It was the last ride of the Southern Crescent. Trains were no longer making a decent profit, and this particular old fashioned one, with its run between Boston and New Orleans, was to be discontinued. They loaded my black streamer trunk filled with paint, canvas, and supplies on to the train. I was settling in as it moved slowly out of the station. I worked my way to the dining car. Black waiters in white jackets with large metal trays emerged from a steaming kitchen as if from some yet unwritten Canto. I was seated next to a croupier from  Atlanta and we discussed his art as we rumbled along eating our dinners. The train rumbled, the plates rumbled; everything - the cutlery, the glasses, my teeth - was shaking. I was twenty seven, couldn't believe any of this still existed and thought what a shame it was to lose it.

Bill Smart, the director, met me at the Station in Sweetbriar and drove me to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He showed me around the large southern-style mansion where a dozen artists and writers were housed, then out to the stables which had been converted into painting studios and writers' rooms.

I was to stay for two months on a work scholarship, which meant an hour or two a day of painting walls or cleaning up the kitchen at the side of a few of my poor painter-poet colleagues. There was one familiar face among them. Carl Woods was a hard working, grey haired poet We met previously at the Millay Colony for the Arts. He methodically kept hundreds of rejection and acceptance notices  from various magazines in two wooden boxes. He was as poor as a church mouse and lived in the attic of the Center as a sort of permanent ward of Bill Smart. Though young enough to be Carl's son, Bill was like a father to him.

In many artists colonies the fellows work alone all day in  and meet in the evening for dinner and an affable exchange of creative and inspired thinking...in theory. At dinner the first evening I discovered a dozen middle aged, middle class, alcoholic female writers. By the first course they had picked up quite a bit of momentum and were arguing virulently about everything, anything and nothing. It was the first time l'd been in the South. I was a long way from home, didn't know a soul

As I was wondering how (and if) I was going to make it through this Sari Denes entered. She was eighty years old with a huge white ball of curly hair and the colorful robes of an African princess. She made strange drinks with bananas and garlic in a blender brought for that purpose - of which I drank copious amounts. It was a small price to pay for the pleasure of her company. She took me to openings, presented me to well known artists, introduced me to the I Ching, even met women for me to go out with. She found so much wonder and magic in the oddest things. She would stop in delight to photograph some stains and markings on the sidewalk or to pick up a squashed can and examine it as if it were some relick of an ancient civilization. Then careful store it in her giant multicolored sac. We went to the Smithsonian lnstitute and stood before the almost lifesize portrait of her, done by Alice Neal. That is the image of her that I keep today.

today.

Alter a few days it started to rain and then to freeze. The rain turned to ice as it hit the ground and covered everything, including the telephone lines and tree branches, with a clear, solid, shining coat. The fellows were huddled in the salon by the fireplace, sipping their bourbon and trying unsuccessfully to be cheery. I decided to take a walk out to my studio in the stables about one hundred yards from the house. I was slowly walking down the road, marveling at the transformation of the southern landscape into a crystal wonderland, when there was a loud crack. Over my head about half of a towering tree was on its way down. There was no time to moue. I stood dumbfounded as the ice­laden branches came showering down. The broken trunk stil) clung to its origins but now hung upside down, leaving a curtain of branches and ice dangling two feet in front of me and blocking the road. Stunned, I thought perhaps l'd skip going to the studio and instead retuned to the house. It had been a close call.

About an hour later the electricity avent out. It stayed out. For several days. There we were, my merry band of bourgeois ladies and I with no lights, no heat, no running water. My trip to an artists colony - where one is spoiled and all elements are created to promote creativity in ideal and undisturbed conditions - was turning out to be quite something else.

The director arrived. Ah, good news? WRONG. His basement was flooding and he was desperate. Carl Woods and I got a couple of buckets and avent down there before the house sunk. We bailed for hours. We were knee deep in water and it was below zero. Still we hauled bucket after bucket out of that

basement until the house was safe.

The next day I was in bed with a high fever that lasted about a week. When I recovered, the storm was over, the ice had melted, the electicity was back. Bill said that I didn't have to work anymore. I had done enough. He was very

grateful.

He had a mouth full of tacks and never stopped talking. Miraculously, between each sentence he would bring one out standing straight up on the tip of his tongue. He would adroitly catch it on the end of a small tack hammer and bring it down onto the edge of the taut canvas where it stood up straight, just the tip sunken in the wooden stretcher. He'd flip the hammer over and sink it to the head with one blow, barely losing a beat in the rhythm of his story....

