 We are thrilled and honored to have this film being previewed here tonight and have Nat take over and he's going to talk a little bit about the film. Welcome everybody, thanks for coming. It's great to see so many familiar faces and old friends of mine and old friends of Ray's and Jody's. The origin of this film was just about a year ago when Ray had just recovered from what do you call that kind of surgery? Tadder, he had just gotten back from rehab. It was a little touch and go there for a couple weeks before and immediately after the surgery. But as Ray has wanted to do, he pulled through and has been doing well ever since and right when he got back from rehab he called me. We've known each other for 35 years or so and asked if I would consider doing an audio tape of him recounting his life, which he had done with his mom when she was close to the end of her life. And I said, well Ray, I'm a bit of a videographer. By the way, my background is my first lifetime I was a newspaper publisher at Vanguard Press and Vermont Times up in Chittenden County but living here. And then after that I became a budding filmmaker. I actually went to film school after college but wasn't able to get a TV job in Vermont so I became a journalist. And I was also executive producer of the Vermont movie which Paul Carnahan back there and others may be familiar with. Nora Jacobson was the lead filmmaker and three dozen Vermont film anyway. That's another story. So I have been working on this for, the filming took about a month and a half, nine separate interviews. I thought it was going to be, you know, a pretty quick and easy project but it took on a life of its own. Ray's a great raconteur. So one thing led to the other and pretty soon I was a little bit over my head. And then it took about, I had about six and a half hours worth of interviews, nine different interviews and right now it's at an hour and 21 minutes. So the editing process is typical. I was spending about a half a day a week on average for nine, ten months over at the ORCA studio. Thank you ORCA. It's a great resource for this community. And I was editing with some help from my grandson Desmond who's operating my laptop here. It's going to be 18 and about a month and a half. And the folks at ORCA were helping up until about three hours ago. So you may notice a minor glitch or two but it's in pretty good shape. I'm happy with it. It's not a Kim Bernsian style documentary. There's not very much in the way of B-roll or interviewing other people. The only people I interviewed were Ray and Jody. So it's basically an hour and 20 minutes of talking heads and photographs and artwork and a couple of other things thrown in there. So that's all. There'll be a Q&A afterwards that Ray and Jody, if you have questions for her, will participate in and enjoy. First memories of life are actually of my younger brother being brought home from the hospital. And he was born in 1945 and Roosevelt had just died. So it was sort of a mix. It was nice for my mother to get home from the hospital with a new baby brother. And also we were mourning the death of a loved president. I myself wasn't too thrilled about having a younger brother but I didn't have much say about it. So I had to learn to live with it. And my younger brother and I, after 30 years of life, finally got to be good friends. We lived in Brookline Mass in a residential neighborhood in the house that my father had built at the same time as he built his first gas station back about 1925. Dad was involved in politics. He was 17 years. He was chairman of the school committee in Brookline. And then he was elected to the selectmen and he was chairman of the board of selectmen for something like 20 years. And that was what he was really interested in was government and that's how we lived with him going off to a meeting, which was okay. You know, I don't know how my mother felt about it. She never complained about it. I think she liked the prestige of it all. She liked being married to the head honcho. She was a great wife of a politician. She could throw a party and she liked people. My mother was tough to get close to. She was very opinionated and you did it her way or it wasn't right. My father loved us and did everything for us but he wasn't able to really express any kind of feelings or understanding of what we as individual kids were about. They weren't bad parents. They were good parents. I can tell you about my grandmother, Crow. Her name was Honora. We called her Noni and she lived with my father and mother from the day they got married. And she was very important to me growing up because my mom did a lot of outside stuff outside the house and a lot of times Nana was really raising me. And I was quite close to her. She was a great lady. She got senile as she got older and that led to a lot of funny situations in the house. But she was a great lady and I was very lucky to have the experience of growing up with a kind of an extended family. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother came from Ireland in 1843 and they knew each other there. And they got married over here and they had two sons and my grandfather was George, one of those two sons, and his son was George, my father. So George, my grandfather, was born in Roxbury, Mass at the end of the 19th century and then moved to Hopkinson where the marathon starts. And he was an entrepreneur. He began as a young man as a waiter at the Harvard Club and he started arranging fights, boxing matches at the Harvard Club. And he met some wealthy guys at the Harvard Club. They asked him if he'd like to be the manager of the Boston Athletic Association and he said yes. And then these guys decided to build the Boston Garden. And when they built the Boston Garden they asked him if he wanted to run it. And he said yes. And so that was sometime around 1920. In