I will begin this with an understatement: Nonobjective painting is hard. In fact, it is so hard, I can't even find a way to describe to you how hard it is, so I will back up a minute and give you a quote from Robert Motherwell, which I had the good fortune to read just this morning, it is this: "One has no idea what it is like to spend forty years of one's adult life alone in a room with blank canvas or blank paper and think, 'Now what am I going to do with it?'" I say good fortune, because it's really very hard to spend one's life alone in a room making things out of nothing, and I am so close to that difficulty as to be conjoined with it. But it is even harder to make paintings out of nothing, that is to say, to make a painting that has no object, that takes no thing as its subject, to begin a painting without the clear objective of making an object come to life, in whatever ways one is gifted at doing, that is even harder, I have made it even harder for myself than it already was! I will not elaborate on why it's become necessary for me to get my head (and hands) around nonobjective painting, only that it has, it has become necessary, it is something I must do, I must understand it. But I do not understand it! But it is not just the confrontation with the canvas I am experiencing, I am used to that, it has always been a confrontation of varying degrees of difficulty, it is more existential in nature, it is an ontological confrontation with nothingness itself. There is, literally, nothing to go by. I am telling you now in a way that will neither understate nor overstate it, I am telling you that nonobjective painting is hard in the way that nihilism is hard, it is Sartre's nausea, it is an existential crisis of the kind I have never experienced before. I am groping for the slimmest edge, but there is nothing, it is the unanswering void. It a dreadful mirror, it is the dreadfulest mirror.