The business of art is so disheartening. Painting is its own struggle, it is sometimes a bloody war, it is sometimes, happily, not as fierce as that, it is usually a struggle of one kind or another, but it is deeply rewarding, and I do not consider that it would be worth doing were it not a struggle. I distrust things that come too easily, these things are called "facile." I have made facile paintings, and they are the paintings I destroy, they are not worth keeping, they signify nothing, not even failure. But the business of art, this is a struggle I don't much like engaging in. That is because it is a game whose rules are unclear to me. There is nothing straightforward about it; it is all twisty and turny and full of rabbitholes and snakeholes and mirrors you can sometimes walk through, and sometimes not, sometimes they will be closed to you and if you try to walk through them, as you did last week, they will only show you back to yourself, stunned, confused, dumb. I do not understand this game! It is interesting, the word "submit," is it not? As artists, we submit our work for consideration. We submit. It is an act of submission. In performing it, we become submissive. We make our pleas for entry. It is usually not given. It is not because of the quality of the work. There is not that logical correlation. I have seen more bad art on the walls of the galleries of this city than seems statistically even possible. This is another thing I do not understand. You could throw a rock, I have said before, and hit a hundred good artists—how did this one get a show? There are rules, you see, there must be complex rules I am too obtuse to understand. Really, though, I think it is like being a butterfly who is told she must do the heavy carrying of a mule as well. It doesn't matter that the wings won't hold. Find a way to turn them into burden carriers. But be beautiful in flight, be weightless on the earth as we could never be. Show us what it is to be ephemeral; but what have you brought us besides?