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Show 105 Before going to bed one night he went around the house collecting objects to set up the s t i l l - l i f e he was going to h i t them with f i r s t . He was going to do the exterior of a house he had seen in Venice, near Pacific Ocean Park, i f he could find i t again-it was a kind of dwarfed mosque with concrete mushrooms the size of tea tables in the front yard-and a self-portrait with Yvonne, both of them nude i f he could t a l k her into i t . He wasn't sure what the other two were going to be, but they would evolve as he worked toward them. It was a mistake to plan your paintings too far in advance, because you were a different person by the time you got to them, and you could hang yourself up t r y i ng to remain f a i t h f u l to an earlier conception. He prowled corners and drawers and closets in search of things he might want to use in the s t i l l - l i f e , stepping over Yvonne who sat on the bedroom floor changing the bandages on her toes. He carried l i k e l y objects to his screened porch and l a i d them out on the floor in the yellow glare of the overhead l i g h t until he thought he had enough, and then stepped back to look at them. The selection of your material was obviously less important than what you did with i t , but i t was just as well to exercise some care over the material so that you didn't waste time finding out you were trying to do two different paintings on the same canvas, because objects did have a way of implying their own conceptual frame. He discarded a brass doorknob and a broken flowerpot with a d o l l ' s head peering over the rim, and after thinking about i t for a minute he also took away the hair dryer with i ts pink plastic bonnet and the old pair of wing-tip shoes he had ruined last year when he had chased a g i r l named Phyllis into the water during a party at someone's beach house and l e f t them in front of the fireplace all night to dry. This l e f t a constellation of objects that he suspected had the coherence and variety for an understated study in controlled contrasts. |