Nothing we studied explained why, leaving us baffled and belligerent, the normal state of the would be artist. No classes were offered in the politics of creativity, and our teachers could only teach us art, not experience.

There were many talented students in the art department of the university I attended, and perhaps the most gifted of all was Fred Holle. I thought so. He was, and remains, as fine a draftsman as I have ever known. Even then he could begin a drawing of a human figure at the shoulder, draw in one nearly continuous line through to the wrist, go to the other side and starting at the uppermost part of the biceps, extend another line down through the wrist on its other side, all with great accuracy and precision, so that those lines became the arm. In this way he continued until the entire figure was drawn. It was remarkable. His line was firm, authoritative, elegant, and these figure drawings, of which I saw hundreds, were very simple and beautiful. He loved drawing, and it seemed to me that drawing loved him. I began to love both. It was Fred who first made me aware of many of the qualities of sound draftsmanship, and initially through his influence I came to believe that fine drawing is the foundation of fine art.

In those years, even as Fred, myself and others diligently prepared ourselves to become professional artists, an unpleasant prospect began to hover on the periphery of our activity; namely, our chances of making a living painting pictures were about as bright as a blackout. After graduation, the unpleasant prospect became an even more unpleasant reality.

Basically, an artist hopes to make a living from the sale of his work, and this usually means that he must become associated with an art dealer. The problem is that there are many thousands of artists and relatively few dealers. Dealers obviously will only contract with an artist whose work they believe they can sell, and even the most cautious are wrong more often than they are right. If they misjudge too often, they become ex-dealers, and this awareness helps to make them extremely careful in choosing the artists they represent.

Dealers specialize in art which they themselves like. Therefore, from the artist's point of view, the only dealers worth contacting are those who deal in the particular kind of work which that artist does. Thus, it would probably be a waste of time for an artist who paints abstractly to contact a dealer whose gallery walls are hung with paintings by Grandma Moses.

Unburdened with any awareness of such considerations as these, I was instead preoccupied with being a little fry in a small pan while wanting badly to be a big fry in a large one. Professional achievement for its own sake was among my chief goals. To be successful I was ready to chase influence, fame (or "recognition" as I called it then), and prestige, unaware that these appearances of success tend also to be its only realities. I also had a set of slides of the best examples of the four or five styles of painting in which I was then working, and a certain plodding tenacity, which I regarded as my special virtue. With all this, I joined the hungry army of would be professional artists stalking the galleries along La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, the principal gallery row in southern California.