"‘Floods, roses, rills’: I no longer recall which poem of Rilke’s contains these words, which have title to being a poem in themselves. I tend to perk up when I see the word Rose, having thus named my daughter; and of course in Rilke it appears on every fifth page. I do know that the image evoked by the phrase remains, for me, rich with a paradisial perfume. While working on this painting I thought of it as Adam outside the gates of Eden, but as I went along I realized that Eden had no gates, at least not the kind Bob Dylan might write about, and that the picture was turning out as if Matisse had turned to graffiti. However it did, in the end, have Adam, the angel Jophiel, and the serpent; the angel leaving, the serpent sleeping, and Adam squatting as if waiting for a bus. Despite all this, I think the painting has a really unusual light, and one I have never succeeded in painting again."