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I had
been in a bookstore which carried pages of pictures torn and colored from
old books, mostly late 17th and early 18th century dictionaries of fruit
and flowers, and I got the idea for a kind of museum handbook of specimens
such as Roman coins which would stand for a permanence, an everness in the
material world. The idea that these coins would be Roman came from
Walter Pater’s description in his Marius the Epicurean of the
“religion of Numa”—some ancient near forgotten deep religion of nature and
the fertility of the land.
And then I retuned to my original old paper,
the
heavy weight newsprint of most
of the dying city drawings,
a paper that aged and yellowed
as I painted on it
and has aged deeper
and deeper
in
the forty years since.
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About my work, 1959
