Artist David Budd - Sarasota Art Museum

Artist David Budd, 1927-1991

Mike Solomon

Excerpted from the memoir, Our Salon by the Sea
© 2022 Mike Solomon

It’s an interesting and often comforting thing to have someone in your life that knew of your arrival before you were born. Artist David Budd was such a person for me, a kind of pre-assigned mentor. David had become a protégé of my father, Syd Solomon, in 1950, six years before I came along. While studying architecture at the University of Florida at Gainesville in the forties, his life changed when he saw a profile of Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock in Life magazine in 1949.

He wanted to make abstract art. He had to make it. David moved to Sarasota to attend Ringling School of Art. It did not take him long to learn that Syd was regarded as the leading abstract artist in the state, so one day in 1950 David called my parents. My mother Annie, answered the phone. David introduced himself and asked if he could meet and talk with Syd about painting sometime. Annie’s response, typical of her warm generosity and interest in artists, was, “Well, would you like to come over now?” He hurried over, and so began a friendship that lasted all their lives.

David took in all of Syd’s advice. Syd told him he should go to New York as soon as he could to meet the most important artists of the day. David went in 1954 and did in fact meet his hero Jackson Pollock, as well as many of the other Abstract Expressionists. You can see something of his admiration for Pollock in his comments in the Jeffrey Potter book, To A Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock. I think his particular attraction to Pollock’s work, judging from all David said to me over the years, was the power that gestures made with paint had to create new structures, structures of the invisible worlds, maps of the energies of thought and emotion.

At first, David painted in a style very common to the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, using large brushes to make big gestures in an urban palette of grays, black, red, white, nothing too original. (Unfortunately, a few dealers not sophisticated enough to understand that these works were his transition into painting have promoted them over his mature works.)

Studying gestural abstraction, tracking it, understanding artists’ mechanisms were a major occupation of many of the younger artists who venerated those who originated the genre. David and his peers went deep into everything Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline did. They were their triumvirate.

Sculptor John Chamberlain, one of David’s closest friends, once said to me, “Nobody thinks about how well Pollock knew viscosity. How he could make a line of paint go from here to there (hands outstretched) just using a stick.” Under Pollock’s influence, this aspect of viscosity became one of David’s main interests.

As he progressed as an artist, he began to identify the overriding motif that would characterize all of his work, in a word, repetition: repetitive shapes and repetitive marks. He talked with me about how our motor memory makes us repeat gestures, that they are second nature to us, and how the movements of our arms, hands, and fingers create patterns that flow from them. It was such a brilliant observation of such a simple phenomenon relating to the processes of painting.

Another requirement at the time was for one’s gestures to be original in their application and not a copy of someone else’s. As he quickly moved away from generic Abstract Expressionism, he developed the use of the palette knife to apply paint to canvas. The great majority of his works are made in this way and should be regarded as his unique and mature idiom. Through it he explored his four main interests: gesture, viscosity, repetition, and texture. There are some good series of paintings that are flatly painted but those works, too, are defined by repetition and gesture.

Though some of his works contain more than one color David chose to work primarily monochromatically. From this reductive foundation, the texture and patterns that developed from the gestures of his marks would be emphasized over other visual qualities. It just so happened that having made this choice, he was one of the earliest postwar artists to work monochromatically, along with Robert Ryman, Rollin Crampton, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ad Reinhardt.

By going to New York when he did, David learned that many of the artists spent their summers in the Hamptons, so he started going there to visit. If he hadn’t already met everyone in New York, the visits to the Hamptons in the 50s completed the process. With some he formed lifelong friendships, including Alfonso Ossorio, the artist/collector who was so crucial to the art world at the time.

Ossorio brought David to Pollock’s studio then. Alfonso was a multinational, multiracial gay man with an incredible mind and education, perhaps unrivaled among the cognoscenti of his generation. The breadth of his curatorial reach was extraordinary. He knew all the artists working in Europe, Japan, and America, so when he started the Signa Gallery in East Hampton in 1957 with his gallery partners John Little and Elizabeth Parker, it exhibited avant-garde art from all over the world. The Gutai artists of Japan and most of the New York School were shown there, including all the women, the abstract artists in Europe making work then called Art Informel, and many others. Symposia and some of the first “performance art” were held there. This is the stream into which David had stepped.

