My father

My father died last night. More people read my blog than will read his obituary in the local newspaper, so tonight I will devote the post to my father, Dr. Thomas P. Kearns. My father was born on April 12, 1922 in a little town back 50 miles of gravel road in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, Ravenna. His second generation immigrant Irish father worked as a section gang worker for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. The house he was raised in was built into a steep hillside over a dirt cellar. I believe it may have had only two rooms plus a bathroom. His parents bought it for 700 dollars. My father recounted that he was not allowed to go over the hill on which they lived as there were hillbillies back there who were dangerous. In high school he began working in a store that must have sold general merchandise, he told me the story of a woman who came back to complain that her refrigerator was making ice faster than she could empty the trays, and hoped it could be adjusted somehow.

Something happened with my grandfather and mother during the depression and they separated temporarily, I believe that my grandfather may have developed a drinking problem, and he was unable to support his family and so my father and mother went to live with "Uncle Doc" who was, I believe, actually a cousin once or twice removed. Uncle Doc was a physician in Louisville, Kentucky and even though his patients sometimes paid in chickens, was relatively well off and highly respected. My father idolized "Uncle Doc" and decided that he too would be a doctor when he grew up.

He and his mother then moved to a rooming house where the bathroom was down the hall and I remember him saying how he disliked that. Food was scarce and he and his mother had to eat so many apples from the tree in the backyard that he would never eat them again till he was elderly and then only rarely. He worked at an A and P grocery to put himself through school at the University of Louisville. When he met my mother, whose father had a farm on the Ohio River, he was astonished to see both ham and chicken served at the table. In his home, there was a single piece of chicken put on your plate in the kitchen and that was your meal. In my mothers home, the chicken was on the table and you could have a second piece, or even ham.

Dad finished college and was accepted to the University of Louisville Medical School, the A and P offered him a managers job if he would stay, but he still chose medical school. My father was like many of the depression kids, a very hard worker and determined to rise from the poverty in which he had been raised. He was a tireless worker and as focused as a man could possibly be. When World War II began, the army put him in uniform and picked up his tuition. He and my mother were married during the war and her fathers extra gas allotment as a farmer was enough to get them to nearby Cincinnati for a honeymoon. I have the room receipt in a box somewhere.

After graduation, he was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas, he had experience doing refraction with "Uncle Doc" so they had him working with eyes. After the war he applied for further training to a number of schools. This advanced training in those days, was called fellowship, and paid almost nothing but offered lots of work experience and the occasional nights sleep. He applied to the very prestigious program at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, not really expecting to get in. When he was accepted to train there as an ophthalmologist (eye doctor) he and my mother moved to Minnesota. After fellowship he was invited to remain and become a staff physician. He spent his entire career at the Mayo Clinic.

My father and mother in the 70's

If you stop and think about what kind of a guy you would like operating on your eyeballs, that was my father. He was precise and a ceaseless, tireless worker. He became one of the first neuro- opthalmologists ( that is he specialized in the nervous system of the eye), in those days it was a tiny and exotic subspecialty and one of the only institutions large enough and seeing enough curious cases to need a full time neuro-opthalmologist was Mayo. Besides practicing medicine he did research and wrote almost ninety papers on the eye. He identified a syndrome that still bears his name Kearns -Sayres disease. Ultimately he became president of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolarengology, which at that time had 12,000 members.

His success allowed my mother to collect fine antiques and we lived in a fine home, that was full of beautiful things. When I dropped out of high school and was able to wheedle my way into art school the next year (it WAS the 60's after all ) he gave me a monthly stipend of 300 dollars and told me he would pay my tuition at any school I could get into. He sent me those 300 dollar checks until I was in my thirties. Of course by then three hundred dollars was not a princely sum, but it would pay my rent. That little boost, not enough to make the world go away for me, as I still had to struggle to survive, made it possible to study with Ives Gammel (if I drove a cab at night) and allowed me to live indoors while I learned to paint for a living. If I sold a picture a month I could eat.

I don't think my father had much of an interest in art, I think he thought it was sort of too bohemian. But the first time I had a painting juried into the National Academy of Design biennial and we went to see the show on 5th ave. in New York he started to come around. So he was supportive of me even though he himself was skeptical of the whole art thing.

After his retirement in 1987 my father who had saved the sight of so many others lost his own to macular degeneration, something in which he was an early expert.For many years he did the best he could finding his way around with only a corona of peripheral vision. My mother and he moved into a high rise for the elderly and lived there, first in their own apartment and then on an assisted living floor. Several months ago he had to be moved to another floor that could care for him as his health deteriorated. I have visited him many times over the last year or two and watched his health slip away. He became weaker and weaker like some toy that runs on batteries that gradually wear out. Last night my sister who was in Minnesota called to tell me that he had died.

Life on the beach

I am going to continue documenting the trip to a coastal New England village. I have started a street scene and I will post a demo of that tomorrow or the next day.

Above, Ignat Ignatov paints overlooking the water.

Here is the gang lined up in front of the model, her knee is at left.

Here I am in the sun, painting with Frank Gardner. I started a 26" by 29" today and got about halfway through it.

Frank painting out on the waterfront and below is the historic Charles Hawthorne studio. Some of the guys painted up there today.

Below, I am pictured appraising some remaining cigar material, my picture is on the easel behind me.

Below, Jeremy is painting an interior.

Here is a sunset on the beach. Tomorrow I am going to paint down there. Then I will have two pictures going.

Here is Daniel Corey. Painting all day was not enough so he is out painting the night with a headlamp.

Rockport part 3

Here is my old portfolio lettered by Reynolds Beal that was the official office of Dorkohelix Industries our little retro sign business. Ren did nice work, he had the old timey look down, and his signs looked like they had always been in the antique settings of Rockport.

For those first years in Rockport my life revolved around the Rockport Art Association and my tiny shop. I made lots of little paintings and sold almost all of them , very cheaply. But I was making enough money to pay my rent and eat. I didn't have a car and couldn't have afforded to keep one on the road so I walked to the grocery store, and every where else. Rockport is small so it was not a problem.

I had a number of duties at the art association, I swept floors and carried things around, and I hung shows. Often that meant hanging 150 or more paintings per show. We did four major summer exhibitions and numerous other shows in the smaller galleries of the art association. In those days most of the shows were juried, and every year there were two juries for membership. The jurying was done up in a space called the loft. There was a viewing area with a shelf where paintings could be brought before a panel of about seven artists who sat in a row across the small viewing area. They each had a square wooden block with an old fashioned doorbell button on it. The wires from all those buttons went back to a panel with lights on it that illuminated when the buttons were pressed. The director and the president sat at that panel and counted the votes yea, or nay.The whole room and light board setup must have been from the 30's. There was a big sliding barn door we could open on one end of the loft when it was hot. the building had that because it had been built in the 19th century to be a cotton warehouse. The placed reeked of history and I often thought of my heroes like Hibbard and Gruppe, Thieme and all the other Rockport painters who had sat in those chairs to jury thousands upon thousands of paintings.

