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Lessons From a Road Trip & a Chimp in the Louvre — Pilgrimage to the Source pg223
Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
Meandering through the Grand Gallery of the Louvre it struck me that 90% of the paintings were commissioned. According to a certain professor they were all whores. (Art school. I swear.) I think of commissions as ‘painting for them’ and unstructured studio time as ‘painting for me’.
Favorite ‘paint for me’ artists in the Louvre were Giuseppe Acromboldo who created fanciful faces composed entirely of vegetables and fruits in the 1500s, and a guy named Decamps who did a lovely little oil of an intense chimpanzee painting a luminous landscape in a dim, cluttered studio. — From Chapter 12
When I was young in ’78 I drove across the US with Fred, a strange and brilliant chemist/inventor in his late 30s. The radio in my Pinto was for shit, so I would read stories out loud from a sci fi magazine. One was Exploration Team; a story of intelligence-enhanced bears who served as bodyguards on a wild planet. The Big Front Yard was about a do-it-yourself yankee trader whose house was mysteriously turned into a portal to an intergalactic flea market for ideas. Then I listened to Fred’s tales of growing up in Sacramento. One in particular involved a get-rich scheme and creative…