Narozni had started working in a canvas factory when he was about fifteen. In his early years, he stretched about 200 canvases a day, or so he claimed, certainly explaining his unique skills. He had noticed that the gesso, the white ground commonly used to prepare canvas for painting, was not solid, and it would often crack along the edges. Narozni realized that if it cracked so easily, it could crack under the paint, perhaps damaging a great work of art. He dedicated the rest of his life to canvas and its preparation.

He explained to me me that the climate in the south of France is perfect for the preparation of canvas, hot  and dry. In his traditional Provençal villa on a sunny hillside, he developed his own formula for gesso which would be indestructible. Narozni would wake at dawn to mix his magic formula in giant drums. He loved to demonstrate its properties by folding, crinkling and crushing a sample which would never - even under torture - crack, flake, or break. Two huge 25 meter long rooms, faced in stone to match the local architecture, were built to accomodate the work.

The roll of canvas, generally 10 meters  by 2.16 meters, must be stretched out on one huge frame. It is then laid out flat. Several workers run up and down the length of it with long squeegees spreading the thick white liquid evenly over the surface. With a crash they flip the frame upright and stack it with a dozen others, and then flip the next one over on the table and begin again. The floor is thick with dried gesso. The workers are white, covered with it. The canvas is made of either linen, cotton or, more recently, polyester. Narozni is in his office, counting the number of threads per centimeter in the weave of a sample of belgian linen which he is about to order.

He is as passionate about his creation as any artist is about his painting. Where would we be without him? I am grateful to see how it is made, to be in touch with being a painter on that level. And to see the stone buildings on the hillside overlooking a valley multiplying and expanding to accomodate the six hundred rolls per week which he produces and ships around the globe. I often wonder who paints all of Nazroni's canvases and where all of those paintings go.

In late summer the Baskins returned from thier sabatical in Devonshire, England. I had been house-sitting for about six months. Working in Leonard's studio, plowing through his art collection. They were quite shocked to find that it never occurred to me to mow the lawn and the grass was waist high. We didn’ t have lawns in my neighborhood in Brooklyn and I was much too consumed with my new discoveries to notice what was between the library  and the studio in the carrage house. They were also confounded to learn that I'd made absolutely no plans for myself after thier return. Again too preoccupied. They owned a fourteen room 18th century Inn which was a historical monument in Hadley Massachusetts and they moved me there until they could figure out what to do with me.

Where would you like to go? They asked . Well I did always dream of studying the great museums and Cathedrals of Europe. He immediately got on the phone to a well know national foundation for the arts and explained that he knew a  talented young artist who was destitute and without a home (neglecting to mention that he'd just put me out of his own home). A few days later a check came. They have an emergency fund for artists and were careful to state that this was not an official grant and I was not to put it on my resume. Fine. Another miracle and another dream come true. It was just enough to buy tickets on Icelandic Airlines to Luxemborg. I was twenty one and when I got off the plane I had’ t the faintest idea of the geography of Europe. But I had a map, a napsack and  some names and addresses. One of them was in Florence and after a few stops and a few adventures I found Massimo at his lace tablecloth stand in the market. He had a small apartment to rent and I took it without hesitation. It was a few steps from the Medicci Chapel and there began a daily exploration of Italian Art. At the American Embassy and I obtained permission to study at the print and drawing room in the Uffici Gallery. It was open three mornings a week and I'd go with sketch pad and pencil. They would bring out volumes of renaissance drawings Tiepolo, Pontormo, Bronzino and on and on. I copied and drew. I also discovered that they had an almost complete set of Rembrant etchings and those too became as familiar as old friends. In the afternoons and odd mornings I'd go to the museums and churches. The Bargello was my favorite. Alter four months of looking every day I was still discovering new masterpieces right around the corner from my apartment.

