 So we have a really, really distinguished panel and an exciting evening ahead. So I'm raising my voice to gather the troops. And I did it one time around. I think what we're gonna do is we're gonna get started now and hopefully by Osmosis, Sonora's Osmosis, folks will filter in. Ginny Callan, who is our executive director, needs no introduction, but she's gonna talk to us a little bit about some of the important things. So Theo Kennedy's our board chair and I wanna welcome you all to the T.W. Wood Gallery. We're at the Center for Arts and Learning and this is really a building that we have bought, the T.W. Wood Gallery and the River Rock School and Monteverdi Music School. We really wanted to become the hub for the arts in Montpelier. So we have a nice mortgage that we're working on, but we have a home, which is really important because the gallery has been in many locations in Montpelier through its history, but it's never had a real home. It's always been a guest, the Kellogg-Covered Library at Vermont College of Fine Arts and early on we were at the YMCA, I think it was. So tonight we are really honored to be showing Ronald Slayton's work. In this room is all watercolors of his. All of these pieces are from the collection of Billy and Bobby Gosh, thanks to them that this is happening tonight and the exhibit will be through the end of June. And the watercolor murals, we have the Last Supper and the hunger murals and I wanted to put our panel in front of it because it's just such an amazing piece and the colors are fantastic. All of the landscapes that you see around us and you can see this in the booklet, these are all for sale, 100% of the proceeds are being donated to the gallery, they're from Billy and Bobby's collection. So I urge you to think about buying a piece. These pieces are only going to increase in value and tonight we will offer you anybody who buys tonight a 20% discount and a free membership to the gallery. So look around and if you wanna make an investment in art of a fine Vermont artist, this is your opportunity. So I wanna just quickly thank our sponsors for tonight. We have of course Billy and Bobby Gosh, Phil Robertson who's not here tonight curated the whole exhibit and we also have five oil paintings of Billy and Bobby Gosh's in the other room, one of Liz and Tom Slayton's in there, a monochrome and then we have a set of three woodcuts and you'll see that we are raffling off a set of those. There were 50 to the set of woodcuts, they're all signed and so we have a set that we're selling that will be a first prize, $5 a ticket, three for 10, only 300 tickets were printed and second prize is a print of Ronald Slayton's of Vermonka Diva. So we have my husband sitting out in the hallway selling tickets. So think about helping to support the wood and get a chance of winning some beautiful art. So exhibit sponsors are Paul and Peggy Irons who are here tonight. We have, thank you, John Landy, Mary Scott Skinner who are here, Linda Parity, Susan Ritz, Elizabeth and Tom Slayton, Martha and Nat Winthrop and our business sponsors are Lehi Press who did a beautiful job on our program and Rob Spring Photography who photographed all these pieces that we have in our catalog. Sign Design who did the typeface for the Ronald Slayton quote in the other room and Vermont Creamery gave us a huge assortment of goat cheese so eat as much as you can, there's more in the refrigerator. So thank you, thank you for all the support. Right, it was a very stinky delivery. I know because I used to have goats so they're wonderful but the boys can be a little smelly. So thank you for coming and look around at the Vermont Pastel Society, the center of Vermont Hub exhibit which is up and down in the hallway which has some beautiful pieces as well and we hope you'll consider becoming a member and supporting the gallery, thank you. So I'm gonna be brief, I'm gonna lay out the format for you. We have our distinguished guests. Nancy Graff is gonna start and then Tom and then Bobby and Leach spent about whatever they like but 10 minutes or so and then we'll have a question and answer period at the end and just kind of build on Ginny's remarks. Every year that Ginny's here we get stronger and better so I really wanna thank R.E.D. so much. And everything requires a team. I wanna recognize that we're part of a large organization the Center for Arts and Learning and we have here the Monteverdi School, the Summit School, the River Rock School. We have a great diverse set of tenants here, everything from authors to our Onion River Exchange. So please, Green Mountain Film Festival. So check it out and please there are other things happening, this is Art Walk tonight. One of the featured things that's been happening over the years now in Montpelier which really enlivens all of us. Not all the board members and staff are here but if I could and it's often hard to name them so I'm not gonna try but just pretend they're all raising their hand and waving cause