My job was to carry the paintings up and set them in front of the jury. After their decision I would take one down and return it to the stacks and Ren Beal would put another up. I saw lots of juries and their results. That was a very valuable experience for me. I have written about some of the things I learned here. Routinely there were irate artists (and still are ) who had been rejected, they always thought there was some kind of corruption, or the fix was in. I can say that I never saw that, or anything that made me believe that was the case. I did often see juries surprised at how their cumulative judgement differed from their individual judgements.

I remember Harry Ballinger, who was, no kidding, a hundred years old, on one jury. He wrote an excellent book on seascape that was a classic for many years, he had been a well known painter long ago,in about the 30's. He kept falling asleep, when he did he would slump over onto his button and his light would go on. The director would have to call out to whoever was next to him to wake him up.

Many of the artists on those juries were very good. Some had been combat artists during the second world war, some had been illustrators back when the magazines were full of illustration and that was a lucrative and competitive field. There were many who were career painters. I had followed a few of them since I was in grade school in American Artist magazine.

When I first arrived in Rockport, so many places in it looked familiar. I always had this,"I have been here before" feeling as I walked around town, even though I had never been there before. I gradually realized I knew it from all the times it had appeared in illustrations. The town hall for instance, was the one that Mike Mulligan and MaryAnn the steam shovel built in Virginia Lee Burtons book. She died young, a decade before I arrived there. As a child I had earnestly studied the "how to" watercolor books by Ted Kautzky. Many of those watercolors were of Rockport street scenes and the harbor. All of those scenes were stored in my subconscious.

Frank Beatty, illustrator for Popular Mechanics and Harrison Cady who illustrated Thornton Burgesses books like Peter Cottontail had been in Rockport, at least in the summer season. So many illustrators, artists had used Rockport, Massachusetts for backgrounds and so many magazine ads were shot there in the 1950's that it was all imprinted in my memories before I even went there.

There were perhaps 30 members of the art association that gave it critical mass artistically. They could be expected to put something each year into the summer shows that was the work of a seasoned professional. Let me name a few I remember, there are sure to be many I will leave out, and I apologize to them, I AM accepting reminders.

There was Paul Strisik, Ferdinand Petrie, Chesly d'Andrea, Martin Ahearn, Harry Ballinger, Teresa Bernstein, Lou Burnett, Sven Orval Carlson, Bernard Corey, Ken Gore,Walker Hancock,( a member I met and knew, but who seldom showed his sculpture there) and Wayne Morell.

There was also Charles Movalli, Tom Nicholas, Natalie Nordstrand and Joe Santoro, there was Betty Lou Schlemm, Mildred Jones and Marian Williams Steele, Don Stone and Mike Stoffa, Bruce Turner, Charles Vickery (the seascape painter) and John Wentworth.

There was also. John Terelac occasionally, Don and Christune Mosher, the Tutwielers, David and Line, and John Caggiano. There was Carl Gustafson, Bernie Goestner and Joe Rimini also.

Some of these were painters of national reputation who I had known since childhood from reading American Artist others were just retired illustrators with the kind of chops that were required to cut it in the golden age of American illustration. There was a lot of good painting to look at in the Art Association then.While most of it won't end up in museums, I think a few things will, and it all served as a good grad school for me, seeing all of that painting and trying to learn from and often compete with it in the market place for art that Rockport was then.

There was also a lot of "dead" art around then too. I used to get the job of unpacking and moving around artists estates that were either left to the art association or shown there upon their deaths, I saw Carl Peters estate, I loved those and I had been unnfamiliar with his work before that. Many of the other artists estates I was familiar with because I had seen their work when I worked for the Guild of Boston Artists during my time studying with R.H. Ives Gammell. I also saw the Cirino estate. Antonio Cirinos system of placing highlights and accents lives on in my own painting. There were also Margaret Pearson's and the occasional Hibbard around. The yearly antique painting auction brought many things through the association. I remember the association acquiring a Childe Hassam watercolor one year.

Rockport years 2

Aldro Hibbard, Rockport, From the Smithsonian

This picture of Rockport was done from behind Hibbards home and studio. There are now large townhouses above this location, but I expect this place may still be pretty much unchanged, although the view is now occluded by trees. Hibbard painted a number of pictures in this location, and there is one that was made into a print. The few copies I have seen of that were done on poor quality paper and the ink has faded. This view looks out over Back Beach to downtown, there are two steeples visible, the one on the left is the congregational church called Old Sloop church. The steeple of this church had a cannonball fired into it by the crew of the British frigate, Nymph, in the war of 1812. Stretching out to the left, is the breakwater forming the old harbor, which marked the beginning of Bearskin neck where I had my first gallery.

I wrote before, of arriving in Rockport in 1983 here. Looking back on that time in my life it seems magical, and I remember it like one of those old photos where they put Vaseline on the lens to get a soft vignetted look. I worked at the art association in the mornings for the rest of that winter, and painted in the rest of my time. I had very little money, but I did sell a few paintings as I kept the gallery open most of the winter. When spring came I moved out of the inn and into an apartment in the jumble of houses that perched on Bearskin neck, a historic spit of land stretching out into Sandy Bay, where colonial shacks and 19th century fishhouses had been turned into galleries in the 20's and 30's by artists and then into seasonal tourist businesses in the 60's. Most of the established artists had their galleries uptown, but on the Neck rent was cheap, and it was very picturesque.That spring I moved out of the Inn as I was able to rent a small apartment on the top floor of a building built out over the old harbor on stilts. It had a little deck and a big picture window overlooking the water.

I befriended a whole generation of artists that year who are now almost all dead, they were the last remnants of the historic art colony.
At the entrance to the Neck was Lou Burnette, a cantankerous old man who sat on the stoop in front of his cluttered shop and had done so for 50 or 60 years. He had studied at the art students league, with Raphael Soyer I believe. His shop had paintings of purple beatniks playing bongos in East Village apartments, wearing berets and smoking cigarettes . Their girlfriends were green and dressed all in black.

At the top of the hill above the Neck was the Art Association and next to that, Paul Strisik had his gallery, he and Tom Nicholas senior were at the top of the pecking order. Although Strisik is dead, Tom Nicholas is still very much alive and undiminished. Strisik was a student of Dumond and in his seventies at that point. I knew him only socially through the Art Association. I remember being at a party in a summer cottage rented by Line and David Tutweiler sometime in that era, where a group of us sat around Strisik and listened to him tell us how to cut a roll of canvas down, on a bandsaw to eliminate waste. A very young T.M. Nicholas was there listening to Strisik that night also, he was to become a close friend, but at that point I didn't know him very well.

