We first went to Barcelona, then spent a month in the Hotel Inglis in the city of Valencia while I drove about the countryside trying to find a house to rent in a country where no one rented houses. Everyone lived in the house they owned. It was winter; wet, dark and not at all […]

After I graduated from the Ruskin I went back to the States. I wanted a job that involved drawing or painting so I could pursue my studies in art for my own purposes, and I could build a body of work. I had a cousin in a Boston suburb who worked in advertising. The economy […]

When I was finishing up my time at the Ruskin, we had to submit a portfolio for the diploma we would get from the University of Oxford. It was really the only time the link between the University and the Ruskin existed. Along with the portfolio, we had to submit an essay and then present […]

One summer vacation, while I studied at The Ruskin, I took a trip to Florence, Italy, with a young student named John Stevens. While on the train from the Port to Paris to change trains, we met an Italian girl named Emma Bionde. She was in tears, her mascara running down her face and her […]

The teachers at The Ruskin didn’t work too hard. They came in one or two days a week from London, glanced at our work, and said something like, “That looks very nice.” Then they engaged you in some conversation that they thought was clever and you smiled, and they thought they were intelligent and that […]

I drove through a classic English pea soup fog to get to a gallery opening that John Mason had in London. There were so many roads and canals on the road from Oxford to London that it was as moist as a wet sponge. I was leaning out of the window of an old Mercedes […]