I have decided to do my ruminating here instead of in my blue, what some call green, chair. My ruminations have to do with the following conundrum: What to paint? Always with the what-to-paint! It never ends! There are two categories of not knowing what to paint. The first and most serious category is having no idea what to paint because ideas are not even tumbleweeds in your mind, they are the places those tumbleweeds have vacated. The second category is a slightly better category, though sometimes no less paralyzing, and that is when the ideas get bottlenecked. In those times, it is not much of a problem coming up with something to paint, except when bottlenecked ideas really do get stuck in the bottle's neck. There are times when there are so many ideas, choosing becomes impossible. That is not my problem this morning. A little while ago, I used the word conundrum. I don't like that word! It seems like a cheap, zirconium kind of word to me, it is mutton dressed as lamb, a fraud of a word, strutting with its assonant syllables while being a poor substitute for better words. I feel the same way about perseverate. Actually, I feel a much stronger disdain for perseverate. So strong is that disdain, I doubt I will use it even once in my entire life—today's appearance of it doesn't count, I am only referring to it, I'm not using it. This word is like an oily con man who preys on ingenues. But I am not doing my job here! What should I paint? (I'm no big fan of rumination either. I think I have a sort of prejudice against the vowel u; this may originate with my middle name, which I love for its family significance but dislike for its sound.) Look, I have a story pressing urgently in on me. I cannot tell this story in the confines of the panels my recent paintings consist of, it needs the freedom of broad wild strokes. It needs space. It is a figurative not an abstract story. This figurative story needs a figure to tell it, it needs scaffolding on which to hang everything I want to tell, and I am certain that this scaffolding is the female figure, it usually is. But she is not holding a match she can't unlight; she is not post-sex, wearing Zeus's swan crown because she has gained her power over the great god by the very thing he took from her; she is not holding her heart in her hands; she is not baring the red places of her wounds; but if she is not doing these things, what, then, is she doing? But if I make another female figure, won't it be the one that is greater than or equal to Too Many? Shouldn't I reinvent painting today?