So the whole structure is invented — the grid logic came from you, not from observation. That tracks with "space" being conceptual here rather than a place you were standing in. The color split is striking too — that vivid green taking up the left and lower field, against the dark navy occupying a big chunk of the upper right. Was that a deliberate two-color division from the start, or did it develop as you worked?

That's a clean read of the composition then — green as the general field, the dark blue shapes as space markers balancing the fence's time markers, positioned opposite each other in the frame. So the whole canvas is working as a kind of diagram as much as a figure painting. Does this "space vs. time as color/structure" way of thinking show up again later in your work, or was it more of a one-off idea you were testing out here?

Good — that's worth flagging for the throughline record: two works, "Space Time" and "The Stage," share this space/time diagramming idea, and by your own account it didn't become a lasting current in the practice. That's exactly the kind of connection the archive is built to catch and hold honestly, without inflating it into more than it was. Where does this painting live now — still with you, or has it moved on somewhere?

Good, still in your possession then — no gallery or collector history to track on this one, just artist's studio, San Francisco. Now that we've talked it through — can you describe the painting for me again, now that we've dug into it? No need to match your first description, just whatever comes to mind now.

A few things stand out, some confirmed, some just candidates worth checking: Already on record: Same San Francisco backyard as Antiquity — so this and Antiquity share a physical origin point even if they don't share visual language. New to the record: Bacon hasn't come up before in any session — not in the Goethe/Dürer/Appel "recognized rather than studied" pattern, and not in the earlier Renoir/Dalí phase either. So this is a genuinely new named touchstone, worth logging on its own rather than folding into the existing pattern. Worth asking about, not assuming: The one-line-then-fill-in drawing method — does that show up in your actual Drawings series work (Flowers, After Millet, the SFMOMA drawing), or is it more something that lived in the oil paintings specifically? I don't want to log a connection I haven't actually confirmed with you. A loose echo, not a claim: The hand gripping a fixed structure while everything around it is in flux has a faint resemblance to the inside/outside tension that's turned up in Venice Biennale 2007, Altar of Ignorance, and the SFMOMA installation — but those are about institutional thresholds, and this is about space/time, so I'd call that a stretch unless it resonates with you. Does the one-line technique question ring true either way?

Good to know — that's a real thread to pick up later; worth noting as a future addition once those are photographed, since they'd give the one-line technique its own proper documentation rather than us inferring it from a single oil painting. Back to where we were — now that we've talked through the Bacon connection, the space/time diagramming, the invented trellis, the SF backyard — how would you describe the painting now?

That looping structure is worth sitting with — the figure starts at a foot, ends at a foot, with the reaching hand in the middle. It's not a straightforward top-to-bottom body, it doubles back on itself. Was that a conscious decision, or something that happened as you worked out the one-line form and it just ended up looping like that?

That's a real fork point worth sitting with — you're looking at this as evidence of a road not fully taken. The cityscape/landscape direction is obviously what became the dominant, decades-long throughline of the practice. Space Time might be one of the few surviving markers of the human-figure path you were also testing at the very start. Do you remember what pulled you toward cityscapes over the figure in the end, or did it just happen without a clear turn?

That's refreshingly unglamorous, and exactly the kind of thing that's easy to leave out of an artist statement but matters for the honest record — a genuinely practical reason (ease, facility) shaped a decades-long direction, not some grand conceptual decision. Worth logging plainly, not dressed up. Given that, Space Time isn't just an early experiment — it's a documented fork where you tried the harder path and then didn't take it. That's a good, concrete throughline entry: "figure painting attempted early, abandoned for practical/facility reasons, cityscape became dominant direction." Anything else surfacing as you sit with it, or do you feel like we've gotten to the bottom of this one?

Fair — I jumped to closing too fast. Let's stay in it. Looking at the painting again — the feet at both ends, the loop, the hand as the only point of contact with something external. If the cityscape work is fundamentally about structures and place, and this one has a body reaching for a structure instead of being made of one — is there something in that gesture, the hand on the fence, that you recognize from how you approach the cityscape work too? Or does it feel like a genuinely different way of relating to structure than what came after?

