Chapter
1 A
biography of Michelangelo that I read so glorified his life that it easily
lent itself to parody. My
exaggerated version would have the thirteen-year-old Michelangelo brought by
his father to the studio of the renowned painter, Ghirlandaio. The great painter tells his father that he will take on the
young boy as an apprentice for the usual fee.
Hearing this, the young Michelangelo speaks up. "My father will
pay you nothing. You should be
paying me!" Ghirlandaio is
taken aback as the boy continues, "Don't you know who I am? I am Michelangelo. At
twenty-eight I will carve a famous 'David’, and at thirty-seven I shall
paint the 'Sistine Chapel,' and in my fifties I will design the dome of 'St.
Peter's,' and you would dare ask my father to pay you seventy-five ducats a
year to have me as your apprentice." Most art biographies suggest that fame is almost predestined in its subject’s life. Reading their pages you can be confident that before you finish that final chapter he or she will be considered great, even if such recognition is slow in coming and that artist doesn’t live to see it. This story of an artist is clearly different; we both don't know that final judgment. A real career in art is filled with self-doubts and insecurity and is often sustained only by a vague dream that one might be producing great and lasting works of art. It is 1983, and unknown I am sitting down to write an autobiography in the belief that with the dream and lacking that final judgement I can still hold your interest, entertain you, and provide you with some insights into the contemporary art world. I will try to make this a humorous adventure with the grand theme of a self-imagined David facing a powerful Goliath and the Philistines. In keeping with the premise of the title and to avoid any suggestion of self-promotion, I have decided to remain anonymous; my last name will not appear on these pages. Let this be just an artist’s life. Here at the start, and hoping not to lose any romantic image of the struggling artist that you may have, I must confess, I am not completely unknown. I have placed one of the largest public sculptures in Manhattan, and have gained a commission for an even larger work for Europe. I have had many exhibitions in both the U.S. and in Europe, so why am I calling myself unknown? It is because I am unknown to the art establishment; the worldwide makers of "names" the arbiters of market value. To them my art doesn’t exist and, sadly, I fear that without at least some recognition my long-term survival living just by my art as well as the survival of that art will remain in doubt. For me to remain unknown, not to be a "collectable investment" in the contemporary art world, means that my works must be purchased or commissioned solely because someone likes them. That is a great compliment but a very precarious position. Art, especially bronze sculpture, requires a not insignificant financial investment and those with enough confidence in their own taste and artistic judgments are, as they probably have always been, a small minority. I can best explain the meaning of being “unknown” by relating a recent experience. Believing that my accomplishments made me ready for recognition, I took advantage of an offer by a contact in the art world to arrange a meeting with the director of an important New York gallery. Since there are no more than half a dozen living American artists with major public works in the heart of Manhattan, perhaps I could now consider myself apart from a sad realm of artists - those who, alas I remember it well, go from gallery door to gallery door hoping to find interest in their work and often being treated with the same regard as if they were bag-ladies who had come in looking for a handout. I
arrived at this prestigious gallery with a stack of photos of my recent work
under my arm. While waiting for
the director, I wandered through the large white- walled rooms.
By coincidence their current exhibit was of works by my former
teacher. A very sweet man, who
when I knew him was as unknown to the art world as I am now and was busy
casting wedges of fresh Italian cheese into bronze sculptures.
In the years since my school days that finger of fame whose point
often seems so arbitrary had landed on him and here he was a
"known" artist in a very well-known gallery.