In the summer of 1955 David invited my parents up to the Hamptons to stay with him and Corky, his first wife. They had rented art dealer, Gaston deHavenon’s house in the Georgica section of East Hampton. With David, my parents met Jackson Pollock at Georgica Beach one afternoon. They met everyone else, too, including Alfonso Ossorio, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Phil and Musa Guston, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, Aldoph and Esther Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Larry and Clarice Rivers, Jim and Charlotte Brooks, Conrad and Anita Marca-Relli, Harold and May Rosenberg, Clem Greenberg, Wilfred and Marta Zogbaum, Tino and Ruth Nivola, Ray and Denise Parker, Kyle and Jane Morris, Joan Mitchell, Norman and Cary Bluhm, Fredel Dzubas, Dan Budnick, and the list goes on. It was because of this visit that my parents’ lives were changed forever. We started living half the year in the Hamptons the summer I turned three, 1959. We rented Ossorio’s gatehouse that summer, and Syd worked in the barn/studio that Grace Hartigan had worked in summers before.

David’s first wife, Corky (her full name was Corciata Cristiani), unfortunately passed away recently from COVID-19. She was like Bridget Bardot, but on horseback. She was a superstar in the Ringling Bros. Circus. Corky was as talented an athlete as she was beautiful. She studied ballet with Balanchine so she could improve her act, doing ballet on the back of a Lipizzan horse as it galloped around the ring. The Cristiani family was a famous circus family going back many generations in Italy. They had their own circus and specialized in acrobatic feats, including trapeze and equestrian acts. It took John Ringling three trips to Italy to get them to come to America and join his circus. When David married Corky, it meant he had to be a part of the circus in some way, so he ran the concessions. He was a little familiar with the kind of crowd that came to the circus because he grew up in the dog racing business in St. Petersburg, Florida. His father was a greyhound breeder, so David understood humanity from the point of view of the track atmosphere, which was similar to the circus, with people looking for an escape through the excitement of spectacle. He made quite a bit of money running the concession.

By the time I was mature enough to have any real conversations with him, David was no longer in the money. Like a lot of artists, he scraped by on the occasional sale and some teaching at the School of Visual Arts and lived like a church mouse. He had the most wonderful space, a loft at the top of 333 Park Avenue South in New York. It was about as spare as any loft I’ve ever seen, with a kitchen sink, a small fridge, a small stove, and some radiators. It had windows on both ends and every once in a while, because it was the rooftop loft, there were break-ins and he’d get robbed of the things that were easy to resell or pawn, a toaster oven or a camera, for example. He never had many gadgets so the thieves must have felt it was hardly worth the risk. He had a partition in the back where his bed was and all along on one side of the loft he’d built racks to store all the paintings. The racks had large sliding doors that hid the works and which he used to hang canvases to work on or to show. At one point he’d traded a painting to someone who owned a big appliance chain (it might have been the Crazy Eddie chain). He got a big TV and a new fridge and some other gadgets I think he sold for cash. Because he had few tables, he put the TV on a bale of hay he’d gotten from somewhere. The only other thing there were a few work tables and some chairs, very minimal, very clean.

The TV got stolen almost immediately. That didn’t matter much to him, but these invasions were always traumatic. His nerves were delicate, and I think it had to do with his constitution as well as his mind, which was that of a highly sensitized observer. He was quick to know things and that was part of his charm. I think David’s appeal to the ladies was this ability to observe and listen. He was handsome and could project male energy, yet women felt they could talk with him. I don’t know much about the men in his life, except that there were some men. He kept that sequestered. He and William Burroughs had done a collaborative work that was shown at the Staedler Gallery in Paris. Lines from Naked Lunch were written into the drawings with images of partial bodies, and later he spent some time in Mexico with Burroughs.

David’s second wife, Elizabeth Giros, (now Elizabeth de Sales de Roussy) was a wonder to us all and still is. When she arrived with him one day in the early seventies, it was as if David had found the most perfect example of all that was French: her charm, her perfect skin, round face and cheeks… It was as if she had been incarnated from an eighteenth-century painting of a young girl picking flowers in the fields of Champagne, where she was born. Combined with this outer beauty was her attitude, her mind. She was so naturally smart, with an unpretentious intelligence that was so refreshing and always vital to the conversations on art, culture, food, or you name it. My mother Annie simply adored her. Elizabeth and David visited us many times in the Hamptons and in Sarasota. They had a small apartment uptown in New York. She said when he was painting in his loft downtown, she would not see or hear from him for days. Once he’d finished a work he’d come home and “just collapse.” Elizabeth and David remained friends after they were divorced. She and her daughter Pauline, from her marriage after David, remain great friends of mine and my family.

