#168: L'Etoile de Mer He had been reading books about the sea: Melville's Moby Dick and Whitejacket and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea--which he now regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written. And a lot of Joseph Conrad as well. Buoyed up by this new nautical obsession, he felt he wanted to make a sea picture. In this he was heavily influenced by the films of Man Ray he'd been watching recently--in particular an exquisitely nebulous, poetically charged work called L'Etoile de Mer from 1928. For his own piece--which was to be a clear homage to Man Ray--he painted a sea-creature, rather starfish-like, but more sinister. He made it on a large sheet of glass, using only blacks whites, greys and silver. When it was finished, the thing seemed disturbingly primordial, some cold, unknowable creature from the depths of the ocean, as well as a sounding from his own unconscious. It frightened him a bit, and he found himself growing pale and delicately imprecise in the face of the creature's imperious exactitude.

No. 167. Hairpin Turn. "What's this then?" "It's a sculpture." The pointed and, he thought, rather abrasive question had come from the painter next door. Her name was Abigail Swan. She tended to make abstracted landscapes that sort of folded together works by John Marin and someone like Morgan Russell. He didn't mind them too much. And besides, sometimes she brought him a freshly brewed pot of green tea. "I thought sculpture sat in the floor." "Not this one." "Well, if it hangs on the the wall, then it's really a picture, isn't it?" This was a smarter comment than he expected to hear from Abigail. He was just about to get into a long discussion about volume and implied volume and fictive volume and how volumes weren't masses, when Abigail suddenly turned away from the piece and smiled at him. "Would you like some green tea?" she asked him. "I'd love some." "You know what your wall sculpture looks like," she added. "A hairpin." "It does?" "Well okay maybe a safety pin."

No.166. The Cut-Out. He had become extraordinarily devoted to the use of corrugated cardboard in his work. He loved its abject yet noble mien, its warm coffee-cream colour, its democratic roughness and expressive imprecision. Yesterday he decided to make a huge cardboard still life--which he had intended to paint, the way Alex Katz had painted full-scale stand-up metal cutouts of his wife and friends back in the late 1980s. Because he couldn't secure a large enough cardboard, he cut his big still life from plywood--which seemed to him to be strongly allied in its effects to cardboard anyhow. He was about to begin painting it, when he decided he really liked it better just as it was. Although it was supposed to be a vase and a plant, the big cutout looked as primitive as the Venus of Willendorf.

No.165. The Kiss. He was perplexed about the shadow that so often fell between his plan for a work and the way it would sometimes turn out. He felt he too often lost control of his projects. This sculpture, for example, was supposed to have been his homage to Brancusi's The Kiss (1916). By the time he'd finished it, however, the work looked more like a giant clothespin. Still, he thought, the high-compression clutching provided by the spring, forcing the two halves of the piece together, furnished something of an embrace-like energy. It would do.