I am content working with the fragments and shards of our ruined culture, believing (probably naively) that I can and will make something of all this. I paint, knowing that all I have is a “heap of broken images” (cf. Eliot’s Wasteland). And because I cannot actually see the results of my building in these ruins, I am like a man working blind. Moreover, I am convinced that all human action is blindfolded. Our work is provisional—scaffolding at best. We can’t see the true edges of our work because they only come into view a hundred or two hundred years hence when the staging is removed.

Certain questions arise as a result of the wreckage of our times: How can anyone actually believe that there is such a thing as posterity? How can anyone imagine that they are working for that distant, unseeable future generation? My answer is that there is no other good reason to work at all. If I didn’t believe that I was making art to last, I’d break my brushes or take up some useful line of work—like medicine or farming.