My main activity in painting during the last week of June and all of July 2004 was getting ready for the Arts and Consciousness Gallery DEATH show. I did not want to use any of the work from the years of Jean Martin's illness and death and my grief and mourning then.  Rather, I simply took what i was working on and saw in it my own future... whatever that may be.  When the three paintings planned for the show--#s5 and 6, June and #1, July  (below) were finished, I thought to add a "pendant" to each, in the old 17th-18th Century manner.  I began the pendants by free association scribbling onto scraps of paper all of the dark, depressing words of grief and mourning that I could think of..  Then, I made a thick impasto of each spectrum color--red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet--and stuck the words into the paint, also messing into it with my fingers.  I did it all in the space of two-three hours one late afternoon.  It was a terrific feeling of color and power and sensuality after the ever darkening and dulling feeling of the three DEATH paintings.  That ejaculation on the tomb of #1 July had, perhaps, brought me back to life.  However, alas, the pendants (#2, July 2004) could find no way to relate to and hang with the three DEATH paintings.

That led to the prints.  Make a woodcut of the central, essential image of each of the three paintings, let the woodcut be the pendant.  And, in the process, learn even deeper the meaning of each of  the paintings themselves.  For wood to cut for the woodcuts I chose--very stubbornly, as it turned out, a 2 x 8 x 24 inch scrap of Douglas Fir left over from a nearby construction project.  Stubbornly, because although fir counts as a "soft" wood,the grain is like steel, and old scraps have knots like stones. The three little prints (#3, July 2004) took most of two weeks to make.

By then, it had been about a month of death.  One early morning, I heard the words...

Fred’s answer to death:
Live in the beauty of the senses of now...

and made #4, July.