1989 Colossal Sun

Wallace Stevens

Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself


The sun was rising at six, No longer a battered panache above snow
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism Of sleep's faded papier-mache
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry - it was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality. (CP 534)







I started making paintings of sunflowers out on the bay beach of Sag Harbor, Long Island, at this time. I used to go out painting with Paul Georges in the 1970's and started again.

They crept into my paintings that fall. I was painting day lilies, I was so very embarrassed to find that each day they died and each morning a new one took its place. I thought they were just there. I found that very profound in the cycles of Nature.