1. A well-known artist who lives for invention, for the new, who is concerned for creativity and is at the midpoint of his career, said to me a few months ago: "I have become very frightened because, although I still tell my students to walk out into the chaos of experience and to make without preconception whatever they can of whatever is there, I myself am a professional artist with a position to maintain—and so I must show off and amaze my friends and public by the power of what I myself find out there in the wilderness of the unknown. The trouble is, my reputation is always at stake and my fear is that I may find nothing. That's why I cheat. The truth is, my claim to be creating 'trophies of the unknown' is really a cover for surreptitious recycling of everything I've done before that worked before.

"If I were really to walk out into the open, unknown world—into the Sahara or the Mohave, along the waste shores of Hudson Bay or into the most lonely, strange and unknown places of all, the vast, pale suburbs of a thousand anonymous towns—if I actually walked out there and really tried to create from what was there at hand, then indeed I might have nothing to show. I might become like that artist whose work haunts me but whose name I cannot remember ... the one who threw the I-Ching and marked the lines with cigarette butts in the gutter or with scratches in the sand before a rising tide.

"Yes, I'd follow his example if I dared. But I've got too much at stake ... my gallery, my family, my house and truck and boat. I've been a professional in a professional world for too long to be able to risk not having an astounding new model for next year, although I know in my heart that when I have that . model I'll have nothing."

2. The other day a successful art dealer told me that he finds it more and more difficult to sell contemporary work by local artists. He said that people want to buy names where they believe they may anticipate the advantages of capital gains in addition to the graces of fashion and decoration. And so work by local artists, especially those artists without previous economic track records for their work, is very hard to sell.

He went on to say that it's difficult even to get people to come in to see work by most contemporary artists. You put up a show, he said, send out releases, call people, and so on; there is a review or two and that's it. You may sell a couple of pieces or you may not, but the excitement, the drive and the expectation of ten years ago are no more. He said that people are worried about the economy and save their money for the decline they think may come—or they buy big names as hedges against economic decline and inflation at the same time.

He went on to say that he thinks there are too many shows (something I've heard in many places recently, even from artists) and that the multiplicity has produced a confusion of "edge" in the minds of the public. By "edge" he meant a sense of where the "leading edge" might be, the wave of history or style or fashion with which any knowledgeable collector wishes to be associated. That great wave has broken into a hundred cross currents, he said, and is probably even now running back down the beach to the sea; so, confused and dismayed, collectors are waiting until the situation is clear again. In the meantime, he thought that for the art dealer the only way to survive is to carry art that has already established a firm place among the many possible combinations of strong decorative value, solid reputation and excellent financial track record as shown by museum acquisitions and auction prices.

And for the artist who has not already established those three factors for survival in his work, he did not say "Forget it," but ...

3. Quite a few years ago, a very old artist was showing me through her studio. There was the usual dusty clutter found in studios no longer so busy as they once were. She showed me stacks.of paintings advanced for their time but tame now, brittle and cracked on canvas fragile with age. And she showed me portfolios of drawings that were brave and progressive as the paintings had been, but were date and yellowed now also like the paintings and crumbling as old, cheap paper does. Memorabilia were pinned to the walls of the studio the way you see in studios now, although there were fewer posters (I guess they didn't print them much then) and more postcards, snapshots, letters, etc. The letters and cards were all dated thirty and forty years ago. Among the scraps pinned to the wall I saw the blurb-end torn from the dust jacket of a book. She saw me looking at it and said: "That book jacket was always very special to me. The title that was on it, and the picture—the way the picture was dark at the bottom and rising toward a luminous sky at the top, the way it was the silhouette of the pyramids looming so close and rising so powerfully against the sky, and the way it said across the top in bright, clear yellow letters, The Art of Far Lands. Yes, the image of that old bookcover has always been a guide at the back of my mind, because I always wanted to make an art that would be permanent and shining. And because of the transient and shadowed world we live in that is so opposite to the art I knew, I knew the art I wanted to make would have to come from a very far land indeed."

Among her paintings I remember only one, and of it I remember only that it seemed to be the bright, shifting windows of a city at night. She told me that she had studied with Arthur Mathews at the old Mark Hopkins, and how stern he had been and how he had congratulated her once. When I asked why only the end flap of Far Lands was there on the wall, she said: "Oh, I saved the flap to remember the cover by, when I sent the front with the picture and title to a friend... I thought that would be the easiest way to tell him what I was trying to do. I heard from him once or twice afterwards, and I think he understood."

A few years after she died, I found among the forgotten scraps in a museum's dead storage a small watercolor bearing her name. It showed rounded hills with the curves repeating art deco fashion, all painted in a luminous, transparent yellow-orange. It was called Golden Hills.

Note: These conversations have been rewritten from the hesitant and redundant originals in order that they may be read more easily and the underlying meaning understood more clearly. In that regard; while I was writing out the third conversation from what I could remember of an afternoon twenty-five years ago, I came across the following: "But for those who do not lose heart there gleams from time to time, at the bottom of a crevasse or on a vertiginous ridge, the priceless crystal, the moment of truth." It was in the foreword to Rene Daumal’s posthumously published novel, Mount Analogue. In the story itself, that crystal was the basis of all value (as gold is for us). The people in the book called the crystal peradam and thought the word might mean "hard as diamond" or "father of diamond." They also said that the crystal peradam had "some secret and profound complicity with the original nature of man."