The three texts that comprise this book were written between 2005 and 2007, coinciding with the three year life-span of Orchard.

"The book`s first essay >Allegorical Decoys<, was conceived originally as a slide lecture, which was presented at a symposium on painting and photography for the Milton Avery Gratuate School of Art at Bard College in the summer of `06. In it I describe the circuitous genealogy of my current approach to painting. The wrapper of this book when unfolded provides the illustrations for this text.

>The Call of the Wind<, was a poem I composed in the summer of `07. Its source material is from a recorded transcript of a visit I made to Thomas Eggerer`s studio in which he discussed at length a painting of the same title. Lastly, >Translatrix< was originally written for a talk I presented along with Dirk Snauwaert on the Belgian artist, Jef Geys, whose work we had the good fortune to show at Orchard." (Forward: Rebecca H. Quaytman)

Rebecca H. Quaytman (*1961 in Boston) lives and works in New York. She received her B.A. in painting from Bard College (1983), and attended the post-graduate program in painting at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin (1984) and the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris (1989). She was subsequently awarded a 1992 Rome Prize Fellowship. Quaytman was director of Orchard, a cooperative gallery in New York, open from 2005 to 2008, and is currently faculty of Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. Her book Allegorical Decoys was published in 2008, and a comprehensive artist book of her paintings is forthcoming.