There were no bronze cheeses. All
around were the current fashion for large steel construction beams and rods
assembled in a manner that suggested random chance or at least the willful
stifling of artistic judgment. It was sculpture so very much in the style of
the current gallery scene as to be, frankly, boring. Standing in the midst of all this heavy metal, hoping to see a wedge of fresh Italian cheese, bronzed or not, I was approached by a young man in a three-piece suit. "The director is busy right now. He asked me to look at your work." I followed him into a small office and handed him my photos. The one of the sculpture I’d just put up in Manhattan was on top. It was a dramatic photo of me dwarfed by my fifteen foot polished bronze male torso sparkling in the sun, with the World Trade Center towers in the background. He glanced at it and spoke, or perhaps he spoke and then glanced at it, it was hard to tell. "No, this type of sculpture isn't for us. We don't show work like this." "Why?" I asked, "why isn't this the type of work that you show?" There was a long pause. It was clear that my supposed important contact in the art establishment was not going to do much for me in opening this door. The man sitting across from me had hardly looked at my work before rejecting it; was there something fundamental that it or I lacked? What could it be? In the uncomfortable silence of that room I persisted, "You show the work of Henry Moore?" I knew that he was one of their top artists, well-known for his polished bronze torsos. The man nodded. "Well, I consider my work to be part of that same school of art that would include Moore." I thought that linking my name to that of a modern master might encourage him to look at my work more carefully. There was another long pause. He put that photo aside and picked up a photo of the scale model of my recent large commission for Europe. I showed him the impressive list of sponsors and told him of their plan to put a small scale model of the sculpture into a limited number of reproductions to be sold to help raise the money for the full-size piece. "Oh no," he said. "Our gallery couldn't have anything to do with that. The artists we represent often object to having their works put into even limited reproduction. For them integrity is the most important thing. Each work must be hand-finished. They wouldn't let anyone else touch their sculpture.” We sat looking at one another. Out
there in the gallery stood works that if made by hand had everything done to
them to make them look as if they were fresh from an industrial stamping
mill. What more could I say?
Sitting there, he looked as if he were very uncomfortable.
Perhaps, for all I knew, he was just the stock boy given the
unpleasant job of getting rid of another artist who, in this case, had to be
admitted out of courtesy to an establishment figure.
He put my photos down on the table and crossed his hands.
I picked them up and put them away.
He thanked me for showing him my work, and I thanked him for looking. I
walked out through the gallery where the shiny structural steel beams and
rods of my former teacher winked and glittered, pointed up, down, sideways,
and at me; useless signposts on the road to getting known. What was it that my work or I did not have?
There are some who are sure that they know the answer.
One
of my oldest friends calls himself an artist.
If you were going to make a movie about an artist he would be the one
you would choose to play the role - very handsome, with wild black hair and
dark eyes. He, as much as
anyone, believed in that Hollywood view of the artist.
Artists drank a lot and talked tough to women. In truth, my friend was really a carpenter.
He could make wonderful things with wood: fine tables, chairs,
cabinets, but carpenters don't have that romantic image of hard drinking and
being thought macho when they talk tough to women.
So, he called himself an artist.
He didn't have a profound knowledge of art but he quickly learned the
current jargon and worked at becoming a fierce and opinionated arguer.
With his wild appearance and apparent fierceness, he found he was able
to intimidate people and make an impression at art gatherings. When
I decided to leave New York to live in Europe we met to say good-bye.
"You're crazy, Roy, to go off to Europe.
It's here in New York where it's all happening.
It's here where you'll meet the right people, the people who can make
you. If you want to make it in
New York you have to forget this working in your ivory tower.
Now, my plan is to set up a fantastic-looking studio and then go to
all the gallery openings. There
I'm seen. I meet people. I argue with them. I
get recognized. 'Who's he?' they
say. I tell them I'm a great
artist doing great work. I tell
them that they don't know anything about art and that I am the only one doing
important sculpture. They become
interested in me. I get a
one-man show, great critical reviews; and bang, I'm famous."
"What will your art work be like?" I asked.
"Roy, you're missing the whole point.
It doesn't matter what your art work is like, if you impress them they
can make you no matter what you do for your art." I
left for Spain, but exhibitions and family commitments brought me back every
year or so. When in New York I
would visit my friend. On my
first visit I went to his new studio. He
was renting a whole four-story tenement on the lower West Side of Manhattan.
It was cheap because the area was scheduled for demolition.