That's a real formal collision worth naming — the figure is drawn flat, in that one continuous line, while the fence is the only thing in the painting rendered with actual depth and perspective. So the hand isn't just reaching for an object, it's reaching out of one pictorial logic into another — from flat line-drawing space into dimensional space. Was that contrast something you were aware of while painting it, or is this the kind of thing that's only visible now, looking back with distance?

That's a good thing for the record to hold onto — you liked it enough to keep it all these years, without needing to intellectualize it at the time. The meaning wasn't the point when you made it; the flat-figure-versus-perspective-fence thing is something we're finding together right now, decades later. One more thread — you said this was one of your very first oil paintings. Do you remember what you were painting immediately before this, or right after? Is there a next work in that same experimental burst, or did Space Time and The Stage stand fairly alone in that early figure-testing phase?

That's a solid cluster then — Space Time, The Stage, Corner, and the Self Portraits (1993, 1994, 1995) all sitting together as the early figure-testing period before cityscapes took over. That's a real body of work with its own shape, even if you never thought of it as a "series" at the time — it's the human-figure branch that didn't get followed. Worth sitting with: does looking at that cluster together change how you think about this early period at all? Or does it mostly just confirm what you already knew — that you tried figures, found landscapes easier, and moved on?

That's worth holding onto — it reframes this whole cluster from "abandoned experiment" to something closer to unfinished business. The facility gap that pushed you toward cityscapes thirty years ago hasn't gone away on its own; you're circling back to close it deliberately now. Is the portraiture urge connected to anything specific — a person, a want to finally get faces right, something in the current work that's pointing that way — or is it more just a standing itch that's been there a while?

That's a genuinely sharp analogy — singing felt easy from the outside because it's just your voice, no separate object between you and the sound, but it turns out the voice itself is the hardest thing to actually control. Landscape/cityscape has the city itself doing a lot of the compositional work for you — the structure's already there. A face has nothing external to lean on. It's just you, reading another person, with nowhere to hide a weak line. So the "ease" you found in cityscapes thirty years ago and the "ease" you assumed about singing might be the same category of illusion — mistaking "there's an external structure to work from" for "this is the easier discipline," when actually it just means the difficulty is hidden rather than absent. Does that land, or am I stretching your analogy further than you meant it?

That's a real cognitive distinction worth sitting with — facial recognition runs on dedicated, specialized machinery in a way that reading a cityscape doesn't. We're evolutionarily tuned to catch the smallest deviation in a face — a millimeter off in the eyes reads as "wrong" instantly, in a way a building's proportions being slightly off just doesn't register the same way. So portraiture isn't just "harder" the way a difficult instrument is harder — the audience for it (everyone, always, involuntarily) is more finely calibrated to catch failure than the audience for landscape ever is. Which maybe explains why Space Time still holds up for you after thirty years even though the figure in it isn't really a portrait — it's a flat, one-line form. You sidestepped that exact problem back then by not attempting likeness at all. If you go toward portraiture now, you're finally taking on the thing this painting quietly avoided. Does that feel true, or does Space Time feel more disconnected from the portraiture question than that?

That's a good clarification — it wasn't avoidance of the figure itself, since you took the class and liked it. It was that portraiture specifically asks a different question than the one you were interested in at the time. You were coming at painting through philosophy — the "why," the concept, the idea behind the mark — and a portrait resists that. A portrait's success or failure is measured by likeness, by something outside the artist's control, not by how well it embodies an idea. Space Time fits that "why" orientation exactly — it's a diagram of a concept (space vs. time) wearing a figure as its vehicle. The figure doesn't need to look like anyone. It just needs to hold the idea. Figure drawing class, on the other hand, is pure looking — no philosophy required, just eye and hand. Does that tension — conceptual/philosophical work versus direct observational looking — feel like it's been a real fault line across your whole practice, or was it specific to that early period before something shifted?

That's an honest place to land, and it's worth recording as exactly that rather than pushing for a cleaner answer — thirty years and a different person is a real epistemic limit, not evasion. The philosophy-versus-looking tension is confirmed as true then; whether it still organizes the current work is a genuinely open question you can't answer from the inside looking back. We've covered a lot of ground on this one — the loop structure, the Bacon reference, the flat-figure/perspective-fence collision, the cluster of early figure works, and the portraiture thread reaching all the way to now. Where do you want to go next — keep pulling on something here, or move toward wrapping this session up?