The reversal in the outer direction came fast as did the realization of the opposites making a system or world I was operating within.
I had wanted always to go back to see the Frescoes in Italy and in 1988 I did.
I had been deeply immersed in my belief of the impossibility of painting the outer world.
In Italy with the closeness of the paintings and museums I began making watercolors each evening to entertain myself. We camped beside water where ever we could and the humid Venetian air made my first tries. I painted grape leafs, oleander and olive leafs, seeming hundreds of years old, and did this into the south of France.
When I went to Santa Barbara CA that year to teach, I continued and the leaves there were now brand new seeming.
Any way some times it was a glimmer of hope that I could belong in this shimmering world and another half, always having an environmental edge, that it the earth was past its innocence and we were witnessing an end to something. In the next years came the end of God, the end of painting, the end of Nature.
