Today I would like to kill two birds with one stone, but first I'd like you to consider how really very difficult it would be to kill two birds with one stone. First of all, we do not kill birds with stones anymore, not most of us anyway, we do not need to aim our slingshots at birds, we only need to direct ourselves to the bird section of the grocery store. I do not know why we would kill birds other than to eat them, although catbirds, magpies and scrub jays are all birds I've disliked enough to want to throw stones at, although not necessarily to kill them, only to make them fly away. Catbirds because they whine interminably; magpies because they, well, talk too much; scrub jays because they're too (interminably) screechy. It would have to be a very large stone that took out two birds side by side, or one with such force behind it, it took out one, who was flung so violently, she took her companion with her. I don't know. I really can't see how a person could kill two birds with one stone. But I am going to do so now, at least metaphorically, because I am going to tell you about my Red Eye paintings, what I am calling my Red Eye paintings, and that will be the stone (flinty) of today's paragraph, and it will also serve as my artist statement, which I need to provide with the Red Eye paintings I am sending east. So. You are on a plane. It is nighttime. Imagine you are on a plane and it is nighttime. You are alone, there is no companion beside you, only a stranger who is beyond reach. You are leaving something. You are going toward something. What are you thinking as you gaze unsleepingly out the window, what thoughts are you projecting into that black nowhereness of an unpeopled and unknowable universe? What are you running from? What are you running for? It is so—for me, it is so poetic, the idea of movement, of running, of travel, of darkness, of voidness, of night.  Lately, I have been making paintings that take as their subject no object, or, rather (perhaps), that take as their subject space. I am a storyteller. But so are you. We are all with story. What I am doing in these paintings is providing, if you will, the space—the window, the stage (for there are stage paintings as well)—into which, it is my hope, you will project your own stories, the poetry of your own stories. Of course, the paintings must be paintings too, and that is my job, to make them right with the eye, it is not your job to make the paintings, but I would like it very much if you completed them by telling your story into them, even if where you are telling it is inside your heart and even if the way you are telling it is not with words but with feelings, with the soul's grammerless response. Now I will tell you something that is not for the artist statement, but is for this paragraph: I will have to change the voice slightly for the artist statement, I will not be including the bit about making the paintings right with the eye, that was only for you, but that will be easy work, and now my work (on this) is finished, I have my two dead birds at my feet—do you know, I've never even touched a dead bird, though I've seen plenty? I have not touched death much. The other day, on the hiking trail, there was a dead snake. It was dead. Its deadness, the way it lay inert and slack with deadness, was something I found utterly grotesque. I would say it was the quality of slackness I found grotesque. But now I am hunting another bird, and that is completely unnecessary, when I already have my two dead ones.