around 1926 he bought the Boston Tigers, which was the first professional hockey team in Boston. And he changed the name to the Bruins. He ran the garden until he died, which was in the late 30s, and my uncle Walter took it over, his oldest son, Walter Brown. And he found the Celtics. And as a kid I used to go to all the Bruins games. And my uncle let me go into the locker room and pick out a uniform and skates and sticks and gloves. And so I had the best hockey equipment every year from the Bruins, which was really kind of fun. And I went all through high school and then all through art school. I went through a lot of games. But mostly in high school that's when I went to every game they played. And that's about all I did in high school. And I did get to skate with them, which was quite an experience. I guess I should tell you what it was, but I didn't just mention it. I was a very good skater as a kid. I was very fast and I was big. And I got on the ice with the Bruins and even the goalies were skating by me. They were so much better than I was. It was unbelievable the difference. And then when I was older I got a chance to play with the guys that played in the 16 Olympics. And went on to beat the Russians and then the Czechoslovakians for the gold medal. And I played with a bunch of those guys. And I was almost good enough to play with those guys. But not quite. And I didn't make the team. But that was a lot of fun to play with at that level of play. Uncle Walter said he wouldn't let me go to the hockey games unless I went to a Bruin, the Southex games. And I didn't give a damn about basketball. I really at the beginning really liked the team they had. Guys like Bob Cousy and Tommy Hyneson and a lot of really great personalities. We used to go down to the locker room and meet them all and all that. I can remember Bob Cousy was only about 6'1". But he had hands on him. His hands were absolutely giant. All those guys were playing for the Southex and they won and they won and they won. They won everything for like 7 or 8 years in a row. And I played hockey until I was 50. I didn't play professionally. I played football and baseball and ran track and not all at the same time. My nickname was Truck. And I was a big stocky kid. But I couldn't run. I played because the football coach was my algebra teacher. And I thought if I played I'd get a better grade in algebra. But it didn't work at all. I ended up taking algebra one three times. Everybody looked at me and said, oh you must be a football player. And that was really about the reason I played it. My father said, oh jeez you'll be a good football player. You'll be a great football player. I just didn't make any sense to me. I went 3 years to Brooklyn High and then I transferred to a prep school in Maine, Hebrew Academy, which had a great hockey program. I took art in high school and I knew I had a little talent. I hate that word. Talent is what people think artists are supposed to have that makes them different from anybody else. And I never felt I was any different from anybody else. I just did it. And I didn't stop doing it. But I did think about being an artist. And of course my family thought I was crazy because I never make any money. You know, I didn't pay any attention to that. That was real good advice too. Probably in high school, in prep school I realized that I didn't want to sell insurance or have a desk kind of job. I know that would have been awful for me. I certainly had no interest in anything else at the age of 17. I was like most kids just kind of floundering around and didn't know. I didn't have the brains or the knowledge to make a really good decision about anything. At the age of 17 the only thing I knew that I liked was art. And because of that I decided I would try to get into art school. I'd get into an art school. And I did. I got into Massachusetts College of Art in 1959. I made a decision at the age of 17 or so that what I would do with the rest of my life is what I actually did do with the rest of my life. And I really looked back on it and realized that I had a really wonderful life. I went on to art school and I thought I would learn to paint like landscape painters of the 19th century. Early 19th century painters. I liked a lot. All through high school I would go to the museum in Boston and I would go through the various departments of the museum. And I always seemed to go back to two or three paintings that were by Corot in particular. And I would go and I would stare at them and try to understand how he could turn what he was looking at into a beautiful little painting. I went to art school in the early 60s and they were teaching abstract expressionist painting. And I thought they were crazy. I had no idea. I didn't know anything about you know, contemporary art. And I had no, none of it needed my teacher in high school never mentioned it to me or anything. At the beginning of art school I wasn't sure how it was going to work out for me. But then I realized that none of the other guys knew either. And we had teachers that said things like, well get a canvas and they said, well what size? Whatever size you'd like would be the answer. And what do you want me to use for a medium? Well you can use whatever you want. You want to use oil paint or acrylics. And I said oil paint and then when we got all the stuff together and got into the classroom and I had there was no model in the classroom. So I said, well what are we supposed to paint? And she said, well you can paint whatever you want. I didn't know what the hell to do. I liked the idea of big paintings. I remember that right away I liked big paintings. I didn't know what they were going to be but they were going to be big anyway. And I did some big kind of landscapy paintings four by four. And I really sort of really liked the act of putting paint on. I knew that