from Ellsworth Kelly, Plant Drawings (Matthew Marks Gallery, 1992), Essay by John Ashbery. Unpaginated. About the life of an American expatriate in Paris:
"I suspect that in this burgeoning period of his art the limiting force was Paris itself, that dome of intuitive appreciation of one's own powers of observation, a specific place and time where `some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, -- for that moment only,' in Pater's famous formulation, and where, as Gertrude Stein said, Americans can discover what it means to be American. One can never predict what form the generating impulse will take: in my case (my own years in Paris came just after Kelly's) I found my poetry being more `influenced' by the sight of the Paris phenomenon of clear water flowing in the street gutters, where it is (or was) diverted or dammed by burlap sandbags moved about by workmen, than it was by the French poetry I was learning to read at the time."
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