Painting Taos; Taos B-Roll and Interview with Unidentified Artist

You You You You

You You You

You You You

You You You

You You You You You So maybe let's just start at the beginning. Can you tell me how you first ended up in Tows? Well, when I was a little kid, I was a cowboy in this, a pair on Gloria de Mesa, and I'd fool myself into thinking I was already a grown man. I was 12 years old, and the cowboys

went down to Espanola to a rodeo, it was a very special rodeo, and they took me along. One or two of them won some money, wasn't much, but they thought it was a lot, and they decided to go to Tows, and they took me to Tows, but just 12 years old. I'd never seen it, and I was just stunned by it. When I was 12 years old, I said to myself, I'm going to move here someday. It was that beautiful. I'd see those paintings, and I'd always fashion these paintings here, so I could remember. So I left a cow ranch right after World War II to move to Tows. I'd just gotten back over there out of the combat infantry, and all I could think about was painting. I couldn't think about cutting cattle too much, and I was surrounded. I had a little ranch, and I surrounded by big ranches, so I had just enough sense of

no, I could never expand. I'd be working for all these ranches rest of my life, and running a few of you at a cattle. So I moved to Tows, and to tell you the truth, I guess I was so egotistical or something. I thought I'd move over there and start really seriously painting, find me a mentor, and that within about 18 months, I would really be rich and famous, and I believed that with all my heart. And about 18 months later, I was almost flat broke and infamous already. That's how I went to Tows. And can you describe first what that old house was like, just what it smelled like, what streets were like? Oh, God, when we came over and I first looked at that village again, again, and a new light, no one else was going to be part of it. It was just like I looked down in a vast bowl of fresh strawberries. Everything in the world was concentrated in

my mind there, and then I found out it really was. It's about 3,000 people, and it was all over the world, every nice and outy. Artists, sculptors, poets, remittance men and women, they were paid to stay out of New York or Boston or wherever, to pay them by the month to live in Tows. Those were the wonderful people. I got along the best with them. Also, you know, they had a little money coming once a month. It was grand, grand, Bert Phillips was the first of the old masters I got acquainted with. And the next thing, they were all alive at that time of the initial grandmasters, and they were all there except, but his daughter was there, so I thought she represented him quite well. And it was just like a little kid. The Recall Ranch over there in between Clayton and Ratton. With all this wonderful art,

concentrated like that, it was just heaven to me. I loved it beyond any words I could ever describe. And then there was Long John Dunn. There he was, every morning at the weather permitted, standing in a certain corner of the plaza, holding court. At his old age, he was just straight as a telephone pole. And he would just walk down there, alley, he lived right back there, the old houses there and all kind of shops and bookstores. And he would stand there and hold court. And everybody would stop and visit his long John Dunn. And then, at my great surprise, he had the gambling wide open in all of northern New Mexico, ill legal, but running. And when I ran out of money, I had made friends with him, and he took me out to the sagebrushian, that wonderful place out there. He had a old gambling setup

who led wheels the entire thing. And he would let me shield the tables. He wanted to teach me gambling. But I already had enough sense to know that that could become very addictive. And so I told him I'd just shield. In other words, hustle customers. And those days it was mainly what we called a rich Texans. And I talked to him, visit with him and then tell him I'm going over and shoot dice. And sometimes I'd get him. If we had a good evening, he'd give me, if we had a really good evening, he'd give me $40. And that's just, it was unfortunate in old days. And he'd always slip me at 10 or 20. And it was a grand way to be introduced to Tows, because he was one of the best friends with labor dogs in New Holland. Very few people ever seem to know that. I never, because when she'd bring famous people from around the world and hold her sorrows there, many, many, many

times. And most times she'd have John Dunn come down entertain him with stories of the Wild West. And he had truly lived it. He had a great stage of, I say, nine stage lines all over. And it was your grand time. And can you tell us a little bit for the viewers about, you know, a lot of the show is taking place kind of a little bit earlier than you were there, like the 20s. And then they got off the train, you know, long John Dunn with there to meet them. Can you kind of tell their viewers how that used to, how that used to work, how he used to meet people at the station and bring them in to Tows and what that was like? Yeah, he'd meet them at Lamy and surprisingly, they'd come in with a train there. He'd pick them up and take them all away to Tows. But Lamy was my little headquarters from Gloria de Mesa. That's where the ranchers came to that little town. They didn't go on