John Manship the son of Paul Manship, one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century (he made the golden Promethious unbound that is at the back of the skating rink at Rockefeller Center in New York) was the president of the Art Association. I later was acquainted with him, he bought a painting of mine in a charity auction, which though it didn't bring much money, was a nice recognition that I was thought of as a painter, even though I was much younger than that crowd and was after all.... the janitor. Incidentally, the janitor before me was John Terelac.

I remember meeting Charles Movalli whose work I have always admired, he did a lecture on design in Hibbards paintings that taught me a lot. At night sometimes I would walk around Rockport and look in the windows of all the tiny shops and galleries. Wayne Morell, still alive today, was in his prime and I was impressed with a colorful painting of an outdoor cafe full of people. It had as much paint on it as I used in a week! Seeing that got me excited about having fluid paint handling in my pictures.

At the Art Association I worked with and became friends with a tortured man named Reynolds Beal, who was the product of one of the many artistic families still gracing Rockport in those days. His grandfather had been THE Reynolds Beal, an American impressionist painter, his uncle was Gifford Beal, another painter of the era and he was related to Stow Wengenroth a well known lithographer from the heydey of Rockport too, but I don't remember exactly how. Ren and I started a little company that I gave the whimsical name of DORKOHELIX INDUSTRIES. We made handlettered signs for the little businesses around town. Ren could do showcard leettering in the 1930's style and we made signs that looked period Rockport. I sold the jobs and did any woodworking that needed doing as I by now, had a workshop in my apartment on the Neck. I had built a workbench you could have strapped a horse down on. Antique dealers would bring me old stuff to work on, worthless old paintings, pieces of old circus wagons needing to be repainted, and old gilt frames needing repair and regilding. These connections with the antique dealers got me invited to show in their booths at the antique shows scattered around Boston. There were almost no galleries in which to sell paintings that weren't modern, so it was a good place to show my art besides my own gallery. They were the first New England customers and allies.

I was once loaned a painting by Margaret Pearson, a Boston school painter to sell on consignment. I took it to an antique show in Boston. It was about five feet high and was a nearly life sized nude. probably painted under the direction of Tarbell as she was his student. It was not an idealized figure, but a studio nude of an actual woman with the blood pooling in her feet, and the swayed back of a tired model who had stood too long. The fleshtones were wonderful though. it was a very nice piece of work and I was shocked when everyone pointed and laughed at it like naughty schoolboys. I wanted 800 dollars for it, no one even made an offer. A few years later Pearson was rediscovered and her work brought real money although the market is for her interiors.

One day I got a phone call from Ren Beals parents who lived near me in town. They had a grand house with tiered balconies overlooking the harbor. They wanted to know if I would like some old picture frames. When I got there, they took me down into a cellar room and pointed out a large stack of gilt early 29th century frames that had belongred to Reynolds Beal. I guess they knew I could work on them, and I had been a friend to their troubled son. Many of the frames were huge, 40 by 60 or larger. I didn't have a car so I picked them up one by one and carried them the two blocks to my apartment on my shoulder. Each time I passed the gallery of another artist, Bruce Turner, I had a more fabulous old frame. Most were big Whistler designs although a few were of the wide and intricate Beaux Arts, Sanford White style. After I had gone by about three times he could stand it no longer and accosted me. Where are you getting all those frames? he asked. I gave him a nice one and went back to get the next. Today those frames would go to a museum or at least to a fancy dealer after being restored. But I was lucky enough to have them and I made good use of them. I stacked them, and hung them around the walls of my apartment, and over the next year or two I made big paintings to go in them. I was the first painter in Rockport with gold frames I think, although that changed rapidly in another year or so.
I will continue this tomorrow.

My first year in Rockport

.Abovee is a painting I did of Rockport a couple of years after the year I am writing about, but it seemed to fit. This painting was done from a historic photo, but a lot about Rockport hasn't changed much.

I worked out an arrangement with the art association that allowed me to work a few hours every morning and then at noon I would go and work in the shop. Rockport is a tourist town, but It also has been an art colony. It was traditional for the artists to own their own galleries and show only there own art. Rockport in those days had many small art galleries.This set up an unusual situation for the individual artist. In the rest of the world, a for a client to come into a gallery and find the artist themselves standing there, was disconcerting, it seemed odd and maybe unprofessional. But in Rockport, when they came in ,they were expecting that.

The two "glassblowers and I set about making the shop space fit our needs and getting our inventory together for a couple of weeks, and then we opened the shop for the Christmas shopping season. We had tiny twinkling Christmas lights which made all of the little glass animals sparkle. I painted nothing but 8 x 10s, one a day. The shop was tiny, and I had only half of it, so it was like doing a show in a piano crate, but it worked. Rockport at Christmas was magic. Most of the town was built in the federal style and was arrayed on ledges and hills around a protected harbor facing the ocean. Some of the buildings in the town, including the one across the street from our shop went back to the revolution.

When the big torch was running the shop was steamy hot, although it was cold outside. Our windows were always frosted and flocked with ornate crystals of ice. People swarmed in to see the glass rods stretched and twisted into little flower pots and lacy pianos and silly elongated dachshunds. It was all very lovely and in the evenings we were often open late . I sold some little paintings, and was beginning to know a few people about Bearskin Neck, the narrow spit of rock, sticking out into the ocean, upon which our shop was located.

We were really low tech. For instance, we did take MasterCard- Visa but that was in the days before the card readers. We had one of those sliding imprinters, that made a frottage of the customers card, but we had to call the card company every time and get an authorization code to write on the slip. We had a payphone in the shop, a legacy from a previous owner, and we would feed it a coin and call in the card numbers.

In the town square, about a hundred yards from our shop was an enormous illuminated Christmas tree, and the town decorated all of the light posts about town with little trees and wreaths covered in tiny lights.

Working at the art association introduced me to a lot of its members. There were still a lot of the oldest generation about then, and I knew many professional artists who are gone now. Many of them had studied painting in New York before the second world war and could reminisce about Raphael Soyer or George Bridgeman. They remembered Aldro Hibbard and Max Kuehne, they remembered when the town was mostly artists, shopkeepers and fisherman. Today it is a suburb of Boston. There were also a number of old retired illustrators and widows and children of well known artists . That whole world is gone now. Only one or two of those artists are still alive. If you had asked me who the Rockport artists were then, I could have read off a list of about fifty. Of that list, perhaps five are still alive today. Looking back, it was a pretty egalitarian place, and I had some good friends among those elderly members of the Rockport Art Association. Considering I had shoulder length hair and fixed my shoes with duct tape and wore my only sweater every day, they were relatively accepting as soon as they understood I wasn't dangerous.

