“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(To bolster the permanency of the panel I backed it with a wooden frame that I glued to the panel, to prevent warping, etc. I used wood for this that I found in father’s garage in Sayre over the last weekend. On Tuesday afternoon when I began the blowup of the drawing to transfer in turn to the panel for painting, the symptoms began—coughing, sneezing, etc., much like aggravated hay fever symptoms. I also had trouble figuring out the right size to make the figures in the oil—nothing was going right, and after a while it was only too obvious that my subconscious was raising hell about the whole project.

The idea of permanence in your mind is strongly connected with more representational work. You think of the old masters for example, the figure work. You are concerned lest the freer style itself implies a lack of permanency, in that you wonder how well others will relate to it as time passes.

You can accept completely abstract work, and do it well, though you would not be satisfied with it for a great time. (True.) This sort of a painting however, that uses figures or objects, but not in representational form, bothers you, while you are strongly attracted in sketches of the same nature. There is no dilemma: you allow the intuitive self spontaneous expression in those sketches. It is only when you transpose the same ideas onto painting and a more permanent form that you become uneasy.

Your father always tried to fix objects that were broken. To some extent you carried this with you, so that objects or figures not painted correctly, in those terms, should be fixed. The order seemed broken.