to Santa Fe. And there's a wonderful Harvey House there. Very small, but wonderful and world famous. And, you know, they'd be met by this striking figure, Western figure, a gentleman. And no matter where in the world they were from, they were impressed instantly with him. And that was part of Mabel's plan. She planned everything pretty carefully. She was a genius at that, bringing people to Tows. She wanted the whole artistic world to come there. That was her dream. She was one of the world great centers of music and painting and poetry and sculpture and everything. And she accomplished it in a sense. So you could imagine them. He'd entertain them with all these stories before they ever got to Mabel's. Later on, I met Luminari Satchis Thornton-Wilder, who spent even drinking with him. It's a sagebrush in. And for some reason, a little later on, after John, his time was

taken up as the gambling. And he didn't have his stage line anymore. A lot of her ministers would stay at sagebrush in out there before they face Mabel. They'd prepare themselves to face her. I met, as I said, a Thornton-Wilder. And I'd read his book, Bridgham Sandler's Ray, or something like that. I can't remember. Times were a good, beautiful book. And Millson Rogers, I met her at Annemann Mabel in there. Millson Rogers, she didn't drink, but she'd come out and visit. And she was a magnificent woman at that time. I was there. She wasn't famous for being this beautiful woman in this great collector of jewelry. And she was famous for having had an affair with Clark Gable. I don't know. I don't know why

that would make her famous in Tows, but it did. That was one place. She was a grand lady. True lady in his art form, whether he was gentle and kind to everybody. I really did care for her. I'm glad to have a museum and her memory there. It's a wonderful thing to her for her. What was Mabel like? Well, I was afraid of her. I wasn't afraid very much, but I was afraid of her. John Dunn kept telling me, he said, you've got to spend time with Mabel, that she can really help you in your art world, that she has the power to do that. And that scared me off. I wouldn't visit with her very much. Once a while, I'd run into her. She was interested very much. A young beginning artist wouldn't come and ask

her and take her advice. And I guess I was stupid for not doing it. But I wouldn't have a long John Dunn. He used to tell me how silly I was, but not taking advantage of that. He was very, very close to her. They had a lot of things going on. People just didn't know about it. I told him all the forests, most of them forest fans, so he'd reveal them in his book. I'm not going to do it here. I'm not going to give it away. But there was a powerful relationship between them, and they used one another to a great profit. What captivated of kind of starting an art colony? Where did that impulse come from? Well, back in Buffalo, New York, she'd had the great armors show, the first great show of the European moderns. And so she had all these friendships and connections. And she

was in love with the power of art. What he could do, what he had the attention it could draw to a place. She'd proved it there in Buffalo. And so she figured that it was setting like this, this magnificent setting of the Indian and Hispanic and Gringo's all mixing together in a very peaceful and profitable manner. Everybody was trying to survive. Not everybody. Somebody, a few people had a little money, a few people made a little money. But most of us were relatively poor and struggling. And so she envisioned, like with DA slants, that it would draw a national public, which it finally did. She was right. She was right. It just didn't work that big. She had dreamed. You know, she got old like the rest of us and went on the great married chase in the sky. And she'd forgotten

about that. If she'd had about 10 or 12 more years, I believe she'd have pulled it off. Now it is known all over the world. It wasn't them. Believe it or not. Everybody there mostly thought it was. But it really wasn't. It was known in the art world. But in general sense, the tourist business wasn't much. People didn't know that much about it. I used to ride the train out to Hollywood when I started doing business out there. And I couldn't fly. I had vertigo or something. And just out of curiosity, I'd ask people in a lounge car about Towson. I never found that one person knew where it was. I was so disappointed. I wanted to talk about it, you know. But they do now. And it all goes back to her. It's large. And all those great people that she brought in there were a famous people. And then she had this thing with Tony Luhon. You know, she went to that dance out there at