everyone on the TW Wood Board and the Cal Board and all the staff are really dedicated to try to bring the arts to our community. Let me see if I had anything else. Well of course I should have, I'll end with the beginning without Bobby and Billy and Bobby gosh this particular event would not happen and I really really thank them so much for their generosity and the vision to bring this together. So with no further ado, I'm gonna pass it over to Nancy, okay? Thank you. Well thank you for coming. See me, it turned out to be a pretty evening. So I'm just going to set some context for the program. A little louder if you can not do it yet, maybe we should turn that off. I'm just gonna set some context for the federal art project paintings. So as surprising as it sounds, there's a direct connection between Vermont's catastrophic flood in 1927 and the exhibit of art that draws us together this evening. In the weeks after the flood, Governor John Weeks famously declared that Vermont will take care of its own but that turned out not to be true. The state ended up accepting federal money to rebuild its roads and bridges and that was only the beginning of the federal aid that Vermont would accept. As the 1920s led into the 1930s, Vermont increasingly accepted federal aid to help it survive the depression and each of FDR's new deal programs seemed to spawn another but the programs to which Vermonters were most receptive were some of the earliest ones specifically programs that put the unemployed and the underemployed to work. The federal art project, which I'm gonna refer to as FAP, was such a program, growing out of the public works of art project which employed artists to decorate existing public buildings and a program within the Treasury Department which hired artists to decorate new public buildings. The federal art project was created in 1935 because these antecedents didn't employ enough artists. The FAP became just one arm of the Massive Works Progress Administration later the Works Projects Administration which also oversaw programs for unemployed writers, actors, composers, photographers and musicians and I brought for show and tell, well no, I'm not gonna refer to each one of them but I brought books that you're welcome to look at after the program that from the poster program and the farm security administration photographs and the writers project that produced Green Mountain History at the time and what's the other one? Oh, the Treasury of American Design which actually refers to the index of American design so these were all art programs that reached not only into Vermont but across the country to employ artists. The FAP's mission was fourfold, to pay unemployed artists to create art, to nurture art education through the creation of community art centers, to put art toward community service and to sponsor technical and archeological research. By the autumn of 1935, the FAP employed 5,000 artists nationally, men and women who had proved to the government that they were professional artists in need of both income and money for materials. Each artist received approximately $95 per month to produce easel paintings, sculpture, murals or fine prints. Easel artists were expected to deliver work every four to six weeks depending on the size of the canvas and program supervisors regularly toured Vermont inspecting the work. Social realism, reflecting the times cultural and economic turbulence was a favorite theme but artists also produced works of nostalgia that evoked a seemingly simpler and more innocent national past. They worked in styles from landscapes to abstract expressionism and cubism. Very importantly, the FAP prohibited artists from leaving their home states to seek work elsewhere. This meant that small, poor states such as Vermont were able to hold on to the best of their talent through the depths of the depression and that artists were forced to rely on local culture, not European, for their subjects and inspiration. The office of the FAP was on Church Street in Burlington. By the end of 1937, Vermont artists had completed 100 oil paintings, 200 prints, 92 craft objects, 400 posters, 60 illustrations and 60 plates for the index of American design. Vermont artists had also produced several murals for schools, a series of 10 oil paintings illustrating the state's history and theater props. The goal was to expose rural residents to contemporary art. So there was an active exhibition schedule at venues around the state, including the Woodart Gallery. FAP artists worked directly to promote government goals such as by designing posters that explained price controls and rationing. And indirectly, by alluding in their landscapes and genre paintings, the government's warm and fuzzy goals of promoting national identity, patriotism and community. The artists also drew maps for the military and designed camouflage for uniforms, tarps and tents. Significantly, Vermont art was not necessarily kept in Vermont, which explains why the Vermont FAP