1990 The Four Seasons

David Shapiro wrote a poem after Jasper Johns, The Seasons. I was working on my own coincidently.

I saw the Seasons reflected in the forms I was going through in my work. Drawing was like Winter or Night, a Watercolor like Spring or Morning, The Painting as High Noon or Summer, The Autumn or Evening a fall from that height.

I think Johns saw it in Stevens or its in Japanese art also all one has to do is to pay attention. It is what poetry is to me and I was trying to relate it to what I thought a painting could be.

By this time I was fighting a losing battle, Painting was dead again, and I felt it too.







These cycles are what the Romance Quest is and really what Modernism is a system of. The Paradigm of Mondrian goes through this model.

Basically Nature is the precedent and it seems our minds are patterned after it from birth to death. For me the cycle is the content of painting, and all art.

The project like Stevens poem above is to make it new.