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A recent visit to the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art inspired me to ponder this question: “How do artists who paint huge canvases in single solid colors, or monochromatic grids of identical rectangles, or whatever, find themselves in prestigious museums?”

I am not questioning, as many do, whether these works qualify as art; they do. But how do they get recognized?

Maybe, like Mondrian, they started with stylized trees. Maybe, like Ellsworth Kelly, they made convincingly realistic inflatable trucks and tanks in World War II and worked their way somehow from there, or like Diebenkorn, started with looser and looser representational work. But how did Picasso get away with Les Demoiselles D’Avignon? That was a shocker.

Maybe the time was right. Maybe the right people with the right influence happened by. What I do not believe is that somebody started succeeding, out of the blue, with work that the average person could not accept, and still does not accept.

And the answer is, it does not matter. Certainly not to me, anyway. Just some kind of luck, that tens of thousands of other artists did not receive.

I find myself, quite unexpectedly, at a place in life where I can paint—or make—anything I damn well please, and my only difficulty is storage.

I do need to remind myself that I am in this game for my own, unique reasons. I have no idea how to explain those.

Here are some superficial explanations for this week’s illustration, Ebullience, named for a feeling that I hope is captured here. I have shown it before, but not said much about it. The scene which actually got this project going is a skimpy pencil drawing of three figures on one sheet of paper, one of them perpendicular to the other two. My imagination saw that third figure as waves of water, lapping at the shoulders of the other two. Who knows why, but the challenge was to make a convincing painting out of that configuration, using the same lines as the drawing. I wanted to find a way to convey sunlight, broken by refraction through the waves, in as simple and convincing manner as I could. I have often, in fact, marveled at the geometric linear patterns of light on the bottom of shallow water, and admired the way that David Hockney painted such patterns in his swimming pool paintings. When I saw those shapes in his paintings I felt myself to be in the presence of a kindred spirit.

Through my choice of colors and forms, I wanted you to feel the water, splashing in their faces, getting in their mouths, cold on their legs, deep and colder below. I wanted you to hear and share in their laughter, playing, feeling the heat of the sun on their heads.

Come to my house, see these bathers on my wall. But if you want to wrest this sensual treasure from me, you’re going to have to compensate me for my loss.