collection came to include works by artists from other states and why other states had works of art by Vermont artists. Bureaucrats in Washington arranged to have some of each state's art circulate. It was important for the farmers in Iowa, for example, to see what they had in common with farmers in Vermont. Everything came crashing down on July 1st, 1943 for the FAP. The state director was ordered to close down the office immediately and disperse all the art to tax supported institutions. Most of the Vermont art went to UVM, where it languished for decades in attics and basements, occasionally being looted by UVM employees for their offices and homes. Before being rediscovered in 1957, 58, when the Waterman building was being refurbished. I'll talk louder, but I think we need some fresh air. That's really nice. It's nice. You've got the lights on. Yeah. Maybe it's quieter out there now. Okay. Fortunately, by 1943, the national employment rate was rebounding, largely as the nation geared up for war. Artists were finding work in the war effort, and Americans had a new appreciation for the integral place art could play in national life. In 1994, the General Services Administration initiated an inventory of all works of art created by the various programs of the Works Projects Administration that were not already in a federal repository. The GSA tallied 11,000 such works of art, but that inventory was incomplete. For example, it does not include the Vermont Works of Art. The Woodart Gallery has 90 works of FAP art, including watercolors, oils, etchings, and washes. It has an equal number of works of art completed under the WPA, but not by FAP artists. The artists, there's no doubt with all the acronyms that this is a government program. That's an impressive number, but the significance of the collection is greater than the number of pieces of art it contains. With this program, the national government for the first time paid hundreds of artists to step up and produce art for their country, and gave them a sense of purpose during a dark time. The FAP brought original art to rural communities and demonstrated how art played a real part in the national economy. So when Tom talks about his dad, his dad was part of this program, and that's what the program was. Thank you. Thank you. Imagine that, the government paying artists to make art. Makes you wonder about the concept of progress. I'm gonna talk about my dad, and you find out when you do one of these things that you don't know a lot about the actual chronology of your father's life. In his last year of life, in 1991 and early 92, he did a memoir handwritten out, which my brother and the other guy put into a computer in 1992, printed it out, and it's like this thick of typewritten pages, and so I kind of went through that looking for things that would be relevant to what we're doing. Dad was born in 1910, and he ran away from home as a young man because he says he got tired of hearing his mom and dad arguing. He went down and lived in Hanover, and Hanover, New Hampshire, and White River Junction, and banged around at various jobs before deciding he wanted to be an artist. So he applied to probably the Boston Museum School. He says a school in Boston that was too expensive, and Pratt, and so he attended Pratt. I think he graduated sometime in 1933 or 34, and came back to Vermont and was looking for work, and did some teaching of art and painted theater sets, and somehow learned weaving and taught that for the Vermont Emergency Relief Agency, V-E-R-A, which was a precursor of the WPA, and that was in, he worked mostly and fairly in Brandon. Later he enlisted in the WPA easel painters program in the 1930s and was able to spend his days painting. He and the artist, Francis Colburn, whom some of you may be familiar with, worked, had something called the Burlington Discussion Group, which was a social action group, and they tried to eliminate the slums, and one of dad's early paintings shows his concept of one of those slums. In 1936, he gave a speech protesting the bombing of Guernica. During his WPA employment at first, he worked in poorly lighted apartment rooms, but later a friend of his at the Fletcher Free Library offered him some attic space, which was unheated, but had a nice skylight, so he had wonderful natural light coming in from above, and he sometimes in the winter had to paint with gloves on because it was so cold, but he painted eight to 10 hours a day saying in his memoir he says, I was developing artistic skills. And there among other, several other paintings, he painted minute work and minute rest, which I'm sure Bobby is familiar with. At the Fleming. At the Fleming, yeah, they're owned by the Fleming. He and my mother, they were married, I think in about 1934, although the dates, sorry, are not totally clear to me, but they lived in Weston in 1936, while still on the WPA payroll, and the painting in the next room going to town shows him walking down a road into the village