Indian dance. It's a great view of Boeing. And one thing I agreed with her own at the Towson is the greatest survivors in the history of the world. You think back to the patchy wars of Comanche's Hispanics and the gringos all coming in there in various forms and wars and armies all surrounding them in Southwest. She was right. She fell in love with that part of it and thought it was. I'm certain from a few other conversations I had with her that she actually felt there was a spiritual thing there that, so Tony, she'd fallen in love with him in a spiritual way, a ceremonial dance at Towson. It was a strange and wonderful marriage. They got along somehow in a beautiful way. And it fit her whole demeanor, her

whole dream system. He was also something that she could entertain people with. It made her different. And they'd talk about it all over the world. This society makes a patron of the arch of New York being married to this great big-goal-hoking handsome Indian. It called him Indian Tony. In our PC world, I don't know whether that's correct or not, but everybody loved Indian Tony. He amazed me. I used to get the greatest spawn out of just watching him. Mabel got him an old Cadillac car. Well, he's new then. Big old sedan. He'd get his Indian friends and they'd go get a bottle of booze and they'd drive around and visit and have the best time in the world. I thought that was rather grand. He did it in style. He always had great stature about him. He was proud about him. He was proud

to be an Indian. He was proud to be associated with Mabel. He understood somehow he understood what her goal was. He was helping her do it. We married a girl from Towson in the first year of Zaire and we moved out under, I bought a piece of land under the West Mesa. Right above us, the only house on that Mesa at the time was D.H. Lawrence's widow, Frieda Lawrence. She had married Angelino Ravaldi, Italian Potter. I used to take my rope and horse and ride down that road there to exercise my rope and horse and I'd stop there. He had his potting table outside and I'd stop there and visit with Angelino. He was a lot younger in her handsome, charming guy and he's a good punter and he'd made pots outside and I'd stop him on my horse and visit with him and inevitably Frieda would interrupt our conversation.

She'd come charging out of the door and she had a cigarette that she rolled with big long white papers and how she could hang that thing on her lip and talk. I don't know but she did. I never saw a smokey. She's just always hanging on her lip like a grown there or something. It amazed me and she'd come out and interrupt our conversation and asked me the same questions every time about the rigging on the horse, the bridle, what the rope was, how that was used, how it was called. She had a wonderful exploratory mind but I never understood the relationship. I guess who does between this handsome Italian British wild artist type guy and this kind of brusque? Well she could have been a good prize fighter I think. I liked her but they were just about as far apart as I could imagine

two people. Now let me tell you something about that. Over lunch when he was there he was in favor and actually left Towson Mabel. He lost, he became lost and his works became lost. He was a period he wasn't published anywhere in the world and after his death and Angelino and free to have been married two or three years he came back into favor worldwide. When she died shortly thereafter she never got to enjoy the pleasure of the financial and the world fame that came again but Angelino certainly did. She passed away and he got everything and it was just brought his foreign in from every country in the world so he left Towson

moved to the Italian Riviera and bought him a great villa and lived out his life in absolute joy and celebration. So there's another thing he came to Mabel. Did you ever get to meet him? He had a studio. His last studio was right across the Colorado highway from Towson which is still there and kind of a famous place. I used to visit him a lot. He was one of the few. I just really could felt comfortable to go to his studio and visit with him and he didn't. The conversations I remember with him I used one in one of my books. The experience he had with Towson is a metaphysical experience up at the Sacred Cave. He had made that trip up there and he said honored him to let him spend the night

up there at a certain ceremony and he told me about it. I was supposed to keep it used sometime later in my life and I did. I kept it to myself. He's a wonderful metaphysical experience at that cave when they were having a ceremony. He loved to talk about those things. He had a real more than an artistic feeling and attachment to the Towson Indians. He really, truly loved them and loved their ceremonies and their beliefs. Therefore I fit in as my motor thinking in the world and he was the one I visited the most. Why? Where did that come from? I don't know. He's interesting and I guess he's painting him, using him for models. He got acquainted with the right one and they trusted him. They grew to Tess Burt Phillips and cows, of course, became world famous just painting. He just had many studios all the time and posed him. But who they really cared the most about

it seemed to me because I had quite a lot of friends there. My mentor, his wife, was teaching out there and he lived out there. Really crumbled with a great pot of water in the Indian Artists. He became my mentor and my mining party. I studied with him seven years and he thought he was a buyer for the famous skill-crease museum and he bought all the Tess artists work for that museum where he crumbled it. So he really got personally acquainted with him in every way. He told me that Phillips, they felt a closer attachment to him than any of the artists, no matter how many times they'd posed for or anything. He understood their spiritual ceremonies and he had a reverence for us for that. I think that's the main reason. How do you remember what kind of buff spoken?

