the peace of the irreducible, he fetched a book about Kazimir Malevich from his library, and set about to construct his own version of one of Malevich's Architektons (1925-27)--nearly sculptural architectural models or, contrariwise, architectural models that were essentially sculpture. Malevich had made his out of plaster. He made this one out of wood, painted flat white. He had loved building it. The time of its making was the only stillness afforded him. As soon as the piece was completed, however, it was hurled into the hopper that democratically ingested everything else in the universe. What he needed--but couldn't attain--was a perpetual steadiness. And he had no idea where to find it.

No. 119: Two Vowels. Sometimes he forgot how engaged he had always been by poetry--or at least by language-at-the-end-of-its-tether. In a series of large paintings about poetry, about language-in-extremis, he had attempted to break down language into its components: parts of speech, syllables, phonemes, individual letters, solitary sounds, even punctuation marks. Remembering a poem he had once written in which he proposed that "horses were consonants while cows were vowels" was enough to lead him to paint vowels this week--or at least their imagined shape (this particular painting was called "Two Vowels"). A companion painting about consonants was to follow shortly.