Tomato 1970

Tomato, 1970, acrylic on masonite, about 30-32 x 36 inches.

Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les coeurs, où tous les vins coulaient.
~Rimbaud

Jerry Pompili bought the painting that year or the next; he sent the digital over today.

Later, updated the 9th of October...

I was…we were all in Carmel Valley. Or Delano, or New York. Or San Francisco or London or Paris. We were in Saigon. No one watched TV.

We were young and unlined and if many were not so lucky, all of us were very beautiful. We were charming and a little rude in our high flying quest for peace and love and art: our mothers were concerned. We were not forgetful back then, we were stoned.

I am looking at my life in the best parts of the last quarter of the last century as if I were, as if I had been, among other things, the student of my own university with an all inclusive faculty of genius comedians.

But I get too far ahead.

Who are these women?

Which one is Blonde Connie?

Is this some kind of allegory?

Yes, ok, I guess it is. But there was more than poetry.

I was deeply in love and I remember each stroke of the painting, every line and color, the missing arms, the two hidden nipples, your lovely profile, our Little Sur dinners with Matisse and Picasso, Anais, Vita, even Gustav Klimt.
I remember catching butterflies in the surf, then letting them go. I remember laughing over the size of carrots and red chard from the garden, acid salad, the most delicious tomatoes, Amoreena in the cornfields.