right away. I liked putting the paint on. And so there was something that I figured out about myself that I liked the act of painting. But I still didn't know what to paint and how to figure out what you want to paint. That was quite a struggle as it should be because if I was going to be any kind of an artist I had to have some kind of a... My paintings had to have some meaning to me at any rate. The lessons I probably got in art school that stuck with the conversations I had with other people my own age that were going through the same struggle was not so much classroom stuff but talking in the lunch room, talking in the bar room, mostly talking in the bar room to tell you the truth. But I kept on at it and I started out doing terrible abstract paintings. Absolutely awful abstract paintings. And then I discovered that if I took what I saw as a kind of a place to begin I could abstract from what I saw and make something that had some kind of a structure to it. So my paintings from probably my sophomore year on were kind of paintings that were based on landscape but were pretty abstract. But they were beginning to get satisfying. I had no trouble with dates. I had plenty dates. I wouldn't call me a ladies man but I liked women a lot. A friend of mine and myself and we used to put on parties. We'd rent a hall and buy a keg of beer too and charge a little admission and have big parties for anybody to come in the door. And that was a lot of fun. I should also mention I'm color blind. I was color blind and I took color courses. I finally came to realize that I wasn't blind to color. I just didn't see color the same way other people did. And that was okay with me because I didn't do a lot of things that a lot of people did. I got through my undergraduate courses and what I'd realized was that I had come to the conclusion that you had to have an idea for a painting. And once you finished the painting then you had to find another idea and do another painting. And it took me years and years to realize that one idea could produce a whole body of work and not just a single painting. I was always trying one thing and trying another thing, trying another thing. But now as I look back at that work I can see all the things about them that are the same. And they already had an adhesion that I didn't even see while I was doing them. And that was great to see that. That's something that really meant a lot to me that I really had big ideas that followed all the way through a lot of my work. I joined the National Guard in 1960 and I served in active duty at Fort Dix in New Jersey. And when I was in the Army down there I won the All Army Art Contest. So from that time on all I did was teach. I never even finished basic trading. So the only one that could take these classes and stuff were the wives. And so all my classes were full of officers and enlisted men's wives which was kind of a silly combination of things. But you know I was really kind of fun. I enjoyed it and I got a salary above and beyond my military pay which I think was $80 a month or something. So I was a real, I was not a very good soldier. I didn't take it seriously. I started to get some real bad back pains and I went to a doctor. So the doctor said, well I'll write you a letter. And so he wrote me a letter saying that I was going to have these back problems the rest of my life. And I would probably end up getting you know a medical discharge from the Army. My Army career was supposed to be I think it's eight years or something. And I ended up being in for four years which was perfectly alright with me. After I graduated from art school I married my childhood sweetheart and she, we had one child, a boy, Dylan, Linda Hardy. She was a beautiful girl. She was in the Miss Massachusetts contest and she was Miss Quincy. I chased her from my freshman year and she wouldn't have much to do with me. And then by the time we were getting ready to graduate I guess I was looking better. At any rate anyway we got married. I got a teaching job in the town of Hopkinson Mass where I taught art and coached football. And it was my first teaching experience and it was, I found out that I definitely didn't like junior high kids. I couldn't stand them. They couldn't stand me. So after one year of that I got out of that and taught high school kids which I enjoyed very much. And I taught there for, taught and coached there for three years. And I had a salary of $3,500 a year which was a low average salary for a beginning teacher in 1962. When I was in Hopkinson I was married to Linda and we had a, an apartment, well it was actually a house. And I was having a good, we had a good marriage, Linda and I and things are going fine. She was working at the, at the St. State Hospital in Worcester and she really liked it. And so between the two of us you know we had our jobs and we, we had a, we had a pretty good life there. She was beginning to show signs of some mental problems but they weren't, they didn't seem to be too, she wasn't very, she wasn't a very happy person. You know she spent a lot of time worrying and, but we were doing alright. And she got, she got worse as time went on but I still thought that it was something that we could handle ourselves. And well it proved that we couldn't handle it on ourselves. I was really learning how to teach and how to, you know I was only a kid, I was only 22 or 3 years old and I wasn't very much older than my seniors, you know. And so I had to learn how to deal with the, deal with the people that were my own age almost in terms of being a leader and having them accept me as a leader. And that was an important part of learning how to, how to teach. I think teaching, I think coaching the football helped that too because the boys were more likely to see me as a leader, you know, if I was telling them how to play football as opposed to