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Making Quilts

Date: c. 1964

Making Quilts
 
Back home in Indiana some of the women give their friends remnants of fabric that could be useful for making quilts, and the women are made happy, the women who receive the scraps of cloth and the women who give them. Reproductions of my paintings usually are satisfying to me: a circle is completed. It is now Thursday. Two people have come to my loft this week and between them have bought three drawings and what up till now was a lost week of too many things to do and of too many people is not a lost week after all but just a week wearing a different face from the weeks when all I do is paint. Tomorrow I am going to Philadelphia to visit the art museum and a friend. Other friends I have been seeing now it is summer are come to dinner and meet new people friends, and I go to dinners and I meet new people and the cooking is usually good and the vodka and tonic everybody offers this year and going to Fire Island every few weeks for a few days and coming home to my loft where everything is as usual and I realize again that all the play world I have been visiting in is like a Saturday afternoon movie when I was a boy that I thought of all the next week and could never really get back to again not even when I went and saw it again. Most of the time it is this way: I have worked harder on paintings that are merely inevitable than on paintings that are miraculously unforeseeably themselves, and if one is ever to paint any unforeseen paintings it does seem one has to work to complete a very large number of inevitable paintings until one comes at last no longer to think about any such thing at all.

Notebook entry c. 1964