of Weston, and you can identify the village of Weston by the church spire and other things. He worked on theater backdrops for the Weston Playhouse, and remembers that he painted the planter, which is just two boots, two hands, and beans going into the ground. He painted that painting, which was a very powerful painting at that time. At Weston, he also finished a set of 22 paintings done for the future farmers of America, showing rural activities, conservation, production of milk, apples, poultry, and so forth. Looking around the room, I was interested in what he said his major artistic influences were, and of course, when he was living in Hartford and visiting at Dartmouth, he met the artist, the Mexican artist, Orozco, who did the murals at Dartmouth, and he watched those being painted, so Orozco is a big influence for him as are other Mexican painters like Rivera, and the Spanish painter Goya, and Peter Bruegel, Domié Hogarth, you can see in his work, I'm sure, and Van Gogh and American artist Ben Sean, among others. His first important show was at the Fleming in 1939, but he says in his memoir, but during this period, I never sold a picture. He left UVM shortly thereafter, and what Nancy described is absolutely true. In his case, paintings he had stored there were quote-unquote put up for grabs and disappeared into various professors' offices and homes, and a photographer who worked for Vermont Life, who did some contract work for Vermont Life when I was there, said she had a painting of dads, and I went and saw it as one of those paintings. The painting Unemployed, which is a master work, I think, it shows a line of men lining up for employment. It's a wonderful painting, it's owned by the Fleming now. That was one of the lost paintings that has been returned to the Fleming. He taught and took courses in art history at Columbia in the 40s, and during that time he met Alfred Stiglitz and visited his gallery where he saw work by Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, George O'Keefe, John Marin, and other influential American artists. This was probably about 1945. I was born in 1941, and I can remember being in New York City and walking in Riverside Park. We lived on Riverside Avenue, and my mother and I were walking in Riverside Park, and the tugboats were all spraying water into the air, and I said, why are the tugboats spraying like that? And my mother said, because the war's over. I would have been about four, I think, and that's one of my earliest memories. I want to tell some stories about Dad very quickly. He was a character, as you probably know, as many of you know, who knew him, and low rent was a way of life for Dad. He didn't like to spend money, and he liked being with the people that polite society rejected. And so he had a barn sale where he sold you stuff, and he'd go out to the barn sale and paint, and that's how he and Bobby met, as a matter of fact. And Liz wanted to spiff it up. We were living out at the farm at the time, and Liz wanted to make it look a little neater and nicer. It was definitely kind of a scatter shot operation. And so she got some corn stocks and some pumpkins and stuff and put them around and made it look really, really nice. And Dad said, oh, that's so wonderful, thank you, dear. I'm so pleased that you've taken an interest in this and helped me, and one day later he took it all down. When we were in Knoxville, we lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, for 11 years, I think. And when we were in Knoxville, Dad, there was an art show that Dad taught at the University of Tennessee, and he was their arts and crafts coordinator for their version of the extension service, and we would go into the mountains and meet mountain people, and he helped found the Southern Highland Craft Guild, and a big craft show now held in Gatlinburg every year. And I would go with him, and that was great fun. There was an art show at the University of Tennessee, and he decided to enter a painting in it, and he did this painting, and it was a classic 1930s painting, and it showed a guy doing this, you know, with technological progress happening, and et cetera, et cetera. Well, it was rejected, because by then, it was very, very old-fashioned art, and abstract expressionism was kind of the rage, and so it was rejected, and it just crushed him. My mother said, don't talk to your dad tonight. He's feeling pretty down. We moved to Vermont in 1957, after my mother was accidentally killed during an electrical storm, and dad held our family together, and he taught at Northfield High School first, and then at the Montpere Public Schools, but he wasn't painting very much. He'd sort of, you know, the juice had gone out of it for him after that turn down, and after my mother's death, and he was reestablishing a life for us, his family. I watched him one day painting in oils, and he worked on this painting, and worked on this painting, and worked on this painting, and he just never satisfied him, and