Willem de Kooning

Mars sits on the thirteenth degree and second arcminute of Taurus and Jupiter on the thirteenth degree and first arcminute of Aries, one sign and one arcminute apart, which makes the closest contact in this chart exact to a hundredth of a degree. Fire takes four of his ten planets, earth three, air two and a single one water. The record says de Kooning stowed away to America in 1926 and became one of the central abstract expressionists.

The reading for that pairing is effort that pays: well-timed action, and the useful ability to commit fully without agonising. At a hundredth of a degree it is the tightest thing here, and it is also among the mildest readings in the whole vocabulary, which is a pattern worth noticing across this project rather than a fact about him. The Sun sits sixty degrees from Neptune at just over a quarter of a degree, imagination available without cost: creative facility, and a natural, undramatic kind of empathy, which in a painter is the contact a reader will want and about as unfalsifiable as they come.

The record's second sentence is that he kept painting into his eighties with Alzheimer's, and that this raised a question nobody has settled about the late work. The record poses the question and does not answer it, and neither will this entry: a chart cast for a birth in 1904 has no standing whatever to say whether paintings made eighty years later were his. The Sun sits in mild friction with Pluto at under three tenths of a degree, identity in a power struggle, which includes periods where a person feels they must be entirely remade. That is a standing reading about a temperament and it is not about an illness.

A T-square closes on Saturn using the Moon and Mercury, and the Moon's sign is certain at twenty one degrees of Leo, so the figure stands. Saturn sits in easy contact with Pluto at three quarters of a degree, durable strength: rebuilding after loss, and authority that has genuinely been earned. Venus sits conjunct Jupiter at under nine tenths, generous taste, and in quiet contact with Mars at the same orb. Uranus sits thirteen arcminutes from the end of Sagittarius and was the only retrograde planet. He died at East Hampton on 19 March 1997, at ninety two. Jupiter stood sixty degrees from its own natal place at a third of a degree that day and square his natal Mars at the same orb, reaching both halves of the pairing this entry opened on. The Moon was at its first quarter and eighty three per cent lit.