A Heap of Broken Images

“Illusion. That is the magic and power of painting. I never relinquished it, even when my work was abstract.

I looked at the postcard tacked to my painting wall — a reproduction of Picasso’s 1919 painting Nature morte au pichet et aux pommes,… I began to draw on the lower right… curved like a woman’s fecund torso, until the pyramid was completed: the glorious works that had made my world possible, livable, works now outmoded, discarded onto a heap of broken images.”