While it looked like a slum from the outside, inside he had set up
that truly fantastic space. There
were lots of machines, half-finished wood constructions, drawings,
reproductions of the masters, exotic hand tools hung on the raw brick walls,
sawdust was all about, stacks of fine woods stood in a corner, and all was
dramatically lit with hidden fluorescent tubes and spot lights.
"What do you think of it? Impressive,
right! Now I'm busy making those
important connections." On my next visit about a year later the studio looked the same. The same half -finished wood constructions lay about and it even appeared that the same sawdust was on the floor. My friend told me about all the important people he had met. The names he dropped fought for floor space with the sawdust. He told me of his famous argument with this well-known art critic and an evening of drinking with that influential gallery director. Months passed and I again visited the studio. Nothing had changed but my friend now told me of his upcoming show. It seemed he had met the director of a very important gallery, and it had all gone just as he predicted. She was impressed with him and the big-name people he seemed to know. All that was needed to set up the one-man show was to have them visit his studio and hear his talk on what wonderful works he was going to do. I left for Spain before learning the results of this visit and it wasn't until about a year and a half later that we met again. "Did you have the show?" I asked. "No,
it fell through. I went too far,
I guess I just got carried away. Everything
was going perfectly. A group of
them came to my studio. I told
them of my plans, of the work I would be showing.
They thought my ideas were great.
Then one of them said that my work sounded to him as if it would be
like the great painter Franz Kline but done in sculpture.
I liked the comparison but I didn't think it was a good idea having
the sculpture I would have to do pinned down like that, so I started
attacking Franz Kline as a painter. The
whole argument didn't really matter to me but one thing seemed to lead to
another. I was attacking Franz
Kline and this guy was defending Kline; as I said, I just got carried away.
I lost my temper and wound up throwing the whole bunch of them out.
I didn't get the show but I did meet the head of the art department at
the university. I'm now teaching
sculpture." Over the years of those visits an odd coincidence occurred. As happens in New York you can often note the passage of time by new buildings going up or old ones coming down. On each visit to my friend's studio his area had fewer buildings left standing. Eventually his was the only one in a great sea of rubble. With the houses now gone on either side, he was able to build a large picture window into his living room wall. On my last visit we sat in his living room before this window discussing the machinations of university teaching and his continuing plans for that one-man show. Ironically, the view outside that new window faced the exact site where my fifteen-foot bronze sculpture was to be placed. The coincidence did not amuse him. "I'm not impressed," he told me, "you can put up ten fifteen-foot great works of sculpture in the heart of Manhattan but if you don't know the right people they'll all be ignored." I
have another friend, very different from the first, but also in his own way a
product or casualty of the New York art scene.
This artist is truly a great natural talent. He can do almost anything - draw, paint, and sculpt.
When first we met he was doing large abstract bronze sculptures.
They were very organic, variations on livers, hearts, and lungs, which
was in keeping with the fine medical drawings that he did to support himself.
As one friend felt that it was who you knew that was the key to
success in the art scene, this friend was sure that all it would take was
finding the "new" or "right" style that would attract the
important galleries and result in his recognition.
For a short while we shared the same studio.
I saw his large bronzes put aside and replaced by organic forms in
colored plastic. The fickleness
of the art world is such that novelty or newness is very short-lived so one
must be constantly running just to keep up.
There is no time for development, no time for maturing.
On those same returns from Spain, I would stop by his studio to see
his new work. Whereas one friend
never finished a work and his studio never changed, the other's was never the
same. A year later the organic
plastic forms had given way to geometric shapes in plastic, wood, and steel.
A year and a half later, we were again back in New York, and at a
gathering with artist friends, were taken out on to a very small
mid-Manhattan patio to see his newest work.
In each hand he held a can of charcoal lighting fluid.
