Robert Indiana kept a series of illustrated journals during the late 1950s and 1960s, in which he discusses the development of his work as well as his daily life on Coenties Slip.

Indiana's journal entry for January 3, 1961, includes a sketch of a work called Ginkgo Panel. He notes that the ginkgo is in gesso, and that the work is on a narrow blue panel that was once the work Corn Plant. 

He also records having dinner with Lenore Tawney, ST & B (Stephen and Barbara Durkee), and J. (his partner, fashion designer John Kloss), and then seeing The Play of Daniel, a 12th-century music drama, performed by Pro Musica Antiqua (a New York group founded in 1952).