telling them how to draw pictures. Although I really didn't know a hell of a lot about football, really didn't know much about football at all. But I knew more than they did. And I didn't know much about teaching either so I, I really had to learn that. So anyway I ended up down at Quincy and began my second teaching career at Quincy High School and I did that for 18 years. I taught drawing and painting and then I taught some ceramics which I had a lot of fun with and I taught art history and aesthetics. And so I thought the most important thing I taught was the art history and aesthetics. And most kids who take art in high school aren't going to become artists, but they're going to become, they're going to become human beings if they aren't already. And they're going to have to look around the world and see things and make just, make decisions about whether they like it or whether they don't like it. One course I did, I spent a lot of time developing was a drawing course which began by my putting up rectangular pieces of cardboard on a piece of paper. Say it was an 8, 16 by 20 piece of paper. And I would put a piece of cardboard up on the, on the, on the piece of paper, maybe a rectangular piece of cardboard. And one end of it would touch the very edge of the paper and then it would go out and be there. And I would say, okay kids, draw that just how it, how it was, you know, they had a 16 by 20 piece of paper too. And they would draw and try to put that rectangle where it was exactly as it was as they saw. And then I, you know, I put another little rectangle. And so the drawing, the designs would become more complicated as, as the days went on. And then I would start making the rectangles into maybe buildings. And they didn't even realize it, but all of a sudden they were doing drawings of landscapes. And it was pretty successful, you know. And that was going right into drawing what they were seeing. And then, you know, you get into teaching perspective and all the rest of the tricky things about realistic drawing. And it was a real, it was a real good course, you know. And they were great years. I liked teaching. I liked high school kids. I liked the guy I taught with. We were two teachers and two art teachers in a great big school. I think it was 3,000 kids in the school. And we had a big, huge art department in all the facilities you could ask for. So it was a real great place for me to work. And so I stayed there for 18 years, which was quite a career, actually. And I always had a studio, so I always was painting as well as teaching and I had shows. So I was busy, you know. I was a busy guy. And I also coached hockey, which was a lot of fun. I was more involved with sports than I was in anything else. But I did have a, one thing that was my own idea was a rock climbing club. Because there were lots of places to climb rocks around the old quarries and granite quarries in Quincy and also in the Blue Hills. And so myself and another guy who was a real outdoorsman type guy, we had this rock climbing club. And he knew all about ropes and how to get kids strapped into things. And so we did it very safely. But they did things, you know, this was a long time ago before there were indoor rock climbing walls and all that. But they were to trust each other, getting tied in together and climbing up a cliff where one fell off. The other one really would have the kids life in their hands. And that was a very exciting and, I thought, very good learning experience for these kids that wanted to do it. So anyway, my wife Linda was not doing very well as we moved to Quincy, which happened to be her home town, which we never had discussed what that was like for her to come back to her hometown. But she was able to connect with some of the people that she went to high school with. So we made some friends and things were going pretty well. But she was sad. She was sad a lot of the time. And after our son was born, Zilla Dillon was born, she really was in a, what we thought was a postnatal depression where she couldn't even get out of bed. And she'd cry him all the time. She had Dillon with her in bed and it was not just not a good scene. Although, you know, we weren't fighting, but it wasn't much of the relationship at that point. And I thought that I could solve all of her problems as only a young man with a good ego thinks. But her problems were far greater than anything I could have handled. And so she killed herself and it was a very sad chapter in my life. And I also, I had a daughter that she took with her when she killed herself. So I lost the daughter as well. That summer, Dillon and I took off in a beautiful Volkswagen camper that my younger brother, while he was in the Army in California, he bought and drove back across the country to Massachusetts. We stopped in Detroit and saw my older brother. And that's when I visited Cranbrook and decided that I definitely want to go there if I have a chance. And then we went from there to Montana where the guy that I went to Cranbrook was now teaching at the University of Montana and living outside of Bozeman and that was beautiful. We stayed out there for a few days and we went from there down to visit another friend who was living down in northern New Mexico. And they had a one bedroom adobe building out in the middle of the desert. And that was really pretty interesting. My memories of that place are of Zillan and their son, I forget his name. They had wicked fights and they fought with sticks and nobody got hurt or anything. But that was what I remember which was the first experience I had had with a three year old hellion. The two of them were. And so I could begin to see what it was going to be like raising this wild little guy. And it was just like I thought it was going to be. You know, I wanted to go to Cranbrook. I never thought I'd get in there. And then I