Soon it was time to move on. Our railpasses were dated. Carrying my huge pack I began two months of sleeping on trains or in the cheapest of hotels. Cooking rice and spagetti on a camping stove in my room. Meeting strangers and becoming instant traveling companions sharing food, rooms, stories, adventures. In Rome, Napels, Madrid, Seville, Munich, Vienna, Paris, and London I visited the great museums and monuments. I took in the landscape from the tip of Spain overlooking the Sraights of Gibralta to the lochs of Scotland and the glaciers of Mont Igor in Gruderwald Switzerland. Bedraggled and begiled I finally landed in London. At last a land where they spoke my language. At least sort of. I visited the Royal Acadamy and thought I would love to study there. A help wanted sign in the window of a bookshop caught my attention and somehow I convinced them to give me a job. A job in London! Just off of Trafalgar Square. I'd never really thought about having a job before. It was something other people did. But I loved it. I was taking a red double decker bus to work with all these people in suits and ties carrying umbrela's. What fun. More important I could stay and was meeting people every day. Going to the pubs where grandmothers and teenagers drink and sing together. All the museums were free and I worked just around the corner from the National Gallery. I would go everyday on my lunch hour and look at one or two paintings, devour them. Slowly I worked through the museum in that way. First the impressionests, then the Rembrants and then Vermeer, etc., etc. One or two at at time. Delicious. The best way to study art.

I was living in"University Village", supposedly housing for students on the Old Kent Road south of Elephant and Castle. They were several rows of prefabricated shacks surrounded by rubble, broken glass and corregated sheet metal. There was about five feet between each row. There were four to five "students" in each two bedroom shack. The neighborhood consisted of bombed out houses that had never been rebuilt after the war and low income highrises. It was the worst slum I had ever lived in and I had a great time. Through our student friends and at work I was meeting more and more people. My bookstore was right next to the opera and I went often to the ballet and met many people from the theater. It was time to move again. I was deeper and deeper entrenched in life in London, painting well and was about to take an apartment in Portabello Road. Upwardly mobile and making a life for myself as an American in London. But life in University Village had taken it's toll. I had obtained a special deal from the landlord and my wife and I lived in a shack that was so bad it had been abandoned until we arrive. We had it all to ourselves for a very minimal rent. There was a hole in one wall and the other one used to come apart from the house at the bottom so that I would have to go and kick it back in place from the outside. We had no heat ;  Just before our  move to hip London society my young wife came down with some strange illness. We went to the hospital and they said she had a depression. They gave her some medicin which rendered her comatose. It turned out to be Pluresey and we were soon on our way home. Other adventures awaited us.

H.M., Hisayo, and their two daughters lived in a little ramshackle bouse on the top of a hill in upstate New York. They'd gone through a lot of changes since H.M. had organised my exhibition in Japan three years before when I'd stayed in their lovely, traditional bouse in Yokohama.

This evening they had planned an extraordinary dinner for me to meet the gallery owner who had held our exhibition in Toronto. A leg of venison was in the oven, a bottle of 1988 Medoc was uncorked, to be followed by a 1982 Puillac and a 1980 Sirrah from California, which were breathing, almost audibly, on the buffet.

As we were seated the wind began to pick up. The blinds shook, and the windows rattled in their casings. There were tornado warnings out. H.M. had a little transistor radio , the kind we used to take to Coney Island and that I heven’t seen since the sixties. By the main course we turned it on. There were, in fact, several tornados whirling about the area. We ate our sumptuous meal and drank our fine vines while we listened nervously to the course of the storms. In between the crackling old Elvis songs, the announcer traced the path and speed of each one - toward which towns it was headed and how fast it was moving. The news was clear: at least one was headed directly toward us.

The gallerist and her husband had two young boys with them, so there were four children at the table. The bouse began to shake with  violently. Fear was starting to mount in each one of us at different rates, yet there was a strong desire to finish the meal. The radio told us to go into the cellar. It became an unstated contest to see who would be the first to leave the table and who would be the last to remain, pleasure dominating fear and risk. We started the second bottle of wine and finished the main course. The shutters and blinds were making so much noise that it became difficult to hear the radio. The women rose from the table to take the children down,. We lingered a little longer over our venison  and even more tasty  game of "chicken" and then finally took our wine glasses, the cheese (H.M. had lived in France for many years before moving to Japan), and the radio to safety.

The basement, which was also used as a wine cellar, was made of dirt that slanted down from all sides towards a rough central pillar of concrete which held up the bouse. We crouched along the side, thinking that, if it were to be our last moment on earth, at least we had great wine and a hearty cheese to take us out.

It was raining as well and the basement started to fill slowly with water. The children began to wimper. We waited several hours. There was enough aged wine to last several weeks. Finally it was time for someone to go upstairs and see...There was a clear possibility that the bouse in which we'd begun a convivial dinner might no longer be there. We cracked open the door.. The wind had died down but the barometer was still very love and it felt strange to walk around the recently abandoned bouse. the empty plates and platters still on the table. It was over.