That piece could well have been a depiction of a moment’s pause from the main undertaking of that summer, the last project on which this particular nexus of individuals would collaborate, a 36-minute film in black and white based on the Mary Shelley novel, Frankenstein.  The title of the film, Lurk, reveals that the film was intended, at least in part, to parody the famous Hollywood treatment, while at the same time attempting to reach deeper into the heart of the Romantic fantasy of the original text.  Denby’s narration, written during the shooting, mixes lyricism with deviant humor: “Serene in the purity of science, in the purity of my lovely daughter’s undivided love, I watched hope ripening to the brink of success.  Not my hope.  I am an old man with no emotion -- it was your hope, it was mankind’s.”
            Jacquette took a supportive rather than active part in the shooting and creation of sets and costumes.  Yet she did play the role of a mother with a baby who attempts to befriend the monster, played by Grooms.  In between all this activity, she also found time to paint:

There were a lot of after-dinner conversations.  Everybody was drawing all the time.  We went out and drew on a moonlit night.  I’d never heard of such a thing!  Red got a hat and put candles on it for his drawing, and so we all tried something.  I was amazed that you could even see the paint.  We hardly did, but the next day you’d look at it and say, “Oh my god, I didn’t know that was what I was doing.”  So that was my first night picture, and it was as a result of this little party idea we had.  I was doing tiny paintings of the view out the window, because I liked the windows in this old house.  Some of them were painted colors like a red window frame or a pink window frame.  It was a very foggy summer, so there were these very misty images out there.  I did watercolor.  Someone said they looked like Beatrix Potter illustrations, but it was actually a body of work that made sense.  Here I was doing these tiny things, and Alex was doing his first giant group portraits.  I was astonished by the scale and use of contingency in those paintings of his.  The summer was very jovial and interesting for everybody.

In addition to scale, Jacquette writes that observing Alex’s “orderly process” was a catalyst for her to examine her own procedures,   which became more and more a case of controlled stages of intermediary studies, culminating in a large-scale oil painting that balances known effects with a certain unpredictability in the painting’s performance.

The 1960s were a vital time for poetry as well as painting in New York, and Jacquette and Burckhardt were friends with the “first generation” New York School poets -- John Ashbery, Kenward Elmslie, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler -- as well as the “second generation” that began springing up.  Poets like Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Larry Fagin, Alice Notley, Maureen Owen, Ron Padgett, Peter Schjeldahl, and Lewis Warsh became friends and liked to use artwork by Burckhardt and Jacquette on the covers of magazines and books they published.  Jacquette remembers doing flyers for the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project in the mid-1960s when Anne Waldman was the director.
            One project in which she engaged herself -- a mimeographed poetry book by Larry Fagin, [title], published in 1966 [?] -- was different from her collaborations with Grooms and Burckhardt in the sense that Fagin, as editor of the Adventures In Poetry imprint, acted with complete editorial control.  Instead of finding the loss of freedom inhibiting, however, Jacquette found it refreshing.  “It was good for me to have someone from outside say, ‘Well, this one looks good, but that one doesn’t look so good with it.  Try some more.’  I had a naive idea about how you go about making a group of things, other than the bunch of window paintings I’d done two summers before.”
            It was a time when collaboration took some of its most adventurous forms.  Led by the example of artists like Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers, artist George Schneeman was a prolific collaborator with Berrigan and Padgett, and Joe Brainard drew a series of poem-comics, edited by Berrigan, featuring most of the above-named poets.  Denby himself continued playing outrageous characters in Burckhardt’s films.  For Jacquette, acting and making costumes had the effect of removing any remaining limitations on the path to seeing the world in a new way, no matter how odd it might seem to the artist at first.
            Jacquette’s experience of being in Maine and applying the Impressionist tradition of trying to paint a specific light in a specific place at a specific time of day and year led her to reconsider her approach to her art in general.  She was no longer satisfied with the glimpses of images she had plucked from New York’s visual environment.  She was looking for a more generalized vision, which she could apply to various situations and thus arrive at an expansive overall statement.
            It was in 1969, on a trip to visit her parents in San Diego, that the decisive change came for Jacquette.  She had taken along watercolors, with the idea of doing some out in California.  While on the flight, she got the idea to make some paintings of cloud formations.  This led to a series of cloud studies and further airplane trips on commercial airlines.  Picking a city that had a museum she wished to visit, she would take a trip there, stay overnight and return the next day at around the same time for a second pass under similar light conditions.  Later, she began hiring small planes, allowing her to circle a given location making pastels and taking photographs until she had enough information to make a painting.
            The final development on the path to maximum expansion occurred one day in an airplane when Jacquette realized, to her chagrin, that it was a cloudless day -- her subject had vanished.  Daunted by the prospect of painting the immense and varied vista on the ground below, she nontheless began that day on the path that opened a space in art that had not been opened before.  She re-vitalized the landscape with this view, which is so familiar to us in these days of frequent flying and yet had rarely been examined in painting previously, a long shot that is somehow delicate, not documentary.
            Even her earliest aerial pictures were based in a painterly approach.  For all their carefully observed detail, her paintings never feel photographic.  Over the last fifteen years, Jacquette’s paintings have taken on a metaphysical dimension in their willful deviation from observable reality.  Sometimes these variations are arrayed in a diptych or triptych format of slightly different views of the same location, or “rotations” as she calls them.  Other times, more subversively, she blends varying viewpoints within a single canvas, always with such dexterity, that while we are conscious that reality has been altered, we are at pains to put our finger on where exactly the sleight of hand has been executed.