didn't realize, you know, what am I going to do with Zillan when I'm going to Cranbrook? I got the letter saying that I had been excused or I had been accepted into Cranbrook which was great. Because they only take like six painters in their graduate program every year. And then it, you know, dawned on me that George was living right down the street practically from Cranbrook. And so Zillan could stay there and so it all kind of fell together. And it made it so that I could go to graduate school and Zillan would have a really nice place to live with his uncle and aunt and his cousins. They had a kid in the same age as him. Graduate school was a couple of towns over so I could, you know, put Zillan to bed every night. And there was actually only one professor and they taught painting. I looked at this George Artman as a very wise man who was very comfortable in his own skin and very comfortable in his own paintings, which I liked too. There was nothing like anything I ever saw before. They were kind of interesting. But it was more he was an interesting guy than anything else. The way I met him was, I don't know, the first night I was at Cranbrook. I got myself a bottle of Irish whisky and I went down to the, they had like a recreation room that, you know, there was a band there and you could buy beers and everything. And so I was sitting down the way of my bottle of John Jameson and in walks this guy who I didn't know and he turned out to be my instructor. Most of the teaching was done through, you would show your work to your peers and your peers would talk to you about what you were doing. And that was very, very interesting for me because at that point, you know, I'd been teaching for 10 years and I'd been painting for 10 years. So I had a pretty good idea about how to paint but I still had no idea what to paint. And so I jumped around a lot from one kind of a painting to another kind of a painting. I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about painting, about why you paint. Not so much about what you paint because that was pretty much up to me whenever I wanted to paint. Why was I getting this need to paint and I kept that need right along. I went through a lot of different ways of working and it was great. It was all I could have asked for at a graduate school. And while I was out there, I met a young lady who we liked each other and so we started to go together. It was a first woman that I had anything to do with since I knew Linda and then that grew into a pretty steady relationship. And we were getting along real good and so it was time for me to go back to Massachusetts and I asked her if she wanted to come with me. And she said, sure. And so I thought, well, that would be good because then I'd have somebody with me who could help me with Dylan until she got a little bit older. But she said, oh, well, I want to go back to Boston with you, but I want to marry you. And I wasn't really excited too much excited about that. I thought of it more like a temporary kind of a thing, but we did get married and it went pretty well. Dylan, she got along really well. She's a fine woman and I don't regret our marriage. I'm sorry it didn't work out, but it didn't. And so we lived in Brooklyn and as our relationship started to go downhill and she decided she was going to leave me and I ended up going to California and she met a guy out there and they've been together ever since and she's happy. And she and Dylan are still in touch and that's really nice. And then I had this house's three-story duplex with just Dylan and I in it. And so I rented out some rooms and one of the people I rented a room to was Jody Wilson. There were two things that I think of particularly that attracted me to Ray besides the fact that we were both interested in art and architecture. We had common interests. One is my body. Oh, of course. That goes three things. I don't even have to mention that part. That's true, but before I found out about that part, he had a really, really nice way about it. Well, we would have parties, have people over. When he came in the room, it seemed to me people became at ease and the tenor changed. Maybe it was just me. And the other thing was he had a lot of stress. He had had a lot of tragedy in his life. And I remember just loving him and thinking that, you know, this tragedy isn't fair and he deserves to be happy. I really think that's one of the things that I felt really strongly. So move forward quickly. We became an item, had a really good time. I was sure I wanted to get married again. So Jody left and went to California. I took a job in an architectural firm and lived in Northern California and was having a good time and having a good life. I decided I wanted to go to graduate school at University of California Berkeley. There was a designer there that I was told me had to get and I wanted to study landscape architecture with him. And I missed her a lot, much more than I thought I was going to. And so I went on a plane and flew out there and found her and convinced her to come back. So we got together again and more seriously this time and I was ready to make any kind of commitment. I set up in Vermont and rented quite a strange little house on a mill pond that had a stream that ran under in South Woodbury. And so you could hear the water running all the time through the stream and then sometime around the end of January the stream would freeze up and the whole and the quiet was so quiet. It would take us a month before we could get to sleep. It was so quiet after having the stream all the time. We guess we made the commitment to a Vermont and we had to figure out a way to make a living. I was doing freelance work. I wasn't hired by the architects that I did work for. I was going around and trying to talk everybody into hiring me and they gave me jobs, contract jobs. And I was