so finally he threw it away, and he turned to watercolors because they were quicker, and if you didn't like it, you could move on to something else, and gradually, as Bobby knows, he became a master of watercolor, and one day, Bobby, Bobby gosh, came to our house. Dad was painting out in the barn sale in the garage, and Bobby came in and changed his life, and I'll let Bobby take it from there. I'm gonna read from my chapter on art, and two years ago I published at memoir, and it pretty well covers the history of what Ron meant to me and how we met. That's actually a good starting point because that's how I started. That was the day. In 1978, I was driving down Route 12 and about two, three miles down on the left was this big sign, sale barn, so what's that? I collect an antique, so I pulled in, and I drove in the long driveway and saw a man painting in the open doorway of the barn, and he was sitting there. He was working on a large mural which was painted in the socialist style of the 1930s. He introduced himself as Ron Slaton. He was restoring the painting, which he had painted in the 1930s for the Fleming Museum in Burlington, Vermont, which owned the painting. I asked him if he had any paintings for sale, and he showed me various paintings around the barn. He took me up into the attic and showed me a 1930s painting called Burlington Gothic, Pie in the Sky. Well, I think you referred to that one, which is what was going on, and Burlington was in development, industrial, and it's girders crashing down in this family with, it's sort of like American Gothic, and the guy's holding his lunch pail with his family, and there's pie in the sky above it, much like, that's a theme that goes through Ron's work. It's like circular, something circular about his, about a lot of his paintings. I instantly loved it. A picture of a workman with a lunch box and a family outside of their tenement house with smoked stacks and iron beams crushing around him. A cornucopia of fruits and vegetables looned over the family's heads. Ron said the painting was not for sale, which I totally understood, but it was just knocked my socks off. I thought that I bought two paintings that day, and the first one was Two Worlds, which is in the WPA room that was painted in 1942, and it's as close as he got to really modern. I think it was a little bit of Francis Colburn's influence in there. It's a little bit, you know, from my eye. And a watercolour he had recently painted, which is from Acadiva. It was, if you've seen the, when you walk in, it's one of the raffle prizes. We have the original watercolour from 1978, but that's a G clay fine art copy of it. And it's a farmer daydreaming in the field by a fence with his broken down horse. And a series of poses of the same naked woman falling off a white horse appeared above his head across the top of the painting. I was hooked. I returned to his barn a few more times and bought more paintings. Ron often told me stories about his life as a young artist during the Great Depression. He would take vegetables from neighbors' gardens to survive. Sometimes he would go to a diner and order a glass of water. He would then pour the ketchup that was on the table into the water to make a kind of tomato soup. When the university of Vermont hired him to rid one of the bell towers with pigeons, he went up, killed him with a baseball bat and took him home for dinner. He told me all these stories. Ron became a painter under Franklin Roosevelt's works progress administration. He got that history well documented by, okay. And earned $18 a week, which was about $95 a month. In 1939, he had a show of his paintings at the University of Vermont, which Tom referred to. When the show was over, he couldn't afford to pick up his paintings. That's the way I heard it from him. And they found their way into the classroom walls of the university. Many years later, some of them ended up in the Fleming Museum. And I think Francis Colburn really sort of watched over and they were very close friends. He would often say they were up for grabs, which confirms what Tom said. A few months after meeting Ron, I invited him and his wife, Mayette, who was also a very good painter, to come to our house for drinks, followed by dinner at our restaurant, which we own at the time in Randolph. Ron appeared at the door with a large package wrapped in brown paper. After some hors d'oeuvres, Ron and Mayette did not drink. Ron handed me the package and said it was a gift. In the package was the painting Burlington Gothic, Pine and Scum, which was not for sale. When I saw it in his attic, I told him the gift was too generous and I could not possibly accept it. Ron said, I have a feeling that you're gonna be my historian when I die. I said, Ron, I am your historian and you can count on it. And this is, you can count on it. I loved the painting and did not want to insult Ron. So I accepted it. Not going into the Bennington show on the end of June for four months down to Bennington