I don’t think Lauren Hutton was ever a lover, but he had pursued her and they were friends for a while. His painting titled with her name is one of the masterpieces. It’s a kind of luscious pink-white that comes straight out of high fashion. He was a collector of lipstick colors. She once offered to buy the painting, to help him, but the damned fool asked for triple the money it was worth and she declined. He told me this himself. Assuming she was rich, he thought she could afford to pay whatever he asked and the deal was designed to help him, right? But what he asked for was simply a bridge too far and I think it must have offended her. For all his worldliness and knowledge of people, David was not great at handling his own business. This is typical of a lot of artists. They can be their own worst enemies because they can’t come out of the creative space (in which they must be completely immersed) far enough to see that the world at large has hardly any notion of the values they hold as they experience making their art.

David stayed with us at all the houses we had through the years. He and the folk singer/illustrator Eric von Schmidt became friends through my parents in the early days of Sarasota. Syd called them “my two older sons” and sometimes, when he was grouchy, “my two errant sons.” So in this family-like atmosphere, I was sometimes doted upon by a number of my parents’ closest friends and no one was closer than David.

In a letter from Paris written to my parents on November 10, 1960 David speaks of seeing the Moscow Circus. “The clown Popov is all and more than he is reported, which puts me in mind of Mike. Your story of his railroad days was marvelous. I got the whole image immediately and loved it. I keep it. I must have had the same experience somewhere back down the line because the whole thing keeps going through what I laughingly call my mind. He is something, that boy. I miss him.” He’s referring to me waving at the Long Island Railroad trains that went by the house we rented from Sam Liss in Amagansett. So there you have it, the cast of our friendship was set long before I knew what friendship even was.

The year I turned 15 was a milestone. It was the first year I started school in Sarasota rather than in East Hampton. Because we lived six months in each place, normally I would start the school year in the Hamptons in late August or early September and then be pulled out in November so my parents could go to Florida, their state of residence, to cast their votes. Every year in November I would try to take up studies again with new books and teachers in Florida. This pattern wreaked havoc on my academics, especially in math, in which each step of learning was contiguous and precise. That year, 1971, my parents felt I could go to Florida on my own to start school at the beginning of the school year. I lived alone in the Midnight Pass house on the beach with no supervision at all.

I partied all the time, so that by the time they got back in November I think I had done almost all that was possible for a fifteen-year-old to do, no hard drugs, but everything else, definitely yes. After they returned, I began to take an interest in the mystical and in spiritual and epic tales. I don’t really know why. I read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Surfing had been my go-to activity since I was six. Dwight Myers was a surfer friend, an older mentor. He was charismatic and incredibly athletic and a hell of a harmonica player too. He was the first person I knew who actually was a yoga expert, a vegetarian, and a meditator. I still have an image of him in my memory doing the Padmasana for what seemed the longest damn time.

One day he handed me a little red book. The cover was The Hidden Words of Baha’u’llah. Dwight said, “I think you might like this.” I did. I thought every word rang true, yet it was mystical and exotic to me. Why did I react so strongly to it? I then read the histories of Baha’u’llah and his precursor, The Bab, and the spiritual revolution they started in Iran in the mid 1800s. A few weeks later I became a Baha’i. One of the precepts of this new religion was the prohibition of alcohol and drugs, unless the latter were prescribed by a doctor. After living like a wild child until then, and having done it all, I found this was a great freedom and relief from all the inebriation, not to mention the paranoia. The “no sex until marriage” part of the Baha’i teachings was admittedly a much bigger challenge, but I am sure even being made to question the sex impulse created some limits I would not have had otherwise. Certainly that was the situation with my upbringing. There had been no limits. When I was 12 my dad enthusiastically asked me if I had “been laid yet?” I grew up in the opposite way of most people.