making, we didn't have really any money so I was making money at night bartending so that I could do that. And she was bartending at Charlie O's in Marperia. We were pretty poor and that was nothing new. So I got a job with community action, screening people that were looking for help by weatherizing their houses in Vermont. And that was, it was a great job because I go around to all these rundown old houses and trailers and meeting all these people that were real Vermonters who needed help with their housing. And it was really quite a nice job. I liked it a lot. It was kind of ironic that here's a kid coming up from Brookline Mass to tell people from Vermont how to winterize their houses. But that's like anything else, you know. It's like the army. He ended up in the army and he ended up teaching art. Well, I ended up weatherizing houses in Vermont. Dillon by this time was, I guess he was 15. And he got involved with some kids who lived in Southwoodbury and went to high school in Hardwick. And I thought, you know, moving to Vermont would be a better place for him because he liked being outdoors and everything. And there was, you know, less chance of drugs and alcohol and everything. Well, that was certainly not true. The kids in Vermont were just as wild as the kids in Brookline were. And he was just as wild there too. But he met some good kids too, you know. But they did. They did a lot of smoking dope and drinking and raising hell. Dillon was really not happy at high school in Hardwick. So we decided we'd move into the best educated place we knew of, which was U32 in East Montpelier. Dillon was a handful growing up. He was a handful from day one. You know, he would, like when he was three years old, he found a loose picket in the fence in the backyard. And he kicked it out and took off. That sort of set the stage. I don't even think he was three. And then he lost his mother when he was three. And it was just the two of us. And that was pretty tough. But he did, while he was in Vermont, develop a real strong work ethic. He worked with a builder who was a state representative. And he taught Dillon what it was to work. And he worked as a carpenter's helper while he was still going to school. And then we moved again from Woodbury. And so he went to another new school. And he made some good friends there. He didn't get into a lot of trouble there, but he just had no interest in academics at all. And so he wasn't a very happy guy. He went through a lot. He has a very intense personality anyway. He's very smart. He's very, very funny. He likes people. But he has an anger that has a really hard time controlling. And a lot of stress that he has a hard time controlling. So he's a mixed bag. But I guess the worst thing was when we were living in the East Point area, didn't finish school, and he had a girlfriend. They went to Boston together. Oh no, we had to tell him to leave home. That was awful. Yeah, we went to the minister who married us. And we were explaining our... He was stealing from you. Yeah. He said, you know, you don't deserve to live like that. You've got to get him out of there. And so we did. We threw him out. He had a little bit of trouble with the law. And he needed $50 bail as my recollection. And he said, we weren't going to bail him out, but we would pay for him to get help and go to Spofford Hall. And we kept sure I think it was. And he did do that. It wasn't his idea. It didn't work. And his girlfriend took off for Florida. And he sent us a letter from... had a friend mail it from Massachusetts saying that not to worry about him, he was fine. But we had lost track of him for a couple of years. And that was really awful. And it's scary. It's scary. We didn't know where he was. And he didn't get the touch with us. And that's when Ryan was born. He got in touch with us when Susan became pregnant. The relationship didn't work out. They came back to refine and broke up. And they had a very difficult time. You know, he grew up and finally started to get his own shit together without bothering us anymore. And he became a roofer and he joined the union. And he really liked his work and he did it for 20, 25 years. And he got cancer and couldn't do it anymore. But he got his license as a contractor. And so he has... Now he gets guys to work for him and they do private houses. And so he has a little business. And he's met a real nice woman. And they lived together down on Cape Cod. And so, you know, it took a long time. But he's really a nice guy. And I'm very proud of him. And I'm glad he's my son. So those kinds of things, they find the work themselves out. And Ryan is very much his father's son. But anyway, you know, everybody has problems in their lives. And they come in different shapes and colors. But they're all their own problems. You know, and I try to take care of as much as I can to take care of myself and take care of Jody and do what I can for Dylan and Ryan. And as long as they live, I'll continue to do that, I hope. I genuinely love Dylan. And I think he genuinely loves me now. And I think probably it was very difficult for him to accept me at first. We decided after we had purchased land together, lived together, lived apart, lived together again in Vermont. At some point, you couldn't imagine, and we'd figure out how to support ourselves. We were comfortable together. We couldn't imagine not being together ever. So we decided to celebrate with a wedding. And we had a wonderful wedding. On our land, we would marry with a tent and move to the Culinary Institute and Joe Burrell near my Lou's fan. But lots of fans, you know, it was really... That was a great way to do it because by the time we got married, we had... We didn't have our doubts about each other. When I made up my mind that I was going to enter into a serious relationship, it would be Jody. And I wasn't really sure