In 1957 and 1958, I walked the streets of San Francisco, particularly in the areas called Western Addition and sometimes in the Mission District.  Over the two years, I made hundreds of drawings.  In the beginning, I would go home at night and draw not the outer memories but the inner emotional core of what I had seen as in #s1 and 2 to the right.    Later, I made drawings of what I saw, as in #s3, 4, 5, and 6 below, and sometimes used the drawings to  paint the picture when I got home that night, as in #s4 and 5 below.  Still later, probably in the summer of 1958, I began no longer to be able to control my hand to describe the physical matter of things, and the drawings became rather the marks of my nerves amid the streaming space, light, sound and energy of the places where I made them.  Although I had hoped the drawings would be resource for later paintings, they could not be used for anything.  I learned their sole purpose had been my aesthetic union with the scene before me in my act of making the drawings.

Click the image for 1957-58, Paintings of the Dying City

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