Dear Alfred,

Compared to the guys on Wall Street and the bums on the Bowery, the lives of fortunates like you and me have been a most amazing privileged fiction, and every time Gil and I get together we inevitably dwell on it. Weren't we lucky to be born at that time we always say.

The life I have been leading for the past seven years is a vacation from that vacation, a TRUE fiction.

In a lifetime of continual almost total failure to connect with the fame and fortune every artist dreams of - oh yes even you, I have always excused myself by claiming to have spent my life painting for the FRICK.

My fiction now is that I want to be the best totally unknown painter in the world.

Not only have I painted rooms full of huge paintings about which I frequently say -My God, who painted that one for me? -but I am building the museums to hold them. I'm also building an Octagon in a copse in the spruces and painting eight-foot canvases for it. The viewer will close the door and be IN one of my pictures.

Drop in some time, R