that it was a good idea because of the age difference. And my concern was, what's going to happen when I get old? I mean, she's going to be stuck with a guy that's, you know, very late in his life and she's going to be right at the high point, you know, her years. And I was worried about that not being particularly fair to her. It's been a great, great long relationship and I have no qualms or, you know, I don't feel bad about any of it. So we picked up and moved to a house in East Montpelier and so Jody could go to U-32. And we liked East Montpelier for a lot. And we rented this sort of modern, hippie-built house and we stayed there for a few years and at the same time we were looking for a place to buy and we found this schoolhouse. It was a nice-looking building but it was just, it was a schoolhouse. It wasn't the house at all. It wasn't set up to be lived in but we found out we could buy it and we could afford it. And so we did. We got a builder and he made it into a hall for us. I designed the space. I got to use all the ideas I was excited about and then it became real. It was a big design project that got built and ended up being a wonderful environment. That project and also the renovation of the home that we live in now very close to that kind of a feeling and engagement. The arts-applied business didn't even have any drafting and that's a real basic art. Jody was a picture framer. He'd been framing pictures for two or three years while we lived in Brooklyn and I knew a lot about our materials as did she and I was a pretty good people person so we thought that it was going to be a good fit for us so we ended up doing that for 33 years so it was a good fit. I have to say it was Jody's business acrim that really made it possible though. She was the one that really took the bull by the horns and learned all about what I meant to run a business. I was the guy out front who dealt with the customers on a daily basis. Like Grace said, we grew from very little equipment and no employees. We grew up to when I sold the business to Liz it was five full-time, two part-time the longest employee had been there since 1990. The people come into my superior and they say oh how come that place isn't open anymore? Well it isn't open anymore because the persons that were providing the basic for why it was there have retired or died or gone on to something else and nobody wanted to do it again so small businesses do turn over and close you know and they do they can close for a lot of the reasons that aren't necessarily because they failed people think oh that's too bad that business failed no it didn't fail it just ran its course you know I don't think for me it ever got where it wasn't scary because you know it's one of those things that I just had to put your energy into or it wasn't going to work you know it just it simply wasn't going to work you know these little businesses are very much personality driven and if you don't have the that ability to connect with people it isn't going to work no matter what it is you're selling it becomes your life basically it did for me become my life Ray could always keep his artwork and painting going there were many many local artists who became our friends as we ran the drawing board and what I remember most about it was how similar it was for me to teaching was running running that store because most of our customers came in with visual problems to solve either they were going to make something that was a real object or a painting and they wanted to know what materials to use how to begin and all of those kind of questions which were pretty much the same kinds of things that people that have taken a class ask and those are the kinds of things that I felt very comfortable about answering it was unbelievable that we found this way to make a living only in retrospect do I look back at my evolution in terms of the store and I think that mine was slower than Jody's I think I was more set in my ways and less open to new things than Jody was we had already had one burst of we barred some money and done a good rehab with equipment updated to newer equipment that had come out, got the state of the art equipment our next phase was going to be a renovation and then the flood of 92 hit it was well we're either going to just go all in and do the renovation or we're not going to reopen it took a while to get all cleaned out and operational again but then we did close for a month and we entered the store out and just we did it top to bottom and after that it was a much more sophisticated and nicer architecturally we lost like $75,000 worth of inventory which is a lot in a really small business in 92 but we qualified for a FEMA loan so we went pretty far into debt so it was a tough time but Montpelier really bounced back the new store was great and eventually we paid off our loans except for I think we always operated with a line of credit for a slow month or two but we did well it was a great learning experience for sure but I think we were able to grow the business every year until the big drop in 2007, 78 our recession when everything kind of everything hit we'd have a little profit or a little loss at the end of every year but we grew the business and we went from taking hardly any money out at all to a livable wage not a lot but a livable wage and towards the end a quite good I got a quite good wage and now I'm financing the business trying to think maybe five years into it we really decided that Liz was going to be the next owner and we had a six year transition of passing on my knowledge me taking less and less of a role in the day to day and more special projects until they didn't need me anymore and they needed my salary to Liz needed my salary to purchase the business so we had a great seamless transition and I think it's the same employees are still there and I expect