My parents were raised in the fairly normal fashion of lower- and middle-class Jewish people yearning to be American, to be modern. As they found their power and freedom after the war, they remolded themselves as bohemians. With all the liberation happening in the postwar period, especially in the sixties, they became bon vivants. All the pleasures of the day were constants in the convivial lifestyle they became known for and in the way we were raised. My older sister, Michele and I had the freedom to do anything we wanted, and we did. When she took me to see the movie Easy Rider with her friends we got high in the car on the way. I think I had just turned 12. In the movie, when Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda visit the commune in New Mexico, she told me she had been living there when the film’s location scout came to check it out. She would have been about 19.

The day I became a Baha’i, I went home to tell my parents. David was staying with us at the time. They were all in the living room looking out at the Gulf. I came in and said, “Hey folks, guess what? I became a Baha’i.” “What’s that?” I told them. Dead silence. Then Syd said, in a rather upset tone, “How come you couldn’t become a Jew?” Now it was my turn for silence, but I was thinking, “This coming from a man who had all but abandoned everything that was religious, and now he cares about me being a Jew?” Certainly he was proud of his background culturally, but that was it. In third grade I had to beg them to take me to Temple Emanuel so I could learn about Judaism. That was how remote we were from its beliefs and practices. I knew and was taught nothing. So there we were at an impasse in the conversation in which no one knew quite what to say next. That’s when David spoke up. “Syd, you know this is a very admirable religion. They believe in all the right things: education, racial equality, the equality of men and women (I saw Annie’s attention spike), freedom from all prejudices, world peace. Mark Tobey is a Baha’i.” (Mark Tobey was a highly respected abstract artist.) I couldn’t believe my ears, and from David, of all people! He knew about Baha’i?! Then he went on to say, “And they don’t do drugs or drink.” That was the clincher. For all my parents’ wildness I think even they had come to realize I had been too free, was too wild too young, and that this was a chance for me to be safer, at least for as long as it lasted. Not another word was spoken about it that afternoon or ever again. Much later in my father’s life, when he was on the brink of Alzheimer’s, I asked him to help me do the lettering on a banner for a Baha’i activity I was involved with. He was excellent at lettering, even when his other skills began to erode. He gave me a big, affectionate, affirmative wink. It was one of the highlights of my life, that wink, which said, “Yes, this is a good thing, I approve.”

In that summer of ’72, I had planned to go on a surfing trip to the Outer Banks with an older surf friend from high school. We had bonded over surfing and getting high. Now that I wasn’t doing weed, the relationship cooled and he asked another person to join us, which pushed me to the back of his VW bus, literally. By the time we got to the beach in North Carolina, I was basically out of the group entirely, not having gotten high with them on the way up or seen the humor in everything they found funny while stoned. I was, according to them, “a real downer.” I had to get my own camping gear and pay for my own spot rather than stay with them in the shelter of the van’s canopy tent as planned. Well, after buying my own pup tent and paying for my own site I soon ran out of money. Actually, in retrospect, I did not have enough to begin with. Syd and Annie were off partying in Europe with Jerry and Gabby Leiber. Luckily, Juan Rodriquez, another surfer mentor of mine, was there with his wife Cindy Perkins and their baby daughter Roxanne. They were going back to Sarasota and offered to take me home. When we pulled into the driveway of my house at Midnight Pass, there was David.

He had arranged with my folks to stay in the house that summer, to work on a new series of paintings, to have the peace and solitude he needed to concentrate. All of a sudden there I was, a fifteen year old kid with nothing to do, and now I would be an invader of his privacy, an intruder in my own home. It was awkward. He knew of course that I had no alternative and that my parents were, well, who they were. So he had to find it within himself to accept the change in circumstances, and it wasn’t easy at first.

I was used to strolling into Syd’s studio anytime I liked. I watched him paint a lot and he never minded.

I think he even liked having me there, so I strolled into the studio while David was working, too, and then I’d stroll back out with my fifteen year old obliviousness securely intact. I did not see or feel the vibe, the neck hairs bristling, the darting eyes, and the frustration in the redness of his forehead at having his concentration disturbed until one morning about a week into my arrival. He was working away and again I sauntered in to see how he was doing. Then. . . Boom! He just exploded with a torrent of accusations about my insensitivity, my obliviousness, my taking for granted that it was my space, but, it was not mine to occupy based on the arrangement he had made. Oh, it was intense. While ranting, he’d stopped painting and came at me quickly so that I had to back out of the studio door I was about to enter and onto the bridge walkway that connected it to the house, normally a lovely space where everybody congregated during parties, but now the scene of an angry, almost physical confrontation. Finally, he began to calm down. The look on my face must have told him that not only was I extremely sorry but that I had no idea I had committed such an evil deed. I remember watching him gradually softening, trying to make the effort to adjust. The poor guy had been holding it back since I arrived and it just had to come out. Later, he said he was angrier with my parents than with me for leaving me without any resources at all for the summer.