In the 1980s, after a decade of building and achieving a technical vocabulary for the effects needed to translate what she saw from the air to canvas, Jacquette returned to her early interest in collaborative projects.  These later collaborations differ substantially from the early ones in that now she is a mature artist, whose contribution carries a more decisive weight.
              Aerial was a project Jacquette conceived in 1980, as way of collaborating with her friend Edwin Denby, who was 77 at the time.  She had observed the ways in which poets have written about or from an aerial perspective -- sometimes only obliquely, others as a full basis for seeing -- and she decided to make a book combining her aerial images with poems by a group of contemporary writers selected by Denby.  Aside from Frank O’Hara, whose poem “Sleeping On The Wing” was included, all the poets were living.  Some actually wrote poems in reaction to particular works by Jacquette; others provided already-existing poems.
            In a poem titled “On ‘Little River Farm,’” written in direct response to a Jacquette pastel by that name, Bernadette Mayer points to the idea of all visual composition as portrait or self-portrait in her line “I’m the farm painted or drawn from the air.”  In the poem’s concluding quatrain, Mayer nods to the artist’s ability to transform what she sees, as the usefulness of her depiction is subsumed into her poetics: “I’ll always remember/Next time/Your vision of that/Rather than mine.”
            Eileen Myles brings in the typically American romance of distance in her line, “I wish I could write my Poem from the point of view of the airplane/Passing just now overhead” while Ann Lauterbach could be commenting on Jacquette’s approach to painting when she writes, in her poem “Carousel,” “Light/is one way to wake, image another...”  The book-length multi-voiced collaboration Aerial was a bold idea by Jacquette that resulted in a powerful set of reverberations on her themes of distance, mobility, separation, and desire.
            Fast Lanes was a book-length two-person collaboration between Jacquette and writer Jayne Anne Phillips.  For Phillips’ oblique account of a relationship in the form of a road trip, Jacquette devised an approach of overlapping illustrations, using the vellum on which she had been making many of her own drawings.  She plays with the idea of the view through a frame, which had intrigued her ever since her early watercolors of clouds framed by an airplane’s porthole.  Here, a car takes the place of an airplane, and the car window, surrounded by car door, takes the place of the porthole, providing glimpses of what Phillips calls “the continual movie past the glass.”  Using the blur of travel as her metaphor, Jacquette takes the techniques learned from years of seeing things so far away as to preclude absolute clarity and makes her car-window views analogies of distance and speed.
            The Big Picture was Jacquette’s only theater collaboration, a dance piece choreographed by Yoshiko Chuma with music by Nona Hendryx.  Drawing on the ingenuity honed in her early days of ambitious shoestring filmmaking, Jacquette devised a system of scrims mounted on wheeled clothing racks, to provide ease of shifting and recombination of imagery.  To complement the big-city film-noir tone of the piece, Jacquette decided to use Times Square (to which she had recently devoted a major triptych) as the piece’s locus.  She zoomed in from outer space (the ultimate aerial view), getting successively closer, until Times Square itself was visible, and finally a large face in close-up.  Unlike in those early films, Jacquette here made a thematic contribution in the omnipotence implied in the aerial view that is appropriate to a drama about getting to the bottom of things.
            1991 was the year of Jacquette’s most recent collaboration,Night Fantasies, a 16-millimeter film she made with Rudy Burckhardt.  The film’s title and 20-minute duration come from a piece of music by the composer Elliot Carter.  Taking the title as their guideline, they made a film entirely of night imagery.  Jacquette was doing pastels of Hong Kong, and the two went there also to film some of her locations.  While looking through the camera’s viewfinder at night with the aperture closed down, she could only see areas of bright light, while everything else became black.  Just as, when she first started doing aerial pastels, the chance transfer of a pastel to a piece of paper allowed her to see the benefit of generalization, so this experience filming  influenced how she would make her own paintings in the future, enabling her to be more capricious in her combination and positioning of images as well as in their simplification.
            The nature of the specific collaboration engenders results the artist would not pursue on her own -- the grounded point of view in Fast Lanes or the huge, Katzlike face in The Big Picture.  At key moments in her life, collaboration has provided a twofold function for Jacquette.  It has reaffirmed her community with other artists, a sense of artistic intimacy that suffuses creation with pleasure, and at the same time it has provided her with crucial insights she was able to bring to bear on her own ever-evolving and fascinating flight of vision.