One of my jobs was to carry jugs of water down to the sketch room in the basement of the farthest gallery. where in those days there was no running water. That brought me into contact with Martha Nickerson, whose bailiwick the sketchrooms were. At first she was upset that I might be taking over her job, but soon we got on well, and she pretended I was a grandson. That got me into the sketch groups so I could draw from the figure about eight to ten hours a week.

Though I still was very poor, I look back on this as a wonderful time in my life. It seems to always appear to me under glowing Christmas lights and populated with smiling faces of the artists all now passed away. The colonial architecture that formed the sets along the quiet streets in the blackness of a Massachusetts winter evening gave that time the feeling of a movie about the turn of the last century. Many movies have been shot in Rockport because it is so beautiful.

I was painting so hard and taking in all of the ideas that had defined Rockport painting for nearlt a century. I learned new things about color and I realizerd I knew next to nothing about design. It was exciting using all of those little paintings I made to learn about the Rockport style of painting. I was selling my paintings for eighty five to one hundred and twenty five dollars a piece.

One of the artists, not a famous one, but a kind one, Joe Rimini, came into my little gallery and sitting at my easel, gave me a lecture on color. He threw ideas at me like painting passages exactly the opposite of their intended color and throwing the real color down into that, he taught me about using formulas based on color wheels and weird broken color systems . Rockport painting has often had a lot of color.There were good old paintings in the town buildings and in the art association for me to study.

I didn't have money to frame all of my art so I hit upon the idea of painting on the round, flat stones from the waters edge behind my shop, where the tide lapped at the back of the building. I painted all of these rocks with dumb subjects like lighthouses and lobsterboats, surf scenes and pictures of motif number one, the old fish shack in Rockport Harbor, that is the symbol of the town. As silly as the subjects were, the color theory applied to those rocks was wild. I ran endless variations on color schemes and formulas. I tried out odd groupings of pigments and restricted palettes. I did a lot of those rocks.When I say painted rocks, it probably conjures up an image of something a whole lot less cool than these. I built a glass shelf in a gilded nook to display them. They looked very grand indeed in that presentation. I sprayed them with Krylon so they had a gloss like a wet pool ball. I sold dozens of them for ten, twelve, fifteen dollars, It paid for my groceries.

I knew an antique dealer up the street who had a a shop in a great location he called the Musee. He saw my painted rocks and asked if he could have a few for his shop on consignment. They often looked antique, like something Victorian. I had forgotten he had them when one weekend the phone rang and it was Jack, from the Musee, who said. "I have someone here who wants to buy this rock, what should I charge them?" I told him "Jack, just about anything you get for a rock you're ahead!"

Off to Rockport

Now I had a plan, going to Rockport, and a little money with which to do it. The Pinto wagon was in the vacant lot next door with an empty gas tank. I scrounged around my friends apartment and found a red can marked gasoline. I went down to the Pinto opened the tank and poured in the gas. When I started her up, she would run, but not get enough compression to move. My friend, whose can it was, showed up at about this time and explained to me that it wasn't gas in the can, but kerosene for a space heater he had once owned. I sat in that Pinto smaoking unfiltered cigarettes and muttering, while I gunned the engine until it burned all the kerosene. Then I walked up to the gas station and got the can filled with gasoline. I put that in the Pinto, then drove back to the gas station and filled the tank.

I thanked my musician friend for allowing me to stay in his apartment and I split the lottery winnings with him, so he could pay his rent.Then I jumped in the Pinto wagon and drove the 40 miles north to Rockport, which I had never seen before. It was late fall now and the tourist season was over, as I drove down into the little town of Rockport there was an inn with a sign out that said winter rentals. I went into this inn, the Lantana house, and the inn keeper who had just purchased it was willing to rent me a room by the week. I remember her asking a fee that was equal to all that I had. I told her I would give her ten dollars less, that I needed the rest for food. There was a convenience store across the street and I bought a can of ravioli, a loaf of bread and a pack of Pall Mall straights, but no lottery ticket. I didn't want to push my luck on that one.

My new landlord mentioned in passing that the Rockport Art Association, around the corner, was looking for a part time janitor. The next morning I went there, and up the almost 200 year old steps to the directors office. The week before, the new president John Manship, son of the renowned sculptor Paul Manship had fired the entire staff.

The director was just moving into her new office. I asked for the job, but I must have looked pretty rough, I had been on the road for a month and only had the clothes on my back. She said something like, we will call you if..... I went back downstairs and there was Reynolds Beale, the grandson of the American impressionist Reynolds Beale, and he was working there already. I noticed that there was something on the front walk flagstones. I think it must have been snow, but it might have been dry leaves, its been a long time. Ren Beale handed me a broom with a conspiratorial grin and I went to work, unhired. About an hour later the new director realized that I was working there, and that she might as well add me to the payroll.

The little money I had was spent and the food I had bought at the convenience store was gone. For the rest of that week I had nothing to eat. I think I went about five days without food. I knew no one there to ask for help and besides it was actually pretty easy, after a day or two the hunger went away.I was afraid I would hurt myself, but I think we are made to be able to take a lot of abuse, our hunter gatherer ancestors must have done this routinely. At the end of that week I approached the director and asked if she would advance me the money I had earned for the first weeks work, and I went to the grocery store.

That week I had a chance meeting with a fellow who, strangely, had also just arrived in town from Minnesota. Her had an old girlfriend who had a tiny shop in town selling little animals and trinkets that they made out of glass, over a welders torch. They called it lampworking, but most people thought of them as glass blowers. He saw my painting, I had only one with me at that point, although I did have my paint box, an aluminum stan-rite easel and a few colors, and he invited me to join the business, He said I could pay my share of the rent when summer came and we started to make some money. I now had a part time job and a share in a little shop in Rockport. It was along hard winter,but I was starting to get somewhere now. This was the late fall of 1983, I was to have along history with Rockport that began then.

A few misplaced years

I thought tonight I would throw in another chapter in the ongoing biography I have been writing.
In 1976 I decided I would return to my home state of Minnesota. I had met a beautiful young woman who lived there and I felt like I had received my training in painting and could return and begin a career there.
I moved to the South Minneapolis area and rented a cheap apartment with a friend. After a year or so I moved to an apartment in an old residence hotel from the 1920's called the Oak Grove Hotel. It was a great apartment, high up and overlooking the whole city, with French windows and a bedroom that made a good studio. I lived on very little, working part time in a nursing home and selling the occasional picture. This was the disco era and for me, like a lot of my generation it was party time. I did a lot of stupid things and went nowhere as an artist.

