Upon seeing his young son Paulo's scrawls, the aged Picasso remarked that he had spent a lifetime trying to paint that way.
It's a favorite anecdote of mine, and if it's seemed that I am oft completely adverse to abstraction, then I've done a disservice to my love of de Kooning, Auerbach or Guston.
And if I've remarked that abstraction comes from a point of cynical ineptitude, then I am definitely doing a disservice to the third generation of Gough's-as my grandson so effectively proves here, with his total, unselfconscious, immersion into this massively epic painting which he annotated as "birdies, tcheees (trees), buzz, sky, fog (frog)" .
