Art students don’t go to galleries. They go to inaugurations and hog down on the free snacks and wine. This is a fine tradition that has kept many an honest artist from starving to death. They don’t visit galleries when the gallery has nothing to drink or eat.

I lived in the hotel Sauto in the big front studio for two years. One day I noticed a young woman in the courtyard dribbling ink on a newspaper then folding and opening the paper, making her own Rorschach test. She seemed pleased with the results. David Wright, another painter living in the Sauto, joined me as I was watching the dribbler dribbling. "RISD student," he said, as if this explained everything.

I knew that a group of Rhode Island School of Design students were staying at the hotel. I mentioned to David that none of the students had visited my studio. "Same here," said David.

A short time later I opened a gallery on Zacateros, on the way to the Instituto. For five years a visitor under the age of 25 was a rare thing. Out of curiosity, or perhaps out of boredom, one day while watching the gallery I called 10 artists I knew, some with galleries. I asked them if they had many art students visit them. No, none of them had ever had an art student bug them for a critique, advice, or to see their work—except three, each of whom had had one student visitor each.

Puzzling.

Perhaps it’s an anti-figurative thing. Most of the artists I’ve talked to are figurative.

I once had a conversation with a couple of students at an inauguration. The exhibit was made up of a series of formaldehyded ponies wrapped partially in ace bandages suspended from the ceiling. I suspect that almost everyone would have something to say about those ponies. Well, it was hard not to, they were right there. I guess that was the point. Getting the attention of the viewer. Showing how easy it is.

So can we conclude that good figurative art will not necessarily capture the attention of young artists? If one wants to capture the attention of young artists, does it have to at least include a dead pony?

Is this really just the curse of being an "art colony", which brings with it the assumption that art showing here today is decorative and for tourists?

Of course, none of these are a good a reason for not looking at art in galleries.
Simply stated, I think it’s weird.

I remember as a kid hanging around Ned Fish’s gallery-studio in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in the mid-1950’s. There were a few of us who thought we wanted to be artists of some sort, and hanging around Ned's seemed like a cool thing to do. Ned would do a charcoal portrait of one of us occasionally and I remember watching the life come to the drawing like magic. Up around the corner was Ham Turner’s studio. When Ned kicked us out we'd go bug Ham. Ham was a big burly guy with deep rumbling laugh, wore a beret and dressed pretty much like a British army officer. We thought he was pretty strange. I don’t know what he thought of us. For Ned, I think we were free models. The town had given us a name, the small group of us that worked on fishing boats: wharf rats. These two artists put up with us. Not only that, they invited us to their monthly gathering of town artists for group critiques. With great humor, mixed with compliments, they slaughtered us. What patience they had to put up with us. We were not any way near as bad as our reputation. We were in some vague area between annoying and criminal. Imagine inviting us into their studios. What nice men.

The first painter who sat down and tried to teach me something was an abstract expressionist named Adja Junker. I got my first studio in a loft on the Bowery across the hall from Junker. The first time he saw my work he asked me if I had been to school:
"No. "
"How old are you?"
"25."
"Probably too late."
He left and did not speak to me for a year. Every time after that, when he saw me in the stairwell, he looked as though I had ruined his day. At the time, Junker had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. I went to see his work and it was very powerful. Pissed me off. That’s why I can remember every word of that short conversation. It pissed me off enough that I stopped painting bad abstracts for people with chrome couches in Scaresdale and decided to see if I could actually learn to paint.

That, as I said, was my first teacher. That is, later, he would become my teacher. A year later.

Next was Gilbert Riou. I met Gilbert at an art in the park show in Patterson, New Jersey. We were both there for the $500 First Prize. I had walked about 100 yards of hurricane fencing on which was hung the same work you see at all of these shows. Then I came to Gilbert's work; paintings of pots and pans in a sink, an old woman, a letter, all painted like a modern day Vermeer.

I told him how much I liked is work, that there wasn’t much to see amongst all these painters, apart from him. He said there was one painter worth seeing. Big paintings of Coney Island, pale flesh tones, pasty, not strong composition, but worth seeing.
"That's me," I told him. "Where do you paint?"
"In my mother’s kitchen. She’s not happy about it."
"I know a place. $100 a month. Downstairs from me."

Gilbert painted downstairs from me for seven years. He taught me most of what I know about painting.

Vince Caprera taught me to draw when I was 36. Vince was a direct and funny teacher and taught me everything I know about drawing. Vince started out by insulting me. He told me I could push paint around, and did interesting things with color, but couldn’t draw worth a lick. Vince could hear, from across the room, someone making that scratchy uncertain sound that people who can't really draw make on a piece of paper with charcoal. He should have been a baseball player. He always carried a kneaded eraser in his hand and when he heard that sound he could bean the nervous student with one graceful sweep of the arm.

I visited Vince in Piermont, New York, a couple months ago. He is now 83. He excitedly showed me a new medium he had made from reading the painting methods of Valasquez. He is more prolific now than ever before.

But equal to what these fine artists have taught me has come from talking to other artists about art, what they think it is, and how they do it.

Leonardo once said, "Listen to everyone, even they guy who comes to fix your sink," or something like that.

On the other hand, when I complained to the ash can school painter, Jack Levine, about how disappointing my day in the Soho galleries had been, he said, "Yeah, I never go to the galleries anymore, there's never anything worth stealing."