As we stood around he lit the cans and by squeezing them was able to
shoot long smoky flames into the sky. It
was a fireworks display mixed with the anxiety that the cans might explode,
the house would be set on fire, or that the neighbors would call the police
and we'd all be arrested. The
next time we met it was in his new large studio, the fireworks were
forgotten, and he was now working on large wooden structures. He called them scale models for fantastic constructions.
They looked like the gigantic bones of dinosaur-like monsters.
Even just as scale models they were too big for most galleries to
display, and if ever made in full-size, they would rival the pyramids.
As he showed me around these models I noticed, off in a dark corner, a
life-size head of a beautiful woman done in a classical style.
"Yes, that's my work too," he told me.
I asked him if that was going to be his next style.
"Oh no, that's just for business." We
walked over to the head, which close up looked as if a fine renaissance
craftsman had carved it in marble. The
soulful eyes, the sensual lips, the flowing hair, were all molded in plastic.
He reached down and pressed a button hidden under her exquisite chin.
The beautiful woman's head hinged open to show a vivid display, in
multi-colored plastics, of her sinus cavities.
"It's for a pharmaceutical exhibit on nasal decongestants,"
he explained. On
my last visit to his studio, the giant structures were dismantled and stood
dust-covered against one wall. The
studio was now filled with the type of barriers that you would see on any
city street: "Danger - Men Working, Dead - End, Police -Do Not
Cross." They looked as if
they had seen years of service in New York City.
He told me that they were not stolen from construction sites but that
he had made them. They were
created to look old, worn, and just off the streets.
It was his new style. A
few weeks before this visit I had read a list in an art magazine that
included his name as a recent winner of a $10,000 grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts. It was
with this new work that he had won and I congratulated him on his success.
"I thought that I would eventually make it," he told me.
"I've been applying for the past ten years and I knew that sooner
or later one of my styles and a sympathetic jury would coincide." This
friend also, as yet, has not really made it as part of the New York art
scene, though he has exhibited in galleries that are on its fringes.
One would think that this type of work would be the outer fringe, but
not long ago I went, at the urging of a friend, to a New York gallery
opening. There were exhibited
works that by comparison made the street barriers appear high art. It was a massive group show of about a hundred individuals who could be called artists only if art is defined as anything made or found by man. As part of the exhibit were bricks painted green, feathers randomly stuck to paper, a found stone, a display of drawings that amounted to one or two lines across a page. I am the product of Abstract Expressionist teachers, so my tolerance for what people can chose to call art is very broad, but this was a truly sad exhibition. That one hundred people were seriously calling themselves artists and what they were exhibiting was in an art gallery seemed to show how far the words "art" and "artist” had come to losing all their meaning. Michelangelo
was taken by his father to study to be an artist in an age when art was a
profession with a clear function and purpose.
That is not so today. Contemporary
artists not only have to find their own individual creative voice but also
have to find a function and purpose for what they call their art.
It is a doubly hard task with little promise of reward.
So what is it ,then, that leads one to want to be an artist? Is it in the genes or in the upbringing? What is an artist like before he decides to become an artist? What must he then do to become and live as an artist? What is it like, the everyday life of an unknown artist living in an art world and during an era so full of turmoil and uncertainty? I shall try to answer these questions from a very personal perspective. I find it hard to bare my inner soul in words. That soul, for whatever it is worth, I cast in bronze, but I would like to believe that I am able to answer those questions through a series of good stories. It will probably turn out to be divided into three sections. There is the telling of those events and circumstances, some large, some trivial, hopefully all entertaining, that I believe have formed me or might offer you some insight into my personality. There is the adventure of becoming, being, complaining, and surviving as an artist. And there is the saga of Icarus. Clearly what links all these stories together is my artwork. Since this is a book without photos of my sculpture please feel free to imagine me as that really great unappreciated artist or just another hack with delusions of grandeur. Either way I would like to believe that it is an important story about art and about a particular time. I
shall start this autobiography with my birth.