Very self-spoken. He's gentleman, gentleman of the first order. If someone else would come around to studio or he'd change into a different human being. He was still a gentleman. He had a kindness about him. I don't know what had a great respect for him because I was kind of outlawed and crazy. He'd been in all those damn wars and all that stuff. Cowboy, rodeo, everything else already in my young life. So to have a gentleman like this, to talk to, that had some of the same spiritual feelings I did. I was raised a little bit by one of my grandmothers and he was a relief to me and I just had a great fondness for him. He offered to take me on as his protégé and I just put it all. I was so honored but he wasn't as much as I cared for him. He wasn't what I wanted. I felt unneeded and the minute

I saw where the crumbos worked. And then sagebrush in again. He was showing what was once a great lobby. Still a great lobby except it's a dance and drinking there now. But I knew he was it. And he had a great influence on time. He was there. He started a tremendous art movement that everybody put him down for, making silk screen prints and advertising all over the world with a crumbo. There's a new biography coming out in October from OU Press about him which I wrote the introduction and the afterwards too. But he guided me and introduced me to some of these people later on that I hadn't met. It was a wondrous time to all those people there and it's tiny. Imagine now try to imagine that you have world famous people, infamous people, all the different cultures of the world. And then the three main

cultures of the Hispanic and the Gringo and the Indian all in a little place of about 3,000 people. It's hard to imagine. It was just a wonderful thing. Every day was a great adventure. If you wanted anywhere you could move you didn't run into one of these artist writers or poets or painters. It was wonderful. It never had been before and it'll never be again. To experience it is, I feel enormously privileged to have experienced that at that time. It's a perfect time for me. Just before it started changing. It didn't change too much till there was a little Bohemian movement which we all liked and enjoyed. I had lots of friends come to there and the Bohemian, the end of the Bohemian movement. And then I was

getting ready to move out of there when the hippie movement took over. That in the ski life changed house forever, the ski run. When you got old, of the old Tows Society, he was the first one to live their full time. Did he ever talk about just how much Tows had changed in his own lifetime or long John What was the reaction to how much it was growing and how famous it was getting? What did the old timers think about that? Well, it went really old time back in the 40s. It wasn't that much. The war had just left everything the same, pre-war. It lasted, oh I don't know up in several years. It was almost the same. They presented in a way that they changed you. When they'd see the tourists finish pick up and people would flood the streets in

the town. I think when Maple didn't wet her in Tows, she was predicting or feeling it was going to come. She described the peacefulness and the serenity of this world there before the war and the great war. I'm sure they all, they didn't dwell on it, but they all mentioned it. Everybody did. After I was there 10 years, I was running around, cussing and changing. I felt like I was an old man, old time. I got it, you know, 32 or 3 years over. I was cussing out all the changes in the modern world. I never heard of him talk about too much. He always tried to go to California when he could afford it. So he had a different viewpoint of it. My favorite, as far as just painting concern of those initial artists

there was Blumanchine. I never did understand later, even the last 10 or 12 years I hear people put down the original house artist as being these boring realists. I've never understood that, because if you really take a close look at Blumanchine, he was enormously modern in the form of his landscapes in way ahead of his time and a lot of them. And ever now, even Burning House, who was a wonderful painter, Burning House, some of his work was impressionistic to a great degree. So they were ahead of their time there, and a lot

of ways people just didn't take the time to really study it and notice it. I did. Then they had a movement come in, and right after that, after the second wave of artists and about, there was Emil Bistram and B. Manelman, Louis Reback, they were all modernists and they had been initially so-called realists. And they became abstractionists, well known. Emil Bistram had a great school and taught many people that went on around the world and became artists of all kinds. And he hadn't been a realistic painter to use a simplistic term when he was in his youth. And he just turned abstractionists. And I loved his abstractions. They were designed and colored beautifully. They weren't just just accidental paintings. And anyway, there was Taupa, there was a subsidiary branch of artists out there, Bill

