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Show Moon -115 the arrangements of glass and fruit, folds of burlap, broken bricks, brass urns, bottles, scattered flowers. We learned to crush and mix our own pigments. Do you know what it means to make a color? We could create the essence of light itself: the First Cause. My lower East Side room was plastered with my drawings and unframed canvases. I even taped them to the ceiling. The world was a place to be seized with the eyes and loved with the hands. No curve of flesh, no scrap of metal was unlovely, for it was subject to the worshipful act of art. Take anything, anything at all, even a bruised apple in a bin, lift it to the light, and it's glorious. Art, I think, is nothing more than being so in love with what you see that you feel compelled to lay it out for everyone. What covered my apartment walls was a mad array, for I was trying everything: studies of hands and feet done in pen and ink, watercolor flowers washed in blurs of wind and rain, portraits in sepia, nudes in swirls of charcoal. Over my sink were taped the obligatory exercises in metamorphosis-a spider transformed by stages into Irish lace, a human ear evolving into a seashell. Inside my closet door were my poor attempts at breaking down the world into cubes and triangles of flat primary colors, which, the modernists say, is the purest expression of what we see. But I wasn't cerebral enough to find excitement in theoretical reduction to the brickwork of perception. I tried symbolism, so popular with my message-minded fellow students, but the result was appalling: tears falling from a ponderosa, washes of blood in a river of fish. These exercises I did not hang up. It turned out I was best with where Td begun: trees. Trees dappled in light, trees sweeping to the ground or clutching at the |