No, not my actual birth, that comes later, but more appropriately with
my “birth” as an artist. Chapter
20
I
arrived into a world where time seemed to hold its breath and my future, all
our futures, might soon not exist. It
was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the week that changed me
forever. Afterwards I no longer
had doubts what I would do with my life - I would try to be an artist. In a world that could go to the brink of its own destruction,
the risks involved in fine art now seemed just slightly greater than my
becoming the successful, financially secure dentist of my mother’s dream. In those past two short years my life had changed. I went from a traumatized art student, to a sculptor's assistant, and an unsuccessful attempt to live just as a fine artist. Seeing this short artistic career coming to an end, in an act of desperation, I created the fictional sculptor, Dale Broza. To my surprise, he turned out to be a great success and became a generous patron. Dale made it possible to save enough money to be off on the high seas with my new wife heading for a nine month stay in Europe. So here we are, having now made a full circle we find ourselves, back at the end of Chapter 4. After
having read your way through these past nineteen chapters you have traveled
with me to my birth in The Bronx, meeting my parents, coming with me to
school and colleges, romance, Woodstock, Penny, Mexico, and the Army. After
all of this, I am sorry to have to report that as an account of how one
actually becomes a real artist, even an unknown one, it has been pretty thin
stuff. I hope that these stories
have been entertaining and in the telling you have been able to gain some
insight into me as a person - insight that a more skilled writer with a less
reticent subject would have been able to reveal much more fully and in much
less space. As we start Chapter
20 all that went before might well have been a prelude to any of a variety of
art related careers. The
Yugoslav freighter, Hrvatska, which in Chapter 4 left New York has, fifteen
days later, deposited us in Tangier from which Penny and I will cross over
into Spain. It will be there
that very quickly something truly magical will happen, where these past
twenty-seven years of living and desiring to be an artist would actually
change into my being an artist. To try to explain this transformation I will stay aboard ship on the high seas a little longer. Crossing the ocean by boat is a wonderful way of appreciating the vastness of the world. We traveled for fifteen days, for the most part, over a flat sea featureless and dull except for the moments of excitement when we caught sight of a whale in the distance, a passing ship, or land on the horizon. We all knew that beneath this calm, under the waves, was another great and vast world full of beautiful and exciting things, unknown to us pinned only to its surface aboard a ship. The sea we observed from over the sides of the Hrvatska, and the greater unseen world below our keel, makes a perfect metaphor for the artist's life we were about to live on the shore. Once we set up our studio and started to work, we fell into a lifestyle that, to the outside observer, would appear as flat, boring, and featureless as the surface of an unchanging sea. If this book were an attempt to be a true depiction of my becoming and being an artist, prepared in the correct proportion of events worth recording to time just spent working at producing art; the next chapters, succeeding volumes, a shelf full of thick volumes would be made up of pages almost completely filled with just the words, "Today I worked on my sculpture". Apparently boring and repetitious, day following similar day, a routine was to become so fixed and unvaried that had it not fulfilled some deep hidden need, it would appear to have been imposed on me by a bizarre military rule that required the equivalent of painfully slow typing forever or by a sergeant far crueler then my recent nemesis, Shvenka. The romance, the great discoveries, the works of which of which I was proud, were depressingly few and often even those were not what I had in mind when I started. Translating a concept into reality seems to be an imperfect process and to continue to work at it at all required first learning to expect much less of myself. Most often, even those occasional triumphs would be transformed over time into failures as my skill improved and expectations rose. Works I once thought successful and cast into bronze, I would later cut up and be happy to see disappear back into the crucible of melting bronze. In spite of this, day after day finishing a simple breakfast I would sit in my chair with my worktable by my side. It is about 10 A.M., the radio, our contact with the outside world, is either tuned to the BBC, the Voice of America, or the Spanish classical music station, and will remain on until we go to bed. Outside the sun is shining, and I hold in my hand some sheets of wax. Starting with an idea for a work of sculpture I bend, twist, cut, and mold the flexible wax until