Wheaton, and G. Asberg, who was known respected all over the world. He was there at Taupa, which is part of Taupa. Out by the famous ranchos, the Taus Church, which I was told over and over. When I was first there, it was the most photograph building in the world. But now I hear it's the second most. It ties my heart, supposedly, number one now. Not to me, not in my mind. Pardon? Yeah, yeah. I don't know. He's a little brusque to me. I don't know. Oh, sorry. We'll start that again now. He was a little, a little brusque with me. And I didn't take to that much. I don't care who they were. I just didn't take to it. So I didn't have much of association with

them. And yet he had a tremendous admirer. I talked about his work to everybody. I just loved it. Because he had this wonder, almost a cubist style of so-called realism. If you look at it carefully, it's a marvelous, a marvelous style of painting that Blue and Shine had. He was sharp. Do you ever meet him? Yeah. Yeah. I met him with my mentor. What a crumble took me over to be meeting him. I was a little shy about sharpness for some reason. And he was really a gentleman, just a pure gentleman. I heard all the stories about tirades. I never found any of that in him. But maybe I just, a countryside, just a little dumb cowboy, trying to be a painter and a writer. They just kind of condone me. Maybe they sympathize with my ignorance. But I don't know. I got a long, great rhythm.

And for all those painters that you're the modernist in the Tao society, painters you're nothing but so much of the work that period was really successful on the East Coast and just in really far away places. What do you think was kind of capturing the public imagination about the art that was coming out of Taoist at that point? For even people who had never even been out here before, they seemed to just be floored by. What was grabbing them? People believed it. It was honest. And it was in whatever their brushstroke was honest. And to look at a painting, if you've never been in the Taoist country, to see a painting there, I think is a spiritual thing that comes through and the love for that landscape. From the Great Aspins, out into that massive, wondrous desert across that gorge, it's a rival of any in the world. And there weren't any houses out there then. It was just that

great wondrous, sagebrush desert. You know at one time that had been grass. And the great sheepratches of the early days, they overgraze that country. And it became, without the sagebrush, if it had been grass, the artist might never have settled there. I thought about that many times, the overgrazing mat and lying there. Sagebrushes take over the grasslands and might be the very simple reason that it became an art colony. They all painted sagebrush one way or the other. Still do. Even the most modern artist in Taoist, one time over the other, they'll paint sagebrush in their own style. And the scent, you know, the least little breeze of that bass area of sagebrush, just like a special perfume factory, in the dating of the air and permeating the air. It became part of you, whether you liked

it or not. You were breathing it right into your bloodstream, you know. And I think they felt that when they'd see these paintings around the world. And maybe they'd see their first one at a show when they'd be in the New York City in concrete, in case in concrete and glass. And there all of a sudden was this wonderful world of sagebrush and indians and Hispanics. And all the way up from the desert to the high terrain of snow and a great golden aspens, how can you beat that for us? A peak at the New World. There's a New World to them. And still is to me. It always will be. I love it deeply. I acted up in that town. I mean, you talk about having fun. I miss spent my youth in such a wondrous way. I spent 19 years there, miss spending my youth. And it was rather grand. I got to where I didn't

know who was my friend. I had friends, but I didn't know who there were exactly. It has a lot of enemies too. So I had a different viewpoint than most people did. I had my first accidental success as an author. Well, I was out of favor because I opened up some minds up above the ski lines at the same time they were building it, more minds. And the only people that liked me were the people from Questa. They were all minors, unemployed minors. They loved me. So I also had a subsidiary town in Questa. And a lot of people resetted me today. I grew to understand. And fortunately, the price of copper, fortunately for Towsa in me as well as making a lot of money and I never lived in those two or three years

was going too crazy, having too much fun. But the price copper dropped in half in 90 days and we went broke. So the ski lines won out. So did the artist. Then I had this success with the rounders. And I never dreamed it happened. The little book is kind of a comedy. And they started dealing on it for movies and stuff. It's the best seller. Then they looked at me a little different turn than they had about a few weeks before. I got by. Start getting a little more respect. Talk about when you were like a young man trying to become a painter. What the art scene was like there? I mean, would it just be that you'd

