Joan moved a stack of Grandpa’s tapes out of the camping chair and sat down. “When I was making abstract paintings in the 1960s, there was always this stop-and-start quality to the process for me. A lot of the beginning was just about making marks on the canvas. Trying one thing and then trying something else, seeing what worked for me and what didn’t. Sometimes I’d scrape off layers or cut things up and put them together in different ways. Sometimes I did that for months before I figured out what I wanted to express. It could be extremely frustrating, but the point of it was the process. It was about discovering what my preconceptions were, first, and then moving away from them. Finding something new to express. Figuring out who I was as an artist. It takes time.”

“So you’re saying I should be more patient?” I asked, trying to sound self-deprecating.

She smiled gently. “Maybe.” She picked up one of the videotapes and looked down at the picture of Grandpa on the cover. “You know the painting upstairs, Southern Cross?”

“Yeah.” It was about four feet wide and depicted the stars of the Southern Cross over a dark ocean. But it was an abstract painting, so the stars were not pinpricks of light but lines cut with a palette knife into a sky layered in shades of dark blue and black. The ocean merged into it in purples and violets, and a few drips of yellow suggested reflections on the water. The painting had a sense of great motion, so that the stars and the sky and the ocean seemed to wheel around the canvas.

“I spent almost a year on that one,” she said. “I was really obsessive about it. I didn’t know I was painting those stars until six months in, maybe. That’s when I realized it was about your grandfather. He was always talking about how looking at the stars was like looking back in time, and how the universe was always getting bigger. I could never quite grasp that mathematically—time and how it worked with the distance between us and the stars—but when Russ talks about it he’s so vivid. He uses his hands and gives such an impression of motion. I just wanted to capture that. I was falling in love with him when I made that painting. I spent so much time on it and I could never bring myself to sell it.”

She put down the videotape and looked at my painting again.