Jay DeFeo, The Rose

"Every day she went to work on what she decided to call The Rose, although it never resembled one. For years she did almost nothing else, surviving it was said, sometimes on brandy and cigarettes. [...] 'There was a kind of archaic version at six months,' she told a curator in San Francisco. 'Then followed a very geometric version, which gradually transformed itself into a much more organic expression. Curiously, this stage got thoroughly out of hand at one point (baroque), and I managed to pull it all the way back to the final 'classic' Rose.

The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, Michael Kimmelman