walk by and people had doors open to their studios and they were working? Oh, no, no, they were by the nature of being a painter and especially a famous one. And they hit out really. I mean, if you were their friend, you were lucky and welcome. It was open because there was artists coming and going. There was a circuit of the last of the Bohemians started softly to Californian and they make the Greenwich Village. They just have as part of their tour, like a rodeo tour, a circuit. It's just a circuit. Orlando, Florida, it was one of them. And they stopped in Santa Fe a little bit and they'd come on to Tows. And that was a wonderful time to meet those people that were in a circuit because they were all together and became well-known and established in different parts of the world. They take it about four years that they were making the circuit and it all changed. I made a lot

of friends among those people. They knew things that I didn't know and I knew a lot they didn't know. We combined it and it was all great interest. We'd have a lot of conversations and a little Vino mixed with it to make it go smoother. So it wasn't just a little locale. It was handing out and Mabel had people going and coming and you never knew when they were going to come. John Dunn was controlling the gambling wide open all over the New Mexico and out of that little town, well imagine the politics that he was pulling. I never thought about it no day to do that illegally. And everybody loved him in Towsay because everybody was afraid of him. They're also afraid of Mabel. I don't know where they ever loved Mabel or not. They loved John Dunn. But she did a lot of good things. She built

a hospital and things like that there. She tried to be a part of the community as well as the international community. You got to give her credit. That old gal was something in this world, in the whole world. She was really something. She had a great power about her. That's why I was afraid of her. I was afraid she didn't listen to doing some silly thing in art that I didn't want to do. She's the only person I was afraid of. Long John Dunn used to just make him almost rage and rage at me that I wouldn't go. He'd set it up where I'd go and have a private audience with her at her house. I wouldn't go. He would call me stupid. How could you beat? I won't say the words, but a string of words and ended with stupid. All these people who were coming in and out of there, were they a bunch of romantics or how would you describe the people that were coming in? You know, I watch

young people, especially young people. I painted in the lobby of the town scene. My mentor told me to paint right there in public if I had guts enough. I was really rather shy about that day. He was hard on me to do, but he was right. He said, I'd start selling and I did. Well, I got to observe people coming to Towsay's tourist and especially young couples would come there, some of them, and they'd fall in love with it. And then they decided they were going to move there. I don't remember a single one of those young couples ever saying my words. It was just too much interest and never direction for both the man and the woman, the male and the female and they had all kinds of things there. I must admit that there was a least prejudice I do believe in those days that interim period

in Tows, that there was anywhere else in the world. There was just every nationality, every sexual attitude, and nobody paid any attention at all except just what kind of individual. And I marveled at that as I went around the country in later years, especially when I got mixed up in Hollywood and things like that around the country. And by that nature, you have to go to New York and involved, and it was the artist and the writers and the filmmakers and all that, the theater and things like that. And no matter how wonderful and wild it seems at times, it never matched the influence that nothing ever matched to the influence that Tows had over these young people. Some stayed and stayed their lives. It's been a success for the others. But most of them were enraptured with the atmosphere.

It was so new to them as a whole world, a universe in their minds. I was younger than they were when I went there. And I'd been there when I was 12 years old and fallen in love with them. So I could observe this out of the lobby of that hotel, painting there, watching each people. And they'd just score around. The word Romani does fit. Yes, it really does. They'd get this Romani feeling and visualization and observation all around them. They'd imagine all the... I could see them just... I literally could see their minds working. How wonderful it'd be. They'd come around and they'd forget. Well, how in the hell are they going to make a living? And then Romani was in the air. And they hardly ever stayed together. It was just too much romance. More than they had dreams.

