Lest you forget...

my literary muse...

One of the favourite facts I have ever learned in my life came from Dabney, or Mckinley as so many of us called him... McKinley was the man who introduced me to martinis (I don't drink anymore...but wow!) ; educated me on his days hanging out with James Baldwin; told me about his experiences in the Korean War. Mckinley was a surrogate father to me, and his partner, Marie D. Brown my literary and life mentor. 

I remember having an amazing conversation with him (one of many) where he told me this story about Picasso. About how there were days that P wouldn't get out of bed, how he would have to be begged and cajoled by whatever lover he had at the time. He had to be told he was great, to get out of bed, because, well, he was sometimes depressed. That story will always stay with me. Love to the spirit of Mckinley, and the spirit who brought me to him. May we all embrace peace. Love you Marie D. Brown

Pablo Picasso, 1952 :
From the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. The 'refined,' the rich, the professional 'do-nothings', the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art.

I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my mind. The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich.

But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown - a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.