This top third-floor studio in a decrepit red brick house was a lucky find, because its view of the East River afforded the stimulation of a waterfront. Particularly at twilight the fumes of oil tar and bilge recalled the excitement of embarkations. Just a couple of miles down were ships to anywhere. The only disturbing note was that on the other and fashionable side of the street high apartments were rising for those social registerites seeking a last stand, a barricade against the middle class invaders sweeping eastward from Riverside Drive who had captured Fifth Avenue and were laying siege to Park. But as yet it was still more restful to look away to the atmospheric impersonality of the Queensborough factories than to face a side street building and the constant movement of people to, at, and from work. Office workers, milliners, furriers, endless city occupations were distracting because a temptation to paint immediately as impressions. Memory helped the brush find the living line, the form, color; memory crystallized the theme and image. Now ten years later he could see and paint Grandma and the boy of fourteen reading to her impatiently. In his memory as accentuating mirror was the little sitting room precariously perched on a tiny pension. He could see now the fourteen-year-old boy reflected in the thick glasses Grandma wore almost sightlessly. "Your head is your father's, long and narrow," she had said, stroking it. What a burden for an old woman to be saddled with a two-year-old because of a train washout. "The water that you touch sure is the last of what has passed and the first of which comes." What yap assured me in Paris that Leonardo wasn't a painter but a photographer—Oh yes, Clem Brush, one of ten thousand polishing Cézanne's apples. Sure painting has to be more than photography, academic or camera record. But not emotional slops of palette scrapings framed by heavy black lines, stretched paint rags, or unconscious automatic scratchings a la Dada. A painting has to be consciously made even when it's of the unconscious. One must be awake to paint a dream. A portrait has to be personal. Photography is flat because it's an impersonal mechanical record. A Rembrandt, portrait or etching, is the work not of an impersonal hand, or mechanical lens, but of a human eye with vision plus a hand capable of creating a living image in line color form. An image which has not only aesthetic meaning but which communicates it to other human beings.
A breeze came up from the bay, with it a sickening waft of animal blood from the midway slaughterhouses. River and sky were separated only by distant checkerboards of lighted factory windows. A