about 1 or 2 in the afternoon. After a lunch, followed perhaps by Penny and I taking a walk on the beach, I return to bending and twisting wax until dinner at around 8 in the evening. After dinner I work until 2 or 3 in the morning, put the wax aside, shut off the radio and go to bed. That's it, for seven days a week, four plus weeks a month, twelve months a year. Sounds flat, boring. and featureless, doesn't it? But, beneath that apparently dull surface, I was swimming in a vast hidden sea of exciting adventure, a world where never-before-seen things lived. They darted by to avoid capture, flashed their wonderful if unclear forms, caught in the distorting ripples they could appear beautiful but once lifted out of the water most often hung lifeless and ugly. Undeterred, I persisted sure that along some ocean bottom lay oysters that someday I would be able to pry open revealing wonderful perfect pearls. When I first started this long distance underwater swimming, the effort was at times so great that I would have to take naps in the afternoon from mental exhaustion. Eventually over the years the effort became less tiring, more pleasurable and this routine was to become as natural to me as breathing. When we left for Europe, Penny and I would have considered ourselves as being in love. We already enjoyed each other's company, shared most of the same interests, particularly the dream of producing art, but, with both of us living the life of the artist that I have described, we realized that along with love we were also a perfect match. We worked in the same studio, listened to the same radio programs, produced art, talked, were in each other's company all day every day, and slept in each other's arms at night. We never seemed to be bored with one another. It made a life style, perhaps intolerable for one person alone, a wonderful joint adventure. To some we appeared a bit crazy, a pair of hermits. Others remarked that we had the most perfect of relationships. Both were not quite true, but close. This
daily routine was of course broken up by the necessities of living; shopping,
friendships, exhibition visits, the business of selling and promoting our
art, working at the foundry, and eventually children. Still, it was to remain the dominant part of our lives and
the continual background for everything that happens in the rest of this
book. To save you a bookshelf of
repetitious pages I have edited out this day to day routine.
Like an explorer on a vast sea, I will write primarily about the
things that appear on its surface, a whale, a passing ship, a storm, and some
interesting undiscovered islands. In
art world terms: the gigantic surface efforts in finding the basic
necessities of survival, along with views of the bizarre and erratic
"Ship of Fools" that is the current art scene, sightings here and
there of the reefs and whirlpools thrown up by the turbulent 1960s and the
Vietnam War, and the many other dangers and pleasures that seafarers and
artists face on long and chancy journeys of discovery.
In the following pages I will also keep such things as gallery shows,
critical reviews, commissions, and those things more fitting for a resume to
a minimum. Having
prepared you with that powerful image of the vast apparently dull sea of our
day to day artistic life that was to be in Spain, we return to view the
Hrvatska which is steaming off into the Mediterranean leaving Penny and me on
the dock side in Tangier, Morocco………. Chapter
30
……….Not long after Icarus' inauguration I had a dream, not a real dream, more an imaginary dream. In it I am awakened at night by a golden glow in my bedroom and there, hovering near the ceiling, is an angel with robes of a high polished mirror finish. The angel speaks, "Roy, I have come to present you with two choices. You may want to pick them both but unfortunately you have to pick just one." I sit up in bed. Penny is fast asleep, and the children in their rooms seem unaware of this fantastic visitor. The angel holds up one of its fingers and continues, "Choice 'A' is that tomorrow morning the phone will ring and it will be a call from one of the top galleries in New York. They have seen your Icarus and want to give you a very large one-man show. You accept and a wonderful exhibition follows: the gallery prepares a magnificent full-color brochure, the opening is an impressive event with all the important collectors and critics on hand, all your work is purchased, the critics write wonderful reviews, and a long unintelligible story about your art appears in the art magazines with even your picture on the cover. Very quickly you are, to put it in one word, famous. Along with fame comes wealth, a large studio, travel, the ability to cast all the sculpture you want, and money with which to be generous to friends and family. Within a few years you are considered the greatest living artist and The Bronx has won out over lower Manhattan and Montroig in Spain to build the museum that will house your works. You will live your life filled with honor and respect and when you die, at an old age, the