Decade: Autoportrait '79 (Brimstone) is a print from Indiana’s Decade: Autoportraits, Vinalhaven Suite.
Regarding the series Indiana wrote: “A decade ago, in the early ’70s I began a series of paintings, autobiographical in intent, which, because they spanned the ten years of my life in the ’60s, I called Decade: Autoportraits. These grew to be three sets, or, 30 paintings in all, of differing sizes, which touched upon some of the important occasions, places and people who figured conspicuously in my life during that very tumultuous decade for an artist in America—truly a golden decade.
Upon coming to Maine to live permanently in the late ’70s I decided to record the more recent decade and the ten years which included part of each on the island of Vinalhaven in the Penobscot Bay.”
He also penned a statement explaining each individual print:
"Brimstone is a 'finis terre' – just barely visible from Vinalhaven, given the weather of the day—known for its polished black stones and difficulty for landing, hence suitable for the 'beware danger' colors of black and yellow, which marks all my 'nine' paintings, just as the colors of the other prints are true to their antecedents in my own private numerology of hues, all related to the ten stages of man’s life as depicted in old prints in Europe and America. Finis Terre is also the name of the estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, where a second Ahava sculpture stands. Ahava is the Hebrew world for love. There live the donors of the first Ahava that now stands on a hill overlooking the city of Jerusalem. Israel was the site of Bishop Pike’s untimely death, and Bishop James Pike I worked for at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and it was in whose immense interest in the theme of love was partially responsible for my latter immersement in the subject."