I do not like it when paintings are too easy, when they arrive without much effort. I have told you that before, I have said it many times, and I have always attached the word facile to the subject of paintings (and, before that, poems) that come too easily, and I have gone on to tell you that I distrust not facility, for that would be ridiculous, but the facile in my work—there is a difference, is there not? However, in a recent case (it is still warm from the oven!), I made a painting that came so easily, I knocked about my studio with very little to do, it was boring! I envisioned it (in my sleep—I did not even have to work to do that!), I painted it, and it was finished. It was finished on the first day, but I found ways to stretch that one day into two, for I will not submit to making a painting in a single day! It is why I have liked making the panel paintings as much as I have, these are called panel paintings, you will not know what I am talking about, so I will tell you that these are the paintings with various numbers of "panels" in them, each portraying its own separate scene. Taken together, these scenes create their stories, however you read them, they are your stories, I am only providing the elements, it is up to you to put the stories together. I have liked them because they have taken time, they have taken time to make, for not only must I create a separate painting for every panel, I must also make a cohesive single painting from the separate panels. Although they appear simple, they are in fact rather complex. But I am sure you would look at them and say that they are simple paintings. I do not mind; you can say what you like. I do not have to kill myself stretching canvases day after day when I am making the panel paintings, because I can spend a week on a single painting—a whole week! That is long for me. Believe me, I would like to be the sort of painter who takes months over a single piece—no, I do not think that is true. Strike that—do not believe me. I am too restless for that. But a week is good! A day is bad. I do not wish to return to those days when I made paintings—good paintings!—in a day! I do not think the painting that is still warm from the oven (as it were—I don't, in fact, bake my paintings), is a facile painting. That is the thing, that is the point I am making, that although it came swiftly, it is not really facile, I do not perceive it as facile, though it's in my makeup to, because I distrust it so, I have always distrusted those things which come too easily, and then I call them facile, and then I hate them. I do not hate this painting. I am looking at it gimlet-eyed, however, because I am faced—it is morning time, and I am faced with the workday ahead of me, deciding what I must do—I am faced, as I say, with the choice of doing another one or moving on or away from it. It was a painting I saw in a dream, and so I painted it! Does a dream painting need to propagate? That will be the question I take away with me, when I do this: