"License plate RL - 5912 Ohio - 1964 she’d be 18 then, the car was a graduation gift from her father. A Ford what? I don’t know, white with a powder blue top. She stands posed in front of the car, her hand resting on the hood, her outfit matches the car a white sleeveless top, pinstriped crosswise, in pale blue and pink, pale blue shorts like the roof of the car, her right arm behind her back on her hip, she’s barefoot, she would feel the gravel stones of the driveway beneath her feet. The car is parked in the driveway of her mother’s house on Arthur Street in Willoughby Ohio. A snapshot white summer sky, the leaves fill the trees, the ooak? out front covered in Ivy like it was when I was a kid, but by then only a stump. In the photograph she’s tiny less than three inches from head to toe, her head smaller than my pinky nail, her portrait here is larger that life, it took me about a month to paint it, it turned out differently than I thought it would or from what I had in mind when I started it, a fairly typical painting thing. Hours I spent alone with her face, obsessing over getting it to be as like her as possible, not much thought of art, or painting just the desire to make it look as exactly like she is in the photograph. This snapshot is in the Yale book, it was also enlarged like it is here, but a photographic enlargement with a typed text below it I think, a work I made for the Everson Museum in Syracuse, the text told the story of how her father in a fit of rage over what I don’t know, beat her up and then took a sledgehammer to the car, “cracking in the engine block” she told me in a recording I made before she died adding that “the car Man” said that was “nearly impossible to do.” So I assume the car was rotten rid of, she didn’t finish, or rather there are no other details I was told. He bought her the car, then ruined it and continued ruining her. Even after he died and nearly 4 decades after this photograph was taken (likely by her father) she was filled with resentment, I think she said it grows, and also that there was nothing to do with it now, where to put it, it just festered there with her, after his death. While I was painting the picture, I thought of how it was like spending time with her, it isn’t, but it is, just the two of us, alone, but silent, you think all kinds of things, I thought how I was beginning to reproduce the actual texture of the photograph in trying to get the tones so exact, that I was establishing a certain foggy distance between her blown up portrait and anyone looking at it, I thought again about the film Blow-Up Antonioni, the blown up photograph becoming increasingly abstract and unrecognizable, in trying to penetrate the image, or find something in it it becomes blown out and even more hopelessly mysterious. It’s the second painting I’ve done since starting to paint again. And it’s unlike the first, whatever that means, I’m not surprised, painting is really a dialogue with itself, I’m unclear how much I control it, you ride it like what, it’s untameable, I did think about the show, Tom and Sue, in Brussels, Harlan’s gallery, it fits, Tom is the painter, painting Sue, what could be more intimate than that? The shift in scale is interesting, below is the snapshot, probably pretty indistinct, but you can see how tiny she is compared to the scale of the painting."