So you finally figured out after decades of looking at his paintings that Wyeth paints a bombed out world and its inhabitants eeking out tiny bombed out lives, and this body of work began with his father’s sudden and unexpected death. The paintings are his emotional devastation externalized, projected on the people and landscape of small regions he’s known since childhood.

Now look at your painting “Recovery.” What if your art is about a world of disappointment and overwork, where everything’s crumpled and left in piles. Look at your new series of abstractions. What if everything’s crumpled and falling apart, and even abstraction itself is decaying, corroding. A wrung-out world. A disappointing world.

According to your wife and your doctor you are depressed, but you don’t acknowledge it. Remember writing at length in your early 30’s about longing for people and a time when everything was possible, during the time when all possibilities were restricting, dwindling. You never allowed yourself to plunge into a fully acknowledged depression. Whatever depression is yours, it’s subconscious. Because you see yourself as just working along with what you have. But maybe subconsciously you’re bitterly disappointed by how things have played out. And maybe this is what keeps arising in your art.

Look at your other objective paintings. The laughing old woman who’d had a terrible life, and you can kind of read it in the painting. The shack with tires. Fourth of July at Seaside with the many tiny fluttering flags and the hanging cartoon plushes. Oceans. The dying glacier. The ramshackle-looking houses, bone moon. The woman with her eyes closed (maybe this one’s too cute). The splashed dripped-on scenes and portraits. The corroded portraits.

It comes through in the cartoon work as the disappointment of adulthood against the colorful goofy entertainments of childhood.

Does it come through in the abstractions? Is this why you incline away from the all-over compositions others seem to slip into in such profusion? Is this the reason for your need for gravity, being held down, placing things in a row – for migrations? The broken down abstraction, elements crumpled and flowing left to right as though being carried off in a flood or a landslide?

This seems to have arisen on its own. Can/should you do anything to push it along, to amplify this? If so, why?

Does anyone really need or want to see your disappointment?
Is there anything at all redeeming about it?