Way back when somewhere in the midst of 2023, I began the series that I thought would tell the story of my art-making since the 70s. I told the story in The Artful Mind (pages 22-31) that goes like this: In the 90s, I saw a retrospective of the work of Jasper Johns in which he showed a series called The Seasons. It was disliked by the critics. Yet, it was a legitimate and inherently artful way to broach the subject of immortality. That idea stayed with me for all these years and I suppose prompted me to attempt the same kind of self-reflection.

However, when I was doing the series, I had to leave it in order to focus on an installation which absorbed the remaining time of the year. I thought that Conglomerations could be revived, rebooted, reassessed, and new parts made. But I was wrong.

Having done the fifteen drawings of the series, I thought to myself that I had to secure them and make sure they were sealed. I tested this intention out by coating one, number 6, of the least complicated drawing/collage parts with matte medium. Doing that totally ruined the piece by creating a uniformly messy surface over the diffentiated interesting one.

The last week of the year, I re-made number 6 in the series. I printed the pictures with no problems; I found the stencils I used to create the imagery around the border; and I traced the stencils in the proper positions. I couldn’t find the exact screeshots I had made from Instagram to mount in the middle of the drawing so I used another screenshot of some similar group of photos.

When I began to color in the stenciled shape outlines, the energy and excitement to do that was gone. Since I made the original number 6, I had done so much more work that carried out so many more ideas and created so many more images that I did not care about the black lines that were tedious to draw within the lines and make the right density.

It was the first time in quite awhile that I had felt the actuality of having moved on in my work. Therefore, I present the series to you as it was made freshly invented and beautiful, exposing motifs that are historically a part of my past work, including their being arranged as would be Oriental screen paintings.

In three groups of five:

1-5

6-10

11-15