The next morning, I stayed out of the studio. When David had finished work he came into the house. I decided to make him lunch to help heal the rift. He had taught me to make a very simple but great Italian dish, linguini with garlic and capers. You had to make sure you didn’t overbrown the garlic when you sautéed it in olive oil or the dish would be bitter. Then you just mixed the cooked linguini in with the garlic and oil and tossed in some of the small capers, add a little salt, and that was it. He obviously approved of my execution by leaving nothing on his plate. Over lunch he said, “You know I have never let anyone in the studio before while I am working, not girlfriends, not even wives, nobody. You were the first to see me work.” I wasn’t sure what was coming, so I stayed silent. “Ya know, it really wasn’t that bad. Maybe it’s because you are used it, but I realize I don’t really mind if you come in while I’m working.” “Really?” I said. “Yeah, but if you see that I’m concentrating, just wait to talk with me until I’m done working, when I am resting, ok?” “Uh, ok. Are you sure?” “Yeah, I think it’s good for me, to be able to work with someone in the studio, and you are used to it, and after all this is your home.” What an amazing conversion he’d gone through for me. I will never forget it, how he had the ability to change, guided by his kindness.

What David went through to make a painting was daunting and astounding. In order to make the paintings he did, to create works with a palette knife by making small inch-long gestural marks across a huge expanse of canvas, was a kind of physical and emotional feat. The colors he used had to be mixed for both tone and viscosity, in one batch. Then the canvases had to be painted in a very short time, before any of the viscosity of the paint changed due to the natural drying time. This process, which was at once expensive and pressurized, was surely what contributed to his outburst with me. I had been interfering with his rhythm and with the ticking clock. It’s not that oil paint dries so quickly, but his mixtures of combined pigments, oils, and various other ingredients often took days to reach just the right viscosity and then that perfect viscosity would start to change. It was so finely tuned that with flicks of his hand to his fingertips to the knife, which held the paint, he could make the incredibly articulated marks that cover his canvases. Any degree of change in viscosity over the process of application would alter that fluid motion and change whatever part of the painting was left undone. That had to be avoided. He was working against time. And David worked quite large. Most works measured five to six feet in one or both directions and many were much larger, some eight to ten feet or so. He’d have to spend days and nights with few breaks to get one done. After finishing one, he’d just fold for days and days of rest. Amazing, really, what it took to make his work.

He had a large piece of plate glass that was his palette. It was about an inch thick, with rounded polished edges and painted white on the bottom so the tone of the color he mixed on it was seen exactly for what it was. I think it must have been at least thirty-six inches square, if not larger. It weighed a ton. This was the sacred place where he mixed paint, the site of his alchemy, where, like a witch, he stirred the magic potion that would become the painting. As I said, it was expensive. All his money went into buying paint and canvas. I remember once visiting with him in his loft in New York. He had just finished mixing up a luscious green. The mound of paint, almost a foot high and covered in plastic wrap, took up almost the entire glass palette. He’d have spent thousands of dollars on paint, probably all the money he had for some months. He had recently come back from Mexico and the color of the flora and fauna in the Yucatan had pervaded his soul. That green painting is one of my favorites.

Another, very subtle, characteristic of his work is the under-painting color. At some of the edges of the canvases one can see bits of color that are usually stronger or brighter in tone than the color of the textured surfaces. This colored ground is essential to the viscosity aspect of his paint mixtures. Because each stroke of paint made with the palette knife contains various degrees of thickness, the thinnest part closest to the surface of the canvas has a greater degree of transparency than the thicker part, which is entirely opaque. In the thin part of the mark, the color underneath it, the colored ground on the canvas, comes through a bit. The colored ground thus influences the color of the mark on top of it that we see.

This is a brilliant technical device that has its roots in various forms of transparent media, including watercolor as well as glaze techniques going back to the Renaissance. His later work from the eighties, the series Journey Without Maps, used glazes on top of his textured marks as well as this brighter color underneath the marks. That is why these paintings look particularly three-dimensional. They are.

