At the Academy, my earliest heroes—Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Grace Hartigan—were put on the shelf to make room for those they influenced: Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Sam Francis, and Agnes Martin, whom I came to worship with a fever. By junior year, I could recite “The Untroubled Mind,” her 1972 manifesto-slash-prose-poem, by heart, and I fantasized about making a pilgrimage to her adobe house in New Mexico. I longed to create work that lived as Martin’s did—the manifested edge of an exhale, abstract expressionism light enough to be mistaken for minimalism. I thought that cusp was where I belonged. (I wasn’t remotely like Martin, in the end, but that didn’t stop me from trying.)

It began with Ohne Titel, my first postgraduate show. Ten untitled paintings. They were large-ish—six feet high, eight feet wide, each about the size of five doors set in a row—blank, unblemished, still pools of color, varnished with a dozen layers so that they shone with a lacquered gloss. When exhibited together, they were very clearly different shades of green. In fact they were an exact gradient shift from the green on the inside of a flower stem when you cut it, to the green of antique uranium glass, a green that is almost chartreuse, but not quite. However—alone? One by one? Nothing but large green rectangles—to any eye, the passé retreads of someone recently graduated from art school. Together, as I intended, they were something new—they were colossal—but in my youth and naïveté, I disregarded how easily and naturally they could, would, be broken, separated.

Those paintings, and my failure to maintain them as a unit, hurt me viciously. Even now—thinking about them—there’s an ache. The two following shows had their own successes and heartbreaks, too, despite the fact that they sold, and each one brought up its own twinges of something. Yet during the past week, any time I tried to think about my Rich Ugly Old Maids, which were so beautiful, and of which I’d been so proud—I felt…nothing. It was so odd.

I told myself as I drove that it was shock, panic, and productivity at work: Maybe, if I took a second to feel anything about this loss, I wouldn’t be able to finish their impostors. If I took the time to measure the distance of the fall, I’d never jump. I didn’t have time to think. I had to do. Maybe my brain, against all odds, was protecting itself. That wasn’t its historic strength—but maybe I’d grown smarter. Maybe I’d grown up—was that what this numbness meant?

I hoped so.

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