I remember being rejected by a gallery that told me I knew how to draw, but I couldn't paint, I looked at the art in the gallery and I remember being so perplexed as I thought it was all pretty weak and I couldn't understand why I couldn't get shown. In retrospect my paintings must have seemed pretty dark and formidably academic to the dealers then.

This was in the height of the duck art fad, I remember how depressing it was to see all of these pictures of ducks that were totally artless. The artists who were doing them looked at each others art and were oblivious to the history of art entirely. No one had any idea what I was up to, and no one valued what I did. I painted all the time and the years of work at my easel must have made me a more mature artist but I think I mostly spun my wheels. I show nothing from this era in my portfolio and there is a good reason for that. Still those years of pushing paint around did help to get my brushwork practiced I guess. Still they were my lost years.
Because I lived in the city, I had a hard time finding subject matter, I worked some from photos, I painted urban scenes and mostly I just made up the paintings, working in imitation of the Dutch painters of the 17th century that I so admired. Nothing could have been less commercial or less interesting to the Minneapolis art world.

Toward the end of this period in my life, I met a woman, Mary Rose who had a farm house out in the country along the St. Croix river, a beautiful area about an hour from Minneapolis. Her husband would give me a ride out there, I had no car, and they would let me stay in a spare room and paint on their land. She painted mostly wildlife, but we exchanged a lot of ideas and it was good to have another painter to talk shop with. She had a lot of talent and a good work ethic. We got along well and I enjoyed my time painting on her farm immensely. I began to return to doing more plein air work and I started making some better, and cheerier art. I got into a small gallery that sold a few paintings. That was a first for me. Although I had sold paintings myself, and done outdoor shows, it was really the first time I had been in a gallery that hung and even sold the occasional painting.

I let my apartment go and moved that summer into an out building called a granary, on the farm. It was an uninsulated board structure like a barn, upstairs in its loft area I put my furniture and I ran a cable out there from the house so I would have electricity. There were about a zillion pigeons living out there too. When I was moving in and Mary Rose was helping me, she started to sweep the place out, but I remember telling her, why bother? Unless you figure out a way to evict all of those pigeons, what difference will it make? As the summer passed, and the fall came I kept adding blankets to my bed. At night it was getting down into the teens and it was becoming obvious that I couldn't stay here much longer. Mary Roses husband bought a new car and gave me his old one, a Ford Pinto wagon.
I had been in Minnesota for six years now and it was obvious that I was never going to have an art career there. Very few artists could make it there, as there was almost no market, and what there was, was either for duck art or abstractionist work done by college professors who actually lived on a salary from teaching. I had a few hundred dollars in my pocket from the sale of a painting, and I decided I would return to Boston. It was 1983.
I got into that Pinto and started driving east. About Ohio, the rear main seal opened up and I started losing oil. I pulled into a gas station and the mechanic told me that to fix it was a big deal involving pulling the engine. There was no way I could do that, so I drove to a K mart and bought a case of oil. I kept putting oil in the top of the engine and losing it out the rear. I left a black line all the way from about Toledo to Boston, but I got there. I think I used about a quart every 100 miles.
Arriving in Boston I stayed briefly with my sister who lived there, and then with an old friend, Sam Rose. he got me a little painting commission, a picture of a young boy pulling a sled, for an older gay man who wouldn't pay me until I got the buttocks JUST right!

I moved from there into the spare bed room of a musician friend of mine who lived in a run down old apartment house in East Cambridge, in a neighborhood fill of body shops. I remember I was again running out of money, and with my last few dollars I bought at neighborhood convenience store, a can of ravioli, a loaf of bread, a pack of Pall Mall straights, and A LOTTERY TICKET.
I prayed over that lottery ticket, God if you want to help me here, this would be a good way to do it! I suppose a lot of preachers would frown on my praying over a lottery ticket, but not many of them ever had to. I would never do it again, nor had I ever before. I don'ordinarily buy lottery tickets, but this was nearly my last dollar so I took a chance.

My musician friend, an acoustic bass player was out playing a gig , and I was watching his TV, it was one of those old ones where the tube distorted the figures and made the people look like they were in a fun house mirror. The alien looking anchorman with his head squished like a hammerhead shark, read off the winning numbers as I looked down at my ticket, it hit! Not for a million, but I matched several numbers, I think I won about four hundred dollars.

More tomorrow night in the exciting saga of Stapleton Kearns, artist - foo, l and the escape from Charles Darwins plans for me.

I will be unable to answer comments for about two days, and the next post will load automatically ( I hope) I am not going to be able to get online for a few days. The blog should continue to appear though.

The Commonwealth Avenue years

Tea Leaves, 1909

Oil on canvas 36 1/8 x 28 3/4 in. (91.6 x 71.9 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC.

Gift of George A. Hearn, 1910 (10.64.8)

George A. Hearn, New York, 1909–1910

I will continue with the personal history for another day, you all seemed to tolerate it well. Maybe about Tuesday I can get photoshop loaded and go back to the critiques. I do have some fine images for that.

Besides the Paxton paintings in that store room there were also a number of portfolios of drawings. We looked through all of those too. In return for my help there that day, I was given a drawing. It was a figure and it was signed and dated. Several years later I sold it to a friend so I could buy groceries. I sold it for a hundred dollars.

Since Paxton was unknown to the public, the Vose gallery chose a group of drawings of hands and did an exhibition of those down in their lower level gallery. I believe that much of their inventory at that time was Hudson river school and other 19th century paintings. Hassam and the few other top tier American impressionists were known then, but Paxton and the second tier were pretty much unknown. The drawings of hands must have been well received because shortly after that they did a major Paxton show. I remember standing in the Vose galleries marveling at the big interiors with figures.

I had a number of other similar incidents happen at about that time. One day a week I was working at the Guild of Boston Artists. That is a historic Boston art institution with a small and carefully selected artist membership. The Boston painters like Paxton had formed the organization in nineteen fourteen. I was what you would call an intern today, although no one called me that at the time. I worked there one day a week, mostly carrying stuff around and acting as a go-fer. Often because Newbury street parking was so horrendous, I was asked to run to the curb out front and unload and bring in paintings from idling trucks or cars, double parked very briefly out front. When the Boston Police showed up they had to move, so it was up to me to get paintings out of the cars and into the Guild quickly. I got to meet many artist members very briefly and receive for the Guild the work of many of its members, some living and some dead.