From time to time that summer I would gingerly venture into the studio to watch David work or would look at finished paintings with him. The paintings then were done mostly in browns and blacks, like the water in the Gulf of Mexico when it’s stormy and mixed with sand. He had divined these color spectra, knowing it was symbolic of a kind of dark, surly, yet beautiful energy. The work Turtle Beach was painted then. It is one of the key works made that summer.

I love that he titled it after the beach we all loved and where I had surfed all my young life. Our house was about a quarter mile south of the public part of Turtle Beach. Looking out from the house and the studio one saw nothing but the Gulf with all its variable patterns of wind on the water, the changing currents, and the waves. This was another connection that he and I had. We knew that water.

Sometimes he used masking tape to divide certain sections of the canvas with a wave-like line. He was so adept at applying the tape, which revealed his great dexterity. He asked me to try doing it once. It wasn’t all that easy.

When I wanted to watch him work I would bring a book to read into the studio so that my presence was not entirely focused on him. In the hours, sometimes reading, sometimes lifting my eyes from the pages to watch him, I observed how he worked his way across the canvas, the repetitions, dipping his palette knife into the color and then adding the strokes with a swishing noise. It was rhythmical. He held the palette knife like a conductor holds a baton, balanced between his thumb and forefinger. And it was like music, like writing and playing music at the same time, riff after riff after riff in seemingly endless repetition and improvisation.

Imagine yourself, if you can, painting one of his paintings, what it took physically to cover all that space, a huge expanse compared to the scale and stride of each mark. It was like walking or swimming, stroke after stroke. His series Journey Without Maps tell us that he saw his mark making as a kind of travel. One can get lost in his sea of waves, in his ripples, in the patterns. Surely David knew what it was to meditate, what the mystic trance was because he worked in that state, lost between breaths in and breaths out. When a painting was done, it was done, and there was no going back and “fixing” something. This is why he needed to be in such a special state of mind while he worked. The painting was going to happen only once, with no chance of revising it. It was a performance. Once I understood that, I felt even more honored to have been allowed to witness it first-hand.

I was so proud of David when he was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennial for the Peggy Guggenheim Award in 1986. His works were exhibited in the Pavilion. He told me about the acceptance speech he gave in Italian and how well it was received, partly because he’d delivered it in the native tongue.

In 1976 he had a number of health problems, including lymphoma, a cancer he survived, though the chemotherapy caused serious damage to his heart due to his having rheumatic fever in childhood. That added weakness in blood flow slowly affected his legs and ankles, which swelled terribly at times. It made it harder for him to stand and work and eventually to walk. That was the beginning of the end. It was sometime in 1985, I think, that he took a fall in his loft and lay passed out for a day or so. Nobody really knows exactly for how long. When he finally woke and got up and said he felt really weird. A little later he decided to call his devoted doctor, Bernard Kruger at Lennox Hill. He’d broken his neck and the break was on what is called the “hangman’s vertebrae.” It was an absolute miracle he was alive. He was treated and stabilized. He wore a Halo Brace for several months after, like a kind of aluminum crown of thorns.

That’s about when he started the Silver Series, which contributed to him receiving the Guggenheim Award. He had worked with metallic tones from time to time before, and there are a number of beautiful pieces made with them, especially the big gold painting from 1980, Journey Without Maps XIII. It is perhaps one of his very best paintings. We had a talk about it once. He said using gold was a reference to the highest spiritual state, that using it was like “being in a spiritual landscape.” He knew I’d understand.

The Silver Series went beyond anything he had done before, as if he knew they would be among his last paintings. They were the culmination of all he’d explored previously and yet the series transcended everything he had done until then. It employed all his visual tropes, his interests in patterns, viscosities, dividing lines, textures, colors, shadows, reflections, and structures. In my opinion they are master critiques of most of the elements found in 20th-century abstraction.

Before he moved to Florida with all his work in the late 1980s, David told me he’d “edited” several hundred of the works. Who does that? Who is even able to do that? Only someone who knows himself very well. If art is the practice of self-awareness, which I believe it is, David had attained something truly remarkable. Only from such a place of self-knowledge and appraisal could one have the confidence to embrace such a critical and irreversible process.

I will always have the deepest regret that I did not come to Florida when David summoned me in 1991, shortly before his death. I’ve missed him a great deal ever since.