And one more thing regarding this whole de Kooning business...

One thing I can almost promise you about this picture.  Seriously.  When guys like de Kooning close their eyes, they are thinking about work.  He's thinking about something like this ...

Which brings me to this:  I work seven days a week, barring travel days.  One of my friends once suggested that I'm retired.  This annoyed me.  I can't remember the last day I've been in Troy and not been in the studio.  The curse of this line of work is that you never retire.  And you never stop thinking about the work.  Except perhaps during Knicks games.

I'm not complaining -- there are numerous benefits.  In fact, if I started to list them you'd just get pissed off.  But don't think you have any real idea about what the relationship between my life and my work is (I don't say this in a hostile or defensive way, just as an observation; a suggestion of fact).

Because you, dear reader, don't know what it's like.  Just because I write this blog full of insouciance (whatever that is), self-deprecating humor and general, breezy, this-ing and that-ing and la-di-dah, you think it's easy.  You don't understand that it's like jumping off an eight-story building every day.

I thought it was twelve stories.
That's de Kooning.  He was a better painter than me.