I moved further into the painting what I had learned from the Long Island painters of the east end of Long Island, such as Porter and de Kooning. I used to go paint in hot afternoons by the cooler bay beach with Paul Georges my older painter friend.
I started doing this again. It seemed old fashioned but I didn't care as the activity brought with it a whole range of intensity and adventure even just as something related to the place to do. The weather changed and had to be gauged, the wind picked up and sand blew, the flowers wilted in the hot sun --the bugs began to bite.
I used this bit of still life I painted that summer, blown up in my studio back in NY as a spot of color in relation to the big black and white ongoing space I continued to paint. I called this black and white the text of time. I read alot as I painted and saw the metaphor of a book in the landscape to be read.
Canvases were juxtaposed this way to that and I cut the middles out of the black and white paintings to insert the color. It was a very surgical process.
I had begun reading alot of poetry by this time and had related the color to "spots of time" Wordsworth used to explain a realization or wakening to a moment.
In the stillife painting I had realized this passing. It tempered for me any concern for the stuffiness of the tradition.
Later in plein air painting a similar metaphor in distance and death arrived to me painting, which I took as a sign these genres were worth continued exploring.
It could have been a part of a cycle. Passing and distance were feelings I explored in painting so far, and here were new examples.
Another painting was called Two Days, Two Lilies-- I hadn't up to this point realized that day lilies died each day and a new blossom took it's place the next.
Each spot or realization of this content was somewhat of an epiphany.
