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.