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.