It happens at once

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once.  It's an immediate image.  For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it --well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that --there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored pictures to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.  -Helen Frankenthaler

Sometimes when I get downstairs, I look at the table and whoa and behold,  I see the painting already sitting there.  It's like all I have to do is glue it together, or paint it, or draw it.  Those are my happy days.

I don't worry afterward about how it looks...mainly because I just can't tell, really...if I start thinking I will immediately recognize that, damn it don't look like a Motherwell at all, and shit, it don't compare with a Kurt Schwitters or a Max Ernst, it is not in the same world with a Miller or a Patchen...this junk is all crummy!  for christ-sakes!  well I can get rid of it all for all anyone cares....

And I can imagine a huge show where I'm selling all this stuff for millions (in aggregate that is) and at the same time I'm being sued by every photographer who ever existed because though these paintings are meant to change i.e. that the stuff on the back bleeds through to the front and the composition changes and text magically appears, and the Orbit gum company is after me though they ceased to exist 20 years ago and all the designers who ever thought to design a menu and the Kit Kat company and of course Shell Oil etc. etc. etc. and though I make millions I spend even millions more and years and years settling all the legal stuff...

And of course I will be sued for the 600 paintings somebody stole from me and is then selling though he himself has been dead or incarcerated for a dozen years and I'm not making a penny off it in the first place.  And that throws me back 50 years to the first song I wrote with lyrics -My mind is filled with a thousand things like the dates of wars and the death of kings.  I don't even remember who wrote that -Robert Browning?  well everybody has a poor relative or a rich company that will come after me for that one...and I've got one that is wholly stolen from Yeats -that greatest of Romantics and the last too...

But finally I come back to the paintings which just sit there, quiet and complacent, drifting aimlessly through the internet, never raising a fuss, nor engendering any comment nor interest, happy just to float along till we are all long dead and my blue bubble friend comes along and discovers them, and knows he likes them, and writes a little paper, which gets him into a college with an interested professor, and then begins his life long study and he somehow (with magic I suspect) uncovers these hundreds of blogs, and even the 600 stolen ones and trough the grace of the universe finds the ones lost by the moving company and using the magic of the time is able to prove my ownership of their production, till finally, I take my place in obscurity, next to Rembrandt's teacher, with six actual paintings still existing, the others just poor digital images.  The End.