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gets to the point where it looks as if you didn't do it you know..but I do find that if I do a painting I really like that I think is a good painting which occurs once in a while, it looks like I didn't do it. that's the end product you know it looks as if it is just separate from me and I like it a lot you know, I can really look at it, if it hasn't turned out that well it is something to be worked on perhaps it looks tooo much mine

JK   Are you saying it gets an identity of its own?

JB   It just lifts out of the planning I'd done or out of the concern I'd had for it and I loose that whole feeling completely and if it looks that good which happens once in a while, I just can't imagine having done it. I don't remember the work that went into it either or anything like that/

EV   In other words you didn't have to fight with that or work with it to make it work it just flows itself freely.

JB   No, I did. Some of the canvases were the worse fighting I had to go through end up the way I was speaking of...it has nothing whatsoever to do with the process, it [[strikethrough]] has to do [[/strikethrough]] happened as I worked on it but that some of them will finish pretty quickly that I like and then some of them I'll work and some I'll repaint and repaint a good many times. It could be either way that I've done it but it might turn out either good or bad either way. but some of the paintings I like best have been done with a good deal of effort and change and self-doubts and complete revision.

EV   Do you ever put them away for a while and not look at them and then reappraise them as if they were almost someone else's work.

JB   Yes it always happens that it seems like someone elses if I put it away long enough..that's a problem with painters too, particularly with me but I am a little better at it than I was, I wasn't able to put a painting away for a while. I get obsessed with doing it and worried about it and not able to forget it not able to leave it and work on something else. Lately I have been able to start several things and have things to go to so that can be very refreshing when you come back to a painting that you are stuck on you know. But painting is just excruciatingly impossible you know because you never know, at least I never know where I'm going. That's the interest of it also I realize and that's the way discoveries happen but nevertheless it's living in an area of doubt all the time an area of not knowing what can happen or what should be done to a painting.

EV   And yet it's constantly developing....and changing.

JB   Well It's constantly changing anyway and sometimes for the worse you know.

EV   No, not with you. I think youre new paintings are just marvelous.

JB   In some paintings you know I've looked at photographs I've taken of work and then decided I've got to keep working on them and then I end up with a painting at a certain stage anyway that I look at the earlier photgraph and I wish I hadn't done it. Many painters do that I!ve talked to them, they're very disappointed sometimes that they haven't been working on something that's held them and so they go back and look at their old work or their recent work even and they see things they think they should do something and they kill it or loose their freshness it can happen very easily. I was talking to [[strikethrough]] Markavelly [[/strikethrough]] Marca-Relli the other day and he just likes it when he stores stuff and doesn't want to look at it again because if he does he's going to start working on it again change it and he won't like [[strikethrough]] worki [[/strikethrough]] it as well as he had before,.you know, it will just be different than it was before.