An Unfound Door.

Yesterday I went to the corner deli to get cigarettes and a chocolate bar, everywhere were newspapers with photographs of a young devastatingly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor on the covers. I had seen a still very gorgeous Taylor while in college. I had my first and last show of some of my paintings, a piece or two from a series I had been working on based on Michaelangelo's slaves on his tomb for Pope Julius, a great favorite of mine and something I was 'studying' whatever that means as an art student in a small mountain village in Switzerland. Apparently, I don't remember much, my professor, a charming man who enjoyed a bit of scotch with his breakfast and who had come to this small Swiss village to teach via Oxford had sent in my work for a show in the very posh village of Gstaad where the swells and stars gathered. So I had to go to the opening, not really one of my favorite things to do.

As I walked from where the bus dropped us off to the gallery space, this all a bit hazy, except for seeing the most beautiful face I had ever seen. She had a scarf on her head, so I didn't really see the famous black hair, but I'll never forget her eyes, her skin, flawless, such incredible beauty without any make-up on. That I'll never forget. No idea where she was going, but it wasn't anywhere about celebrity, just a woman walking in a mountain village. I had to go to this opening where the swells had gathered. When two women came up to me covered in furs and jewels and asked me while looking at one of my paintings if this was the new 'dry brush' technique, I decided right there to give up any thoughts of trying to make it in the world of 'art'.

So I drank too much wine, got a bit ill on the bus back from Gstaad to Leysin, the village where I went to school and went to my room and studio which was on top of the building I lived in, an old TB hospital where Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain and destroyed all my work, a practice I tend to continue to this day.