On one such occasion the estate of A. Lasselle Ripley was delivered out front and I carried it up the several flights of steps to a storage room several floors up in the historic building. There were a lot of those and not all were signed. I had the opportunity to see one in a collectors home years later and remark on it as being a Ripley. Its owner was surprised as it was unsigned. I was able to tell them I had "handled" the estate.

I was also shown a metal paintbox there which I was told had been Winslow Homers watercolor kit. I looked at the tubes inside and marveled at the thought of its being in my hands. I don't know what ever happened to it, and I don't believe the Guild has it now, and I may be the only person who remembers it being there. I was young then and very few of the present living members were there at that time. I have had the opportunity to paw through a number of old paintboxes over the years and get a look at these time capsules filled with art materials from Americas golden age of painting.

Another event I remember was being invited to go with a group of Gammell and Hensche students to visit Caproni and Sons. In the 19th century it was common to manufacture excellent plaster copies of historic sculpture. Not only were they used to teach drawing, but museums displayed them. The Caproni and Sons firm was located on Washington ave. under the elevated tracks . I think it might have changed hands about that time and I believe it closed shortly after this. However I was able to see the big iron molds that into which the liquid plaster was poured to make the sculptural copies . Today most casts are made in soft rubber molds giving an insensitive copy of the original. These iron molds were extremely accurate and we each bought casts to take back to our studios to draw. I remember many of us bought a flayed figure called an ercoche used to teach anatomy. There was also a nice Houdon head of Voltaire that I bought.Those workshops were another oddly preserved set from the 19th century.

Several small events that I hardly noted at the time were to influence my direction later. the first was being invited by my roommate, David Curtis to visit his home in Gloucester Massachusetts. It was the first time that I saw Cape Ann which would later be a home to me for a number of years. The second event was a show of paintings at Doll and Richards gallery, now closed, but then the oldest gallery in America. It was the retrospective exhibition of the work of Aldro T. Hibbard. I had seen a reproduction or two of his work and heard Ives Gammell speak well of him, but seeing a whole room full of them was really impressive. He became and stayed one of my heroes. It is another of those cases where a small event can have a big influence on your life. I could have walked by that gallery without seeing that show and I would probably never have ended up in Rockport, his home, for so many years.

I was living in the apartment on Commonwealth ave, I had a lot of art books and a clock radio, a few pieces of old furniture that came with the apartment , and a dreadful dog I got at the pound and named Rotor. There were a lot of break ins in the building and several other apartments had been burglarized. One day I returned to the apartment to find the front door kicked down, there was a New York city police lock on the door. That is a lock that has a steel bar that descends from the lockplate ( spell check just suggested copulate) at a 45 degree angle to the floor inside. I don't think you can force one open, so the burglars beat the door to pieces and then reached in and unlocked it. After all their effort I would have enjoyed seeing their faces when they did get in. There was absolutely nothing there to steal.The clock radio evidently had too much paint on it to steal. It was one of those that had the flaps that dropped from a rotating spindle to show the time digitally in that time before LCDs . There was nothing in the refrigerator, no TV, only Rotor. I wish they had stolen the dog.

I used to paint in Fenway park often, the big landscaped park next to the Red Sox Fenway stadium. I would carry my French easel there as it was one of the few places where I could paint the natural environment in downtown Boston. There was a small stream that ran through it that had reeds along it and a marsh that could have been far from the city. I was painting out there one day up at the end by the Gardner museum and a street gang slowly surrounded me at my easel. They were real interested in what I was doing and peppered me with questions. It was a relief though, when they went on their way.

I remember also from this era a trip to the Boston Museum with Ives Gammell. He knew that collection very well. He would walk us through the museum and exclaim on the various pieces, often noting what he believed to be changes in them caused by improper restorations over the recent years. He would point at a picture and exclaim loudly how it had been skinned, which means abrading away the delicate glazes in zealous overcleaning.. I am not expert enough to know if he was right or not. I remember standing in front of a small head by Dennis Miller Bunker and hearing Gammell explain why it was such a good piece of worksmanship. He was at that time the only one who had done research on and preserved some knowledge of Bunker. When the Boston Museum many years later staged a Bunker exhibition they began with Ives writings, which were the only scholarship available. Ives was a remarkable guy.

Of course when Ives walked us through the museum his loud commentary drew a crowd of bewildered onlookers who at first reacted with annoyance at his disregard for their contemplative quiet. But when they heard his authoritative explanations of the paintings, they would listen, sometimes following a room behind trying not to look as if they were listening in as Ives lectured his little group of four or five students. The guards scowled at him though. One thing he ranted and raved about, was in retrospect, prescient. The Boston Museum had begun to charge admission. Ives was furious, donors, like his own wealthy parents had given the money to build the museum and its collection, in order that it would be available to all. Ives felt that charging admission was a violation of their wishes and akin to charging people to go to the library. He probably knew that the admission fee would be raised until it was a big investment for the average Joe to walk a family of four through there, particularly if there was a special exhibition for which a second fee was charged.

I also remember going up the many flights of steps to the top floor of the Boston Public Library to see the murals there by John Singer Sargent.I think I went there with Gammell, but I am not sure. Forgotten at that time, Sargent had worked years to create them. They are more valued today. In those days Sargent was only being rehabilitated. it is hard to imagine that as recently as the nineteen sixties he had been dismissed as old fashioned, and an artist of empty technique, by a society that preferred Maurice Utrillo. There were only a few Sargents around I could see, but the daughters of Edmund Boit was hung on a stairway in the Boston Museum. Of course there was also the enormous and magnificent El Jaleo and a few others over at the Isabella Stuart Gardner museum.

Here is a shot of the Sargent murals which are now drawing visitors to what was once a forgotten corner of Boston history. The murals are a history of religion and full of religious symbols from the middle east. The back wall called the frieze of the prophets was much reproduced and admired when first hung the murals. here that is.....

and here is another portion of the murals, The Israelites oppressed.

Gammell who was so irate at the neglect of the forgotten murals would be pleased to know they are increasingly valued and visited today. My kids when showing their friends from away around Boston, always proudly include the Sargent murals in the tour.

A woman I had known years before in Minnesota came to visit me one week, bringing with her a friend named Bonney who I was quite taken with. She was a witty, hip and pale blonde built like Jean Harlow. We began a telephone and letter writing romance after she left again for Minnesota, and I began to feel that I was living an altogether too austere a life far from where I had been raised. This lead me to a decision, that looking back, was probably not a good one, at least from an artistic standpoint. I decided to return to Minnesota.

reproductions from artrenewal .org

Leaving the Fenway studios

I am fighting the technology again tonight. Those of you who follow the blog closely know I have replaced mu old, dead laptop, with an HP unit, it lasted about two weeks before the keyboard stopped working. I took it back to Best Buy, they didn't have another like it, so they gave me a new Toshiba. It is running really badly too. I must take it back on Monday. I have been going around and around with this for about three weeks. How it matters tonight is that I can't load photoshop. So instead of a crit I will do another installment of my personal history. That has been pretty colorful, and there are several installments that precede tonight's. They are here in the archives headed not autobiography,that includes a lot of things, but my chronological history.
When I left off the story I was living in the old Fenway studios and studying with R. H. Ives Gammell.

