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Show 142 through an expressionist phase, but Paul acted as though he had invented expressionism, and he let it solve all his technical problems for him. You made hundreds of nervous brushstrokes to fill up the stretches of canvas you didn't know what to do with and you absolved yourself of having to choose between space and form. Paul would probably invent the Blue Rider school next. She examined that one longer than she needed to, but then he saw by the way her eyes moved that she was counting the fishheads. She paused briefly to look at the potted palm that stood dying in the corner and picked off a brown spear which she rolled between her thumb and fingers while slowly walking the length of the adjoining wall. She passed by Lorin's beachscape, which was just as well--the patchy whitecaps were too obviously off the same part of his palette as the clouds, and applied with the same technique-and stopped in front of an odd little oil sketch by Noel of a black hunched bird perched on a fishnet, with what looked like mussel shells over its eyes. That one amused her, and so did the street scene next to it, consisting or warped skyscrapers floating in a pale amber sky as though in a concave mirror. Another of Paul's-a stand of twisted and restless bronze trees on a cliff, with a hint of a town far below them and the ocean in the background-got a longer inspection, but he could see by the way she brushed her hand down the back of her hair that she was bored. She stepped as though to look at the next one and discovered she had come to the door to the John. She turned, smiling at her silly mistake, and then after wavering for an instant, went back to look at Lorin's first painting again, and he couldn't stand it any longer. It was a painting he was especially pleased with, and he had never mentioned it to a soul. It was his only successful attempt at non-representation, and its richness of implication deepened every time he looked at it. It was four feet by |