Everyone around me loved him and his work. They couldn’t contain their enthusiasm. One person actually put two fingers in her mouth to make that especially piercing whistle. He was, on each occasion, hounded until he added an encore song. Afterward I was one among many saying Great job, though I also tried to add something specific and memorable, something about the unexpectedness of a certain lyric or the haunting nature of the refrain. It took creativity — by the time I got to him, many choice comments had already been made.

In my studio I pushed on those hot colors. I brought them in from the corners in a step-by-step way. The first canvas I did during my month there just had these hunter orange moments in dots in the upper right, but the one after that crimsoned all the way down the right side in a fading stripe. When the colony staff brought me red apples with my lunch basket I used them in some still life paintings — why not a still life? — ones where the bowl was empty at the center of the work but the apples were steadily marching inward. I pushed on those colors.

Oh, how I wanted everyone around me to fail! During those late-night drinking sessions I tried to explain my battle with the hot colors and my inability to stop dark-greening everything and people listened…

At night, though, I felt like the colors were being shoved back again. I sat at dinner enjoying the potatoes or what-not but otherwise miserable; in the terrible raucous acoustics of the dining room I tried to find my way into conversations that seemed like a hundred people banging hammers on the table. Then someone would announce another presentation.

One woman presented — a video artist, a person who did these short videos of cooking and eating in ways that made the acts of cooking and eating seem very strange. She apologized for each video. I know it’s not as exciting as some of the other stuff people are doing here or This one just goes on and on forever or I don’t know why I was so excited about noodles for so long, and in a way it was like a set-up; all the self-deprecation guaranteed the love of her peers. The truth, though, was that her stuff was good. The morning after I saw her videos I was very conscious of the way I was spearing my food with my fork, the way I was chewing it. She had illuminated something. And so even if she had said, Here are some pretty damn good clips, people would have responded with the same vigorous applause. They would have been wrong not to.

Oh, how I wanted everyone around me to fail! During those late-night drinking sessions I tried to explain my battle with the hot colors and my inability to stop dark-greening everything and people listened and even commented and asked questions, but mostly people didn’t want to talk about work while they were drinking at night, and what I really wanted — for my personal struggle to be the most important thing in these artists’ lives, as it was in mine — was of course distantly out of reach. I drank to great excess on those nights.

There were days when I couldn’t pull an angry yellow into my work at all, where every time I tried to bring it in I just kept messing with it until it was softening, shifting into some pale leaf color. And there was a day when I painted a canvas a chaos of sun-hues, painted it in one long, furious, sloppy attack. The days were all very different from one another, except in that things always seemed quite uncertain. And the nights were all essentially the same.