Studying in the Fenway studios was endless work, not much social life and no amenities, bathroom down the hall and no heat at night. After about two years, it really started to get old. But I was learning a lot from Gammell and it seemed worth the trade off. We students drew lots of figures copied drawings at the Fogg museum and paintings at the Boston museum. We painted along the Charles river and in the Fenway, a large city park.
I sublet my studio from an artist who had long since moved out of the building but still kept his studio. He rented it to me and I never saw him. I just sent him a check every month. The studio was sparsely furnished with a foldout sofa on which I slept, a dresser and a small table and a couple of chairs. One day I came home from painting and all of the furniture was gone. My clothes were on the floor where the dresser had been, and my sheets were on the floor where the foldout sofa had been. After a period of puzzlement and distress, I called the artist landlord, and sure enough, he had come into the studio with no notice and taken all of the furniture for some friend of his. Although I had rented the studio furnished, he felt that it was OK to take the furniture. Without leaving a note. I know its not polite to speak ill of the dead (which he now is) so I will only say that evidentally he was a decent fellow if you caught him sober, and I simply had the misfortune of never having done so.

I no longer felt like I wanted to sublet the studio and I was real tired of living that hard. So a friend of mine, a student of another painter named Robert Cormier, and I rented an apartment a few blocks away on Commonwealth ave. It is a tony address now, but then it was the student ghetto. The building into which we moved was full of music students from Berkleee school of music which was nearby. Now we had a refrigerator and a bathroom and all the comforts of modern life except maybe an elevator. It was a 5th floor walkup. Since the building had high ceilings it was more like a 7th floor walkup. It kept you in good shape anyways.

I was mostly painting landscape by this point, which must have been about 1975. David, my roommate, and I copied paintings at the Boston museum, he was copying Jan Van Goyen and I was copying a head of Isabella Brandt by Rubens. We talked a lot about art theories as art students that age do, and we had both developed a love for painting of the Dutch and of Rubens. As we admired those paintings it gradually became obvious to us that something was missing from the training we were receiving . We were being told that we should paint as much as we could like nature, and we already made paintings that looked more like nature than the baroque art we were admiring so much. That was a real philosophical problem. If the point of art was to paint like nature and we painted, or at least had friends who painted more like nature than the old masters, weren't we better artists than the old masters. We knew that wasn't so........

That realization started me on a road that diverged from the Boston school and to a different destination. It was during this period that Robert Douglas Hunter, who I guess could be called the dean of the contemporary Boston school, spent so much time mentoring me. He would come out to where I was working around the city of Boston and critique my efforts. There didn't seem to be a lot of conflict between what I was doing outside and his teaching, but the link between me and the Boston school method was weakening.

I was driving cabs several nights a week and now had friends who were musicians, mostly guitar players. I began to have a little more of a social life and I was emerging from the cloistered life of the Fenway milieu. I was working one day a week at the Guild of Boston Artists, an organization of which I am now a member. That was also bringing me into contact with older professional landscape painters like Bernard Corey and Paul Strisik. At that point neither of those guys knew I was alive, but I was admiring their work and would later know them both much better. Working at the Guilds classy Newbury street gallery was a real education for me. I am sure I walked away with far more than I gave them in my work there.

One day Robert Douglas Hunter asked if I would meet him there on a Sunday and help him out for an afternoon. At the appointed time I met Hunter,(driving a nice Mercury Bobcat wagon) in front of the Guild. He had one of the Vose brothers in the car with him. We drove across the BU bridge to Cambridge and there, across the street from MIT was an old brick warehouse. It was the sort that they used to letter FIREPROOF on the side in big block letters. We went up the elevator and down the hallway, through an arched brick doorway into a room filled with paintings. It was the estate of William Paxton, the American impressionist. Although he had died long before, his widow had lived on for many years. She had been close to Hunter and in her last years,and when she died, entrusted the estate to him. This was the first time anyone had gone through these paintings in many years. There must have been a hundred of them there. My job was to hold up the paintings one by one, so Hunter and Vose could examine each of them, and know the quality of what was there. Many of the great Paxtons in the museums and books were in that room on that day. Paxton was forgotten then. I had the good fortune to be a fly on the wall for a tiny bit of art history. It wasn't to be the last time either.
more another time...........

Remember to sign up for the September workshop in Jaffrey New Hampshire here.

Studying with R. H. Ives Gammell

The Fenway studios, Ipswich street Boston

Tonights post is a continuation of my own history. The posts that preceded it can be found here
here, and here. I have told you how in 1973 I came to study with the formidable R.H.Ives Gammell.
Now some 35 years later it is hard to remember as much as I would like to about this period of my life, but I will try and conjure a picture up of the atelier in the Fenway studios as best I can.

I am neither an expert on Gammell, nor am I anything like his best known student. Ultimately, I guess, I was one of the number who passed through his hands. I spent a time there, learned what I could, and then moved on and was influenced deeply by the Rockport school of painting. So I am not a typical Gammell trained painter although I guess I could still be called Boston school. There are some far more doctrinaire students of Gammell who would question whether I am the one to write this history. They have a point if they do ask. I would reply that I am writing MY history and that I was there.

As soon as I arrived, I became a part of the routine in the studios. We would assemble in Gammells large studio every weekday morning at 9:00 and he would discuss with us newspaper editorials he had read and disagreed with, he would quiz us on various painters from art history or recollect his days studying with the greats of the Boston school. We were David Lowrey, Tom Dunlay and myself and were joined later, by the returning David Curtis. Gammell would arrange when he would arrive in the students studios to critique their paintings and then we would be dismissed to 408, another large studio Gammmell rented down the hall. There we would spend the morning drawing figures. We had the same pose for three hours a day five days a week, often for up to two weeks. Sometimes less, but I recall no gesture drawing or quick poses.

The first day I was there, or maybe the second, Ives came to see what each of us was doing. He sat and individually corrected in an incisive and usually deadly accurate line the work of each of the others, often noting the anatomical points to which he was driving his lines. Then he came to me. I was drawing in pencil on a sheet perhaps 9 x12 and I was doing pretty well. I had been drawing the figure daily at the university for a year or more, studied briefly in the night classes of Richard Lack in Minnesota and copied a lot of Ingres drawings, so I was not a beginner by any means. I had practically memorized Vanderpoels anatomy, still my favorite book on the subject. As Ives had not asked to see any portfolio from me, this was the first piece of my work he had actually seen. He sat in my place and I stood beside him. He looked at the drawing for awhile and said,"this is better than it has any right to be". He made corrections on it and went on his way, but I did feel as if I had earned my place in front of the model.