How much was the Pueblo part of that equation? And just that feeling of just the time scale of the Pueblo having been there for so long? How did that fit in here? It had a vast colorful and spiritual influence because they had a great big rail down by the plaza. And a few farmers and ranchers and the Indians would come in there with their wagon in teams. They had a parking space out there for their wagon in teams. And then in those days, the Indians came to town. They wore their blankets and had their arab style the way they put it over their heads. And it was very enormously colorful. And they all made it to rail. There were wagon in teams out there. And so that became part of the setting of the house. Probably the greatest, the greatest traction to outside people. In their first visit there would be

the sight of all these Indians visiting and talking in their own language area. And the wagon in teams and the horses all there. I mean, just think of it. I mean, who else would have seen that? No, where else in the world? And it made it an awesome, mysterious attraction. It is magnetic in its spirituality. And I could beat it always. I even felt as a little 12-year-old cowboy. You know, all they did was little kids would just make them do every kind of thing in the world, wrangle horses. And you got bucked off and threw you back on. They weren't really that kind to you where that world I was in. And you go down to our house, you see all this color and all these paintings and variation. And your mind just jumps full of adventure. You think, I'm going to have all the adventure

in the world right here in this little spot. You know, it was huge around, in the space around. You concentrate all these people in this tiny little spot, 3, 4,000 people. And you have this enormous space of the mountains and the desert surrounding you. Think of it. Right. Awesome. That overused word. But I don't know anything else. It fits it. But awesome. And were all those groups interacting with each other there in the plaza? Yeah. Yeah, they reacted. One of the old John Thun, everybody loved him, Indians and everybody. He talked all. I made all of them. It was, you could go around that plaza. Just walk around that plaza and you, you could have any, almost any adventure you could dream up. There was every nationality, every occupation in the arts and wood haulers. They still haul wood some of them with old trucks and burrows. And in the winter, while at pinion and it mixed

with a sagebrush and my god, it was an intoxicating brew. Wonderful. Any of the other painters that you were particularly close with during the time that you used to visit? Well, my wife had been there long before me and her family moved there. She went through high school there and she joined in. She modeled for a lot of the artist's cast part and Joseph Fleck. I like to old Joseph Fleck. I've missed him a lot. And then there was Dialhocom, our one rich artist. It was a great commercial artist. He did new covers for the New Yorker and what was a Saturday evening post and all those big ads for manufacturers. He was, he was really loved because every payday he had more money than anybody in town. I don't

guess he did really, but it was a ton of money. But he would spend it. Every time he had paid that for his agent in New York, he'd come to town and everybody could have free drinks. He was the most loved person for a while. Tows it ever seen. He broke his hand and my uncle got him a sold him horse and he fell in love with this horse and he broke his drawing hand. He never did recover from it. He had to leave. Went back to St. Louis and took a job as an illustrator for St. Louis post dispatch. He couldn't paint anymore. He could still draw a degree. But you think of that? Just walking that pleasure, the history, the battles, the flags, the blower, the mountain men, the patches had written across that.

The command she said had written Spanish army, the whole, the whole, the whole world had been there in battle and in great struggle before all this art. And then all of a sudden that atmosphere and influence is still there at that little place. So my plaza, what a hell of a place that was. And you could walk at plaza and have any kind of adventure you were moving. You could meet any kind of person. It was. It was, I mean that's just a short walk and you cover the whole world. Pretty keen, huh? Yeah, it was. One thing that we're talking about in this show, too, in this early period is what a change

of the change from railroad to cars made out here in the west. And how the cars really change things a lot as far as bringing in more tourists and stuff like that. Can you talk about that a little bit just how railroad culture was different from car culture over time and how that change things out with? I never didn't know that much difference in the car culture and the railroad culture. But the railroad became a romantic thing, too, mainly because of cows. He started painting their posters naturally and they were wonderful cows, Indian portraits and families and peer-blow and Indians and various forms of colorful dress. And those were plastered everywhere in the United States. So that became a romantic pool for the whole west. It was in front of us out of here being cow's paintings. And

the automobile, I don't know how to describe that in contrast with the railway. The railway was a lot more romantic because of these paintings. And then the stories at Zhang Grey and all these people had written about it, about the romance of the railroads and the great Buffalo Hansen, all that's the connection to both coasts. So the railroad was tremendously important. Of course, it couldn't come to a house. John Dunn had a little railroad across the Rio Grande there, but it's a narrow gauge. And a lot of people came there. He met him. He had a pretty good rocket. He had his horse-drawn stagecoach in the first days when the Brennan birds, who were the binkers and the relatives of the burning house. His sister married the number one biker there. Well, John Dunn would pick him up at Trace Fiatr, so about

