File talk:SHIP OF FOOLS Large Detail Right Side with Victims.jpg

Although the general format of Ship of Fools follows a motif from a Japanese scroll of a floundering boat that is scrambled by a typhoon in the Mongol armada's failed invasion of Japan four hundred years before; in this detail one can see the mayhem inspired by another scroll The Burning of the Sanjo Palace, from the same book as the other scroll, left as if it were meant to be used, in one lonely carboard box by my friend who loaned me his yet to be moved in West Side loft in New York for the summer of 1966.

This was the summer when Chagall's murals for the Metropolitan Opera were being installed but not yet visible, but I had seen in the New York Times a black and white photograph of Chagall painting one on his studio floor. Consequently, I had been preparing two large canvasses on the floor, and as they were drying and I was looking through that book on Japanese scroll painting, the news of the escalation of the war as United States bombers crossed over into North Vietnam was announced.

Free from the constraints of painting from live models, I plunged into gestural, calligraphic brushwork as inspired both by the Japanese and by Chagall. The painting was finished that very weekend when the bombing was announced. It was as if fated.

- Richard Rappaport