Museum. We became cherished friends and I looked up to Ron who was 68 years old at the time as a kind of respected father image in deference to my sibling Tom. Yeah, he was a wonderful humanitarian and a true gentleman. Over the years, I bought many more paintings from Ron and helped him secure shows in quite a few galleries. A major retrospective was presented at the D. W. Wood Gallery in 1989. That was up on top of the hill there. On college? Yeah. Three years before he died. They were about 75, 80 paintings in that. It was another big, nice event. I commissioned him to do a portrait of our family. He was, it was to be six feet by four feet with a portrait of each one of us in the quadrant of the painting, in a quadrant. About a year later, Ron asked permission to paint it in four, three by two foot panels because his health was failing and he could not reach high anymore. I said that would be fine. About six months later, Ron said the paintings were finished. It was a cold November day when he and I walked slowly from his house to the barn to see his paintings. As Ron walked with his cane, he told me he had leukemia. I was crushed to hear that my friends died. When we got to the barn, I saw the beautiful painting that he painted from the rest of our family. Excuse me. I lost it just like now. And these were the last paintings he ever painted. He spent the last weeks of his life on the couch of his living room. I visited him a few times a week. He had painted two large sociabilist watercolors in 1984. I advised him to donate them to the Fleming, which had about a dozen of his 1930s real estate, realist works. By doing this, he could write off the value of them on his taxes for estate reasons. He told me he didn't want the murals hidden in a museum store and said he was giving them to me as a gift to be shown in public. Whenever I could, we had done just that. One of the murals was the last supper, a sociabilist painting from 1984. It is comprised of 10 30 inch by 24 inch panels at your state for a total mural size of five by 10 feet. It is an anti-war protest painting in the late 1990s. In the late 1990s, I exhibited in the Chandler Gallery in Randolph, Vermont, the painting depicted an army general, as you can see, I don't have to explain that, eating the soldiers as businessmen and politicians offered more money in mushrooms and munitions. I thought it would have been a good idea. I thought it would have been a good idea. I thought it would have been a good idea. I thought it would have been a good idea. So, and the voters slept by a burnt candle with cobwebs, the table they receded at was being held up by the poor and so forth. Chandler Gallery was also used by the town as a polling place. That was the first time we ever showed that mural. The gallery contacted me and said the town wanted the mural removed so that it wouldn't be seen by the voters and potentially it offended them. I asked if they were removing the other paintings in the show. They said no. I said my polling place in Brookfield was a Masonic temple and I had a look at a copy of the religious painting of Palais supper when I voted. And as an atheist, I was very offended. I told the town, I wouldn't remove the painting. They backed down and moved the polling place to the musical next door. I don't believe in censoring the artist. Rod died July 1992, 81 years old. I loved him and miss him very much. He was a wonderful human being. So, you don't need me for this, but this is the Q&A. I'll just direct your question and say any of our beautiful speakers, that was so helpful. Anyone have something you'd like to ask? I'm not gonna ask anything, I just wanna comment how the presentation was so great. I didn't know a lot of what you talked about music. And I had met your dad a number of times and he thought it was just a great shot. And I'm so glad that you two have so much of this work and share it with us. It was great, thank you. Retemporary keepers. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're good keepers. We want you all back up for another round here. Anyone else have anything? Our stories. Yeah, most stories. Please. Tell the most or did a lot of work to you. Oh yeah. You wanna do that by me or? Well, I just found, I thought I'd do everything about it. Yeah. Last night, Liz told me, she said, here's the one. What's that? She said, were you at his house or? No, we were in the house that we lived in which was right beside. Oh, okay. Man, right? All you had to do was go out his door and into our door. Right, so you were, And so we were just always. Well, you didn't tell him his story. We were always, we were always thinning out. And so I guess one day I was cooking dinner or something and I wanted to use some dry mustard. And I went to look for it and it wasn't there. And I knew I had dry mustard. We're really fine. Think too much about it after that. But then something happened, Ethan probably fell or whatever. And I needed some new curicum. So I went to