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3 I think that the feeling which comes out of method is different in quality from more directly expressed feeling. I prefer Mondrian and Kandinsky to Klee because while the latter pretended to a method of sorts he really was involved with his own sensibility. Well, to get on with it. Shortly after I arrived in Heidelberg, an actor or singer [[image]] there made a little puzzle for me from wood. It was quite Japanese. There were just little squares, double squares, and double doubles, [[image]] that is to say four little squares making a larger one. It was a very difficult puzzle to work out and, I think, required about a hundred [[image]] and sixty or so moves. In order to remember what I had done before I used to jot the moves down on the graph paper I always work on just as chess moves are noted. Sometimes while I was day-dreaming I would begin to look at the arrangements as pictures rather than as moves in the puzzle, and would sometimes make larger ones and color them with crayons. I had made many Mondrian-like pictures while at the League but instead of using lines of black on white, I would use areas of different grays or of different colors. But I never made anything as simple as these, except for a few crayon drawings which Barney will remember that I did while I had the office on 19th St. Lately I have been making a whole batch of pictures using circles linked together in various ways. The picture which I did the other night was a small [[image]] water colour made on paper which had been roughly squared into five units one way and seven the other. The elements used were like those in the puzzle except that they were circles. There were single circles, two circles linked, and four circles together in a square pattern. I [[image]] liked the picture very much and brought it downstairs to show it to [[image]] Jane. She also liked it, and we began to talk about the different parts, [[image]] that is the different colored shapes against one another. I said that I would like to make separate pictures of the different parts, as I had often done in little sketches, and thought of doing on a larger scale. You might say that I have thought about these things idly, as a form of doodling. Jackson has seen me do such things on his kitchen table any number of times. But this time I decided to see how many pictures I could actually get out of the first one. I thought I would do it then, but had to do something else and gave it up. Perhaps it was then that I thought of the article I had read about Kiesler's show. The next morning (yesterday) Jane had to go to Stuttgart to sing with the 7th Army Symphony, and as soon as she left I sat down to see how many pictures (if you could call them pictures) I could get out
