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empty inspirit as the shuffleboard players of Sarasota, he can contrive a painting as superficially attractive and as empty as their lives. It's pretty sophisticated stuff I must admit, that little world of his that isn't there.

  I'm enclosing in this letter a folder from a school at which I will speak next week (purely for love of the money they pay me, I assure you) and I think that you will gather the gist of what I gripe about. Frankly, I have a good deal more than enough of this. I prefer lecturing to teaching, which is hopeless, whereas, when I talk I can more or less say just what I feel (properly packaged of course) and no one can interrupt me-- at least not while I have the floor. Besides everyone thinks I am a great speaker and I will admit to you that I am paying mush more attention to the "silver tongued orator" than I used to.

   This coming moth I shall be traveling a good deal. I shall bless Chattanooga and Memphis and perhaps New Orleans with my presence and talks on Modern Art and what Bluecher thinks it should be, and I shant get much painting done in March. Of course, most of my time here is my own and I have gotten a good deal of work done. I expect to send six middle-sized canvases home and work exclusively from then until summer on three 42"x51"'s that I have been painting on for about a month now. Tomorrow I hope to finish the last of the 17 small ones and I don't think I shall be making more of these for a while. I can solve the problem of composition better I feel with tempera paintings of the same size, many of them in plain black and white--and greys of course. I'm a bit more pre-occupied with drawing and composition right now and I leave painting for the large ones. You yourself observed last summer that after painting foe a while the original structure begins to give way to another one which cannot be easily verbalized and this is so-so. I feel that a division of labor is in order--at least for a while. I also have some large stretchers covered with heavy detail paper and I hope to make large temper drawings on those--a kind of work that can be redone--each day. I must have found about five separate compositions (figural) this year, each of which should be developed in a series of canvases and they ought to be good some time but i actually pray for the break that could make me independent once more so that I could concentrate on