the cabinet in the bathroom to get me a curicum and that was gone. And so I couldn't figure this out. And then one time over at Dad's, went over to his house, looked at some of his paintings. And this was in the, this would be in the 70s. And probably meant to like 70s when he was doing a lot of things with very bright, you know, the bright colors. And I looked at him and I said, I think I know where my muscle is. I don't know where my muscle is. He just watered down the curicum. Yeah, because he used it on that painting of the nude, the standing on the rock and she's got a red, oh yeah. A light curicum or a red thing. Yeah, that's the curicum. That's the curicum. Come on. This is the curicum with a little water. So you never knew what was gonna happen. Let me fix it right here. I just told Bobby about when my Annie's folks came up the first time. The Yorkers, very sophisticated, came up, Van and Shirley came in and we were nervous. No, what that was gonna go like, you know. And they came in and, you know, I said, okay, dad, man, and you know, they're here and we'd like you to meet them and dad said, oh yeah, come right in. And he had his teeth out first and then he and Peter were making squirrel stews. And Van was a stand-up comedian in New York and he was sort of like, I don't think so. I think he used to. It's a thing that you didn't mention about, you know, trying to fix up the barn sale and everything. What he told me was that if it looked too fancy, people would think it was too expensive. And then he went away. He went away. He went away. He went down and kind of ran away. I mean, I don't know if it did, I don't know. Sam. You just described it, I'm trying to picture the barn sale more. He was teaching at the same time when he had the barn sale or how many years did it go on? Yeah, well, he was retired. He was retired from teaching. He was curator of the Good Art Gallery for several years. But he had more time with paint. And the barn sale was appropriate enough in the barn out in back of our house. And that barn had had a panel cut out so he could ride two cars into it. And he would sit where the cars were no longer there. It was full of junk. And he would sell up his easel. Yeah, saleable items. And he would sit there and paint. He'd be selling barn sale stuff and his paintings. Yeah. The musical instruments. Yeah. And he would sit there and paint. Yeah, musical instruments came to where? People came. We had a piano again. We had a piano again to listen to. And it ended up in the barn sale. I never ever said he's a try to dig the endless line. No way. No way. How many people came? Well, my father's. Quite a few. Oh, that's people. Yeah. That's right for us now. Yeah. People still come, actually, to play. And look for music lids from the big player. Well, one of the stories then, I wasn't there. But it was like a day or two before he died. And so people came in. And they wanted to, I said, as a saxophone or something. And tried to explain that dad was dying. And dad wanted them to come in. So he was doing business two days ago. Before he died, but he might be fine. I went in the day before he died. And he had a phone on his chest. And I said, dad, you want me to take a phone off your chest? It doesn't look very comfortable. And he said, I'm waiting for a call. But you want me to take a phone off your chest. Phone, right? And he picked the phone up. And he was talking. And he said, no, no, I'm sorry. I can't do that right now. I'm in the process of passing all the way. Oh, wow. Your brother Peter has a lot of instruments. At the same time. Yeah, I have something I can make here. I tried to see him a couple times a week. And he was laying on the couch under the water for a room. That's right where he was. Laying on the couch. And we're talking. And all of a sudden, some guy and his wife walks in. People just walked in. And he walked in and he said, I'd like to buy it. I think it was a saxophone. He said, I'd like to buy that saxophone out there. So how much is it? And then Rod said something like $150 or whatever. It was a good one. It was so good. And the guy says, well, I only had $10. He said, just take it. And he says, you keep track of it. This is one, two weeks. Wow. I think he rented out musical instruments. Yeah. So some kids in school would put in the floor and buy an instrument with Reset and one of them would. I have to tell the story that involves Bobby and Dad. And my father was distressed. He was out in the Barnsdale painting. And he was obviously upset. And Bobby said, what's the matter? And Rod said, oh, there's this guy. I'll give you $50. And he's never paid it off. My name was Warren. I was about 100 years old. OK. So it was, to my dad, a very substantial amount. And he's never paid it off, darn it. And Bobby said, I'll get the money for you. So correct me if I'm wrong. Bobby went home. Bobby stands six feet, two. And he was wearing his shades. And he went home and got his leather jacket and drove to the guy's