From my studio notes about #2 April 2010...
What the hell to do? It is always a problem, no more now than then or tomorrow. But, still, what to do? Must everything always come from inside? And when inside is empty? Damn, get an assignment like the Travel Book was in 1975-7, like the Oakland Museum catalog was in 2001-3. Yet, yet, what to do?

The times of life have assignments built in. Childhood, youth, maturity, old age--each is a requirement to fulfill so the next may begin. And, Paul Mills told me the requirement of old age when he sent a photo of the installation of the painting he had bought from my 2003 Oakland retrospective and asked for a "paid invoice" including shipping costs. He said he needed to "finish it up," and died a few months later.

Yes, there's each time stuff we must do--outer requirements that make inner assignments--and for old age it is to finish up the transformation of the life's work into something that will last beyond the life... or, for me to make a new work out of the old work, a new work with everything in it that I have learned since I made the old work. And to do it now before the senile dementia and tremor of age makes it impossible. See the complaints about Titian's own painting for his tomb--and how do I know it has not already happened to me?

So, a concept--to make "the summing up" (I got the phrase from Somerset Maugham's 1938 memoir) of each period of my past work, each period of work being in fact period of life.  And, to pick a place to start, use the folder of 1956-7 "Very Early Collage-Landscapes in Transition"

Notice that it is the same problem as the Italian Renaissance painters had—they had the figure drawings of all the individuals in the commission, but how to put them all together without changing any of them? My photos of the old paintings are the unchangeable figure drawings, now how to compose to make a whole. I began by making extremely Photo Shop contrast prints of the photos from the 9 x 12 inch drawing/paintings in the folder, pinning the prints on the studio wall in a pyramid form and trying to get something out of it. (See image on left above.) Then make smaller images (about 6” across) to trace on “mulberry” rice paper in the “pyramid” layout, and spend most of the next day coloring them in with gouache. Looks bad. In the evening use gloss acrylic gel to mount the mulberry paper to a 30 x 22 sheet of Somerset. Then paint into it with acrylic . It took until very early morning the next day.

The problem is, I cannot figure out how to put the 1956-57 Very Early Collage-Landscapes in Transition together. Each one was a composition in itself—a single organic, just like a person. The old traditions would have been to treat each drawing as a figure—a sketch from a model—in a larger composition of several or many figures... setting some sort of grid for the composition (like my pyramid, left above), then tracing the outlines of each figure in its preordained place and then coloring all of them in. Well, I won't/can't work like that.

Instead, take the feelings built up in me from seeing the pyramid on the wall these last four days, and then just cum on the paper with a slodge of white over each little drawing... and then with a few calligraphic strokes from a nail cutting into the wet white, make the image it wants to be. Just feel and build the pressure in your crotch and body, Fred, and cum.

The result was #2 April 2010 above.