Trace Fiatr, at the little railway there. And he'd bring him to the house on these stagecoach. And he hadn't worked out. He built the bridge himself across the Rio Grande River. I have pictures of it, and I took before he modernized it. It's still called Long John Dunn Bridge. So he built a hotel, a gammon joint right there, where they'd come out of the canyon. And he'd make him stay. He had no choice. He had to stay all night. And his hotel'd spend their money with him. He'd feed him and steal their money. The best he could, it's the roulette tables or the dyes tables. Then haul them all into the house, and he had a deal there where he'd take them. And so he brought a lot of the artists, a lot of them. First, Long John Dunn. Stagecoach was there first. Then he adapted to the times and motorized it. He called his motorized. He called his John Dunn stagecoach. And he'd

take them up. He got acquainted with Mabel Dodge. Of course, they became dear friends. They colluded for him to pick them up and help with a great railway, Transcontinental Railway, and deliver them to the house. All full of great ideas of the West. And he, from John Dunn's point of view, by the way of Mabel Dodge Luhon. So you see the pattern that was formed there, the social structure, the spreading of the task charm in the art world, the word of it all over the world. That's how it happened. And how self-aware was he of this kind of role, this kind of ringmaster role? Oh, he was aware. He was an absolute born genius. He knew everything that was going on. He played Mabel, she played him, and they were a team, a wonderful undercover team. No

one ever knew. Really, what was going on? Oh, he's a good friend of Mabel. They didn't know that that whole thing was very carefully plotted. They had a place there that's not in history. It's misted. It was called the office. It blocked off of the plaza. And it was hidden. You had to drive in behind it. I lived at the end of that block, where the Harwood Foundation is. It was between the in-war-hour-rouse while I was still there, and the Harwood Foundation. And right in there, they had a place you could come in the back, and they had people coming. They had gambling. People would have rendezvouss, male and female from all over the world. And they kept that absolute secret from everybody, but there were immediate families in Tony, and nobody ever gave me away. And that went on for quite

a long time. Then they finally had to give it up, obviously, for all of these reasons. But that was very profitable for John. He had the dash tables and everything in there. And they had rooms for these special meetings between the sexes from opposite parts of the world. And so there were things like that that were just wonderful. And the artists were kind of involved with that, too. Oh, yeah. But not the old masters. They weren't the first came there. They called them the old masters, the initial founders, the founders. They weren't involved in that. No. How did the town kind of respect them as the founders? Or how was everybody's attitude towards that group? Well, I asked me that question again. Now, what was all the new people who had come, the younger generations? What was their attitude towards the old masters? Did they kind of respect them as founders of the Tows Art Colony?

Or what was their attitude towards kind of the younger people towards Phillips and Blooming Shine? No, I think they were in all of them. Except the ones who had been sort of brainwashed in a period there, into the modernistic thing, where that was passé and would never exist again. And they didn't have enough experience or weren't being taught enough in their schools or by their mentors to know that art fashions are like all fashions. The realism comes and goes and the moderns come and go and they have fashions. They never change. The art never changes. Changes time. That's all it changes. Right now, the task masters are in high favor, along with a lot of the so-called modern. I don't know what's modern. Back there, over 50 years ago, over half a century, they were called in modern art. Modern art is no cowboy else, no mind said, modern. Well, I don't know about those modern art

history, so I ain't figured them out yet. Well, different attitudes, different times. And now the realism is back ended along with the so-called modern art. What is modern? What was modern in France is the impressionist. What was modern in Touse was the emulbistrum and all those abstractions, Cubist and adult changes and intermingles, arts, arts. People pay attention to it for over 50 years. It's a work of art. If it wasn't, what you did is painting. Is there anybody else that we should talk about from that time that we have been talked about and anybody else that we should talk about? I'm sure there's people that I've left out. I happen to be one of those poor, unforeseen people that can't remember names. I have a terrible recall of names even right now. There was a guy that

should be talked about in Touse.