obituary in the New York Times will fill half a page." I am about to answer, but the angel motions for me to wait a bit longer. "Now", the angel continues, "It is fifty years after your death. There has been a reappraisal of the art produced during the latter part of the Twentieth Century. From this vantage-point that art is seen to have been very trivial, a search for mere novelty, little more than play toys for speculators. Sadly, the great body of your work is also seen to have been a part of that world. Slowly at first, but eventually, all of your sculptures wind up in scrap piles waiting to be recycled into bronze ingots. In a hundred years you and your art are completely forgotten." The angel pauses to catch its breath and, after adjusting its golden robes, holds up another finger, "Now for choice 'B'. Icarus, or your other works, bring you little recognition. Your life remains essentially the same. You ride that roller coaster of art with some good times and some bad. You do not starve, but money always remains a major concern. The contemporary art world ignores you, galleries show little interest in exhibiting your work, and your name never appears in the pages of the art magazines. You live a long and generally productive life and when you die there is no obituary in the New York Times, though there is a big story about a teenager almost run over in Queens. Your works survive in the care of a small but appreciative group of collectors. It is now fifty years later and that reappraisal has taken place. You are recognized as a great artist. How was it possible, those future art magazines write, that these magnificent works of art could have ever been ignored? Your bronzes are lovingly collected and placed in grand museums where they bring great enjoyment to the many who come to see them." The angel finishes and pausing points to me, "What is your choice, 'A' or 'B'?" "I chose 'B'." I say. The angel looks bewildered and chides me in a voice that sounds a bit like my mother's, "How can you make such a choice? You don't believe in an after-life. You don't believe in reincarnation. You will be bones by the time this fame comes. It will be beyond your knowing, beyond any satisfaction of having been proved right, beyond any savoring of glory. Be sensible, pick 'A'.” The room is quiet. Through the window I can see the stars and the passing clouds. "I agree", I say. "It does seem illogical, but for me there is even something that I fear more than dying as an unknown artist, and that is, time. There is so much more of it than there is of life. For some reason I can't explain I need to believe that my visions of this most wonderful experience of living will have a place in that frightfully vast future. I will be dust, but I need to believe that what I have created will be a part, even if only a small rhinestone, of that long and beautiful necklace that links the works of unknown masters in dark Ice Age caves, through the Parthenon, the Renaissance, in Asia, in Africa, in modern times, tomorrow, and on to some stranger I will never know who might be touched by my art work while traveling among the stars." The angel, just a bureaucrat, has no interest in a dreamer's philosophy, opens a large book, and records my choice. The glow fades, the angel disappears, but in the darkness I feel the wonderful sensation of being free at last from uncertainty, free from those doubts about the real quality of my work. Then I awake. I realize that it was only a dream. There is no angel to guarantee my choice. As an artist I must work in darkness, no more sure of my place in the future than in the present. I get out of bed, have breakfast, and Penny and I go to work in our studio, as usual. Three months after Icarus was inaugurated, the art critic of the New York Times wrote a favorable review about it. He called Icarus, "...one of the most ambitious outdoor sculptures in New York City." At the same time I was commissioned to provide a major bronze monument to the international volunteers who fought on the side of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. This was to be the first such monument in a democratic Spain. The sculpture titled, David and Goliath would be larger in scope than Icarus and include my playing the role of architect and designing the hundred foot sculptured plaza where this work would be placed. Encouraged by this news and the Times review, I called a well-connected contact with the New York gallery world. His response was effusive, "Roy, I read the comments in The Times. It's great and I've seen Icarus and it deserves every word of praise. Just leave things to me. I'm going to call one of the top galleries and insist that they look at your work. With Icarus in place and your new exciting commission for Europe I am sure that they will want to meet you and see the work of such an accomplished artist." He arranged a meeting and I visited the well known gallery and.....well, that's where we first came in way back at the very beginning of this book.
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