house in his Cadillac. He goes up in front, knocks on the door, and says, I understand you over on Slate and some money. I'll get the money right now. Wow, this is remarkable stuff. We have eight minutes. That's an eternity. Other people want to share their stories or ask questions? Or? I want to give more stories. This is the best talk that I have, hard talk, that I've never had. One of the funniest stories. It's amazing to learn so much about an artist. And not just appreciating his work, but the personal stories that I really had to say. So are there any more? Probably more, but not in big skimpy. I mean, the only other thing about the barn sale that I remember is I was always trying to gentrify everything. I was concerned about who was coming in and going out and what was going on. And every now and then, a state police car would come in. I know where this is. Yeah, because it's hot. Well, I was always TV's. Whatever it was, they were concerned that Grandpa was selling hot ivy. Because here I am, you know, my home. I've got steak, hot sauce. Because here's hot stuff. Yeah. And I found some one time. I should tell you that this is my beloved wife. And my sister, Gail. That's how we know all this stuff. You know, one interesting thing about the bureau was when he painted these for the Union of Concerned Scientists or whatever, right? The International Organization. And he actually painted them. And he had a box he made, you know, with all that stored paintings in. And he had a stand, a big stand that he put the one mural on the one side and the other mural. And he was in a wheelchair. I don't know what had happened at that time. And he traveled to, I think, Russia, Germany. And I think... Don't worry about that. No, it was Central Europe, basically. Yeah. And he had, I remember, forgot to guide it, went with him, took care of him, and wheeled him around. Yeah. He went over there in a wheelchair. Just went to the painting. Yeah. And what was the name of the speech of the organization he gave a speech in Italy? You remember Bobby? No. I can't remember, because it is memoirs, but... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to be able to pull it out. Yeah. Yeah. Did he take a stand? What? On the street? On the street? What is that? That I don't... I can't remember. He had special boxes made for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because he needed to show them. Oh, okay. That's me. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I was going to ask, is there a reason why he is... I think it's probably the medium of watercolors. Right. To move them. I mean, it would have been one piece for him. He could have taken it up to Europe. You know, he had it all figured out. And then, you know, he... I never saw any original drawings for these, but... One more... I've got one more story. We got... We have another two murals that the state of Vermont commissioned him to paint approximately... It's a little... Approximately this size. A little smaller. And they put it in the employment building. You know, the department employee. Right over by the high school. Right. Fast there. Yeah. And he showed me the study. And he showed me the study. And he showed me the... And he showed me the... And he showed me the... And he showed me the... And he showed me the... He showed me the studies and what... Which we have. About this big and... There was a woman with a bare breast. Breastfeeding. It was like... Vermont at work and Vermont at leisure. Again, the theme of life. The murals in their... In their thirties, you know. Work. And... So the first thing they did was making cover of the... You know. Just holding the baby. He said, censorship, you know. And they put them up in the... In the cafeteria. And they were there... For maybe two years at the most. And they got so many complaints. I don't know why. But they had to take them out. And Steve Gold, who was here last night. He was a prison system at that time. He had a big Iran slave. He had him in his office. And he tried... He called everywhere. You know, all the museums. And nobody wanted to see Bobby God. And hanging in my recording studio. And waiting on the steps. Temporary. Again. I saw those murals on the wall of the... Yeah. The Department of Employment Security. And the first time I saw them, they were murals, right? The second time I saw them, they had curtains drawn. Oh, yeah. Yeah, right. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I think people want a pretty picture. That's exactly it. They don't like to be confronted with reality. They want a pretty picture. And that's for art people. Well, I can sell a lot finer pictures. But nobody wants to do it. Because that's dirty. Actual human bodies. Oh, really? God. Wow. What a wondrous and wonderful evening. Do people have anything else they'd like to offer? Questions? Please look at the art. Enjoy the rest of the food. Thank you to one another. Thank you for coming to the wood. Thanks, our guests, very much.