This drawing was created out of the desire to return to the studio after a two-week bout with Covid. Being sick with the virus was the first and only time I had contracted it.

The format for the work deals with several elements and patterns I had already used in the past. I dove into my folder of templates to choose the most appropriate. The piece measures 51 inches in height by 21 inches in width. The hanging apparatus adds a few inches to its height.

One of the problems I encountered was how to make the paper into an object, into better objects than what came out of False Screens. In the latter, so many different porosities of paper were merged together that I could not control the behavior of the whole. But in Transparent Leaves, I stiffened the sides of the main central body of the piece with parts from the original Conglomerations 6 which I had literally ruined by coating it with matte medium. Those parts lead to making a strong screen-like object.

The piece appeared incomplete with the black shapes repeated in the middle. The three black and white panels in the center were prints borrowed from an evolving 42-part series called Liberated Forms. Yet at the bottom below these prints, the paper called for color. I took on the task of actually drawing images of green Chinese Evergreen and Spathophylum leaves which were accumulating on the table for the photograph series Leaves and Flowers.

I drew the leaf images behind the black pattern forms to indicate that the natural elements existed before the art.