The studio was huge and high ceilinged with an entrance a floor abov,e onto a balcony from the hallway, and three big north light windows providing cool and beautiful light throughout the day. The model was at one end of the studio by the staircase, with her position marked in masking tape on the floor at here feet. I don't remember a model stand, although they were around for portraiture. We had two modesl, one was Betty, and the other was, I think, Linda or Nancy. Both were dance students and very fine models. We would hire them and use them half days for many weeks. They were well paid and they were devoted and reliable. I still remember how excellent they were to this day. Most of the time we drew in charcoal about 18 inches high and we worked on the same drawing for about two weeks. I remember being very impressed with the pencil drawings done by David Lowery.

After spending the morning drawing the figure we would all go to our own studios to work on our individual projects. For Lowrey and Dunlay that meant still lives and portraits, for me it meant first what Ives called books and bottles and then later cast drawings. Books and bottles was an excersise in accuracy for the beginner, and it was just what it sounds like. A little pile of two or three books and a little ceramic mustard bottle or small ball were placed on a felt or velvet cloth on a stand at about chest level. We worked in a system called sight size. Much has been said about sight size and there has been some warfare over its value. But I think it was an excellent training method. Ives called it teaching us to see. I will do a post later showing you how to set up a sight sized still life in your studio, but tonight I will give just a brief description.

About ten feet or so back from the books and bottles was a position from which we always observed the setup. It was marked on the floor with a piece of tape where our toes would go. The drawing paper was on an easel directly next to the subject. We could look from the subject to the drawing paper next to it and make close comparisons to determine the accuracy of our drawings. The point was to draw as accurately as we could. We would stand on our line and make an observation, then walk forward to the easel and using our vine charcoal filed to a sharp point that Ives called a "dental instrument" make a mark on our paper. Then we would walk back to our observation point and make another observation, walk to the easel and make another little piece of the drawing. It was very addicting and the hours would slide by quickly as you worked.

The idea was that you only looked at the drawing from the observation point. We used plumb lines to determine what fell above or below another element. We would often push a drawing for several weeks. There were stories of legendary drawings that were worked on for months, although I never did one. We were expected to work for months in charcoal before we were allowed to work in paint.

Every few days Ives would come to the studio where I was working at a prearranged time to look at what I was doing. I was renting a working space from a former Gammell student named Sam Rose. Sam and Gammell had a falling out years before so when Ives arrived Sam would go hide in the back room of the studio and both he and Ives would pretend not to know the other was there. Ives had a wooden box he would stand on to critique our work. He called it his equalizer. He was a little guy, and all of us who were his students were over six feet. I was six foot four.

He would mount his box and you would stand next to him so he could hold your wrist to steady himself up there. Then he would squawk like a big parrot something like "its wrong! wrong, wrong. wrong! I don't know how in the world you could have gotten it so terribly, terribly wrong!" He would gingerly step down from the box, remember he was over eighty years sold at this point and trot energetically up to my drawing and correct a line or show me how I had missed the shape of something. His line was always righter than what had been there. If you have a problem with a teacher making corrections on your drawings Ives would be a nightmare for you. That was how he taught and he was merciless. I don't remember anyone ever telling him he couldn't, and if they had, they would have been ousted from the atelier. Ives was very severe, but I had been in a boarding military academy a few years before, so I had dealt with guys like him before, and worse.

One time he told me that what I needed was not a teacher, what I needed was an oculist. He could be brutal. But he charged us nothing and spared no effort to train us to paint. I owe him a lot and despite his prickly and neurotic behavior I remember him fondly as a remarkable character. That time was the low ebb for traditional painting and what he was doing was a radical act. Her was training revolutionaries. Things are much different today and it is difficult to imagine how exotic our training was at that time. There are many ateliers spread across the country today and virtually all are modeled on Ives Gammells teaching methods. Within that mileau he has a legendary status. After Ives left I would carry the box back to 408 and Sam would emerge from the back room and return to his easel. Sam painted in an unbelievably tight style and enameled surface with technical methods gleaned from his study of Maxfield Parish. We became fast friends and although Sam had some deep psychological problems we had a lot of fun together and I always enjoyed his sense of humor. He died a year or so ago.

After working for the day on muy drawings I would return to the studio upstairs where I lived. Part of the tine I had it to myself and part of the time I shared it with David Curtis. The Fenway studios were very primitive.. We had DC current, 120 volt DC current. As an early electrified building in Boston it was wired for Edison's system of direct current rather than the alternating current championed by Nicole Tesla. What that meant was that no electrical device newer than about 1917 would work. We had a device called a converter in the closet upstairs that was an alternating current generator than ran on DC. It was noisy and undependable. Much of the time we did without it. We had a hot plate with a cloth covered cord to cook on, and a sink.

The bathroom was down the hall about half a block, and there were no showers. You took a washcloth to the big enamel sink in the bathroom and washed yourself with that. We were always visiting people we knew who had showers. We would do this in rotation, first one friend and then another so as not to wear out our welcome by showering too often in one place. My friend Sam had a jury rigged shower up on base about six inches off the floor. Water was diverted to it from the sink and than collected in a coffee can where the drain would ordinarily be. From there it was returned to the sink with an aquarium pump. If you gauged the flow properly you could get a decent shower out of the thing, but if you got greedy and ran the water faster than the pump could remove it, you had a flood.

There was little heat at night in the studios as theoretically no one lived there, although in practice almost every studio was occupied. We had an ancient sort of pre World War I space heater. It looked like a flying saucer, the thing kids use to sled on, made out of shiny copper. In its center behind a grill like on an old style electric fan was a porcelain post from which bare copper wires were stretched to the perimeter of the saucer. These glowed red hot when it was plugged in and the thing hummed with an evil and malevolent menace. But by hanging a wool blanket over the entrance to the little room under the balcony in which we slept, it could be kept warm enough to be comfortable. In the morning David would grind French roast beans with a hand grinder and make delicious coffee on the hot plate which we drank with canned condensed milk as we had no refrigeration. There were no refrigerators in the days when the building was wired for DC.

We never had money for movies or other entertainment although I did have a fondness for the more inexpensive available whiskeys. All of our time was spent in study and ceaseless work or the contemplation of the days work propped up on a chair while eating canned ravioli cooked on that venerable DC hotplate. Grim.