it to be very successful and like Ray said it needed young fresh energy and a different viewpoint and now I go into the store as a customer and I see this stuff that the new owner has brought in and how she's changing it gradually in a different direction than I would have and I see it as a very positive sign and it's really great I think she's doing a terrific job I never made enough money on selling my paintings to really be able to feel it in terms of monthly income or anything like that sometimes I made enough money so we could go on a vacation you know and that without thinking oh we're going to be really destitute for the next six months because of this vacation there was that kind of money but I've always felt that successful painting is a painting in such a way that people like what I painted but I mean they can like it without wanting to spend five thousand dollars on a painting you know four or five hundred or two hundred well I was going to say that I tried to try to keep my prices down so that people who do enjoy them can afford to buy them I don't give them away but I don't you know I don't go along with charging excessively for painting I've never been interested in marketing you've been interested in the process you know he hasn't had to have a lot of sales or big recognition for what he likes to do is paint you like showing a lot and you like other people to have your paintings and enjoy them you call yourself an obscure regionalist but there are a lot of paintings in a lot of homes in central Vermont it's unbelievable I was going through those slides of how many paintings it's probably a thousand other paintings that I didn't think were worth even taking the slide off but the paintings in there Jesus they're really good it was really fun to look through them all and feel good about it when I was in my mid fifties I decided that I was drinking too much and I was going to lose everything unless I stopped drinking and so I did and Jody did too although she probably didn't have to as much as I had to it wasn't consuming her life like it was with me I realized I was spending all of my spare time drunk or drinking and my idea of having a good time was to get together with a bunch of people and drink and so it became clear to me that if I was going to really get anything going I was going to have to quit drinking and that was the best thing I ever did I remember Ray being hospitalized and being in oxygen and not being able to breathe and it was pretty clear he couldn't smoke anymore was that after you quit drinking? right about at the same time you were really sick yeah I quit drinking and smoking within a month of each other Ray was also, besides being physically ill he had become unhappy he was always a really happy, fun drinker and person I didn't attribute it to alcohol but things our home became not violent or anything but just not happy and so I thought our marriage was not giving so I made an appointment to see a psychiatrist to talk about it at Ray's brother Walter's and I was so frustrated that I dragged Ray with me so we both saw this doctor and he said it may not be the only problem or your biggest problem but I don't think you guys are going to be able to sort things out unless you get rid of the alcohol and Ray says he walked out and just knew that he had had his last drink I was kind of like let's go home and have a drink and think about it because it was going to be a big life change right our social life certainly evolved around drinking and so did our quiet times we'd sit down at night and I'd have a couple of glasses of scotch and you'd have a a half to a quarter or a whole bottle of wine and we didn't see that as being anything wrong my folks drank every night so did mine I mean it was just what people did I didn't know anybody who didn't drink daily I got some help which was psychiatrist had a lot of friends including my brother Walter who had already gotten sober before he moved to Vermont and he was a great help like he told me about I always had a list of things that were wrong in my life and he said well why don't you get sober and you'll watch that list will just disappear and that's exactly what happened all the problems in my life just were all in my head and they just playing disappeared and so I so I started to feel a lot better I had a lot more energy and a lot more time drinking takes a lot of time and I spent a lot of time in the bottle and so my painting started to really take off at that time Ray knew he was done and at least this is the way I perceive it the way he told it to me and he went to Alcoholics Anonymous I did too it took me I think I was about three years after Ray and finally getting sober and staying that way having had my last drink but I did do it through AA and I don't think I could have done it in another way I got a lot of help and come to find out when we stopped drinking all that unhappiness just went right away around 1996 it's when I quit drinking and at the same time we started to travel I think we took our first trip to Europe in 2000 about two years we went over the second trip I planned and that was Paris from southern France and then over to Barcelona and home from Barcelona that was our second trip our third trip was to Italy four? six trips we're all to Italy we just love Italy I hope we can go back I'd like to go back one more time Ray has a group of friends that he's known since they were kids because the Chestnut Hill gang and all of us get together was every ten years then it's five years and I think we've got to speed it up now we're starting to die off we've lost two members we both came out of the blue we both felt young and just doing our thing in the morning and he was like kind of gurgling I asked him if he had a cold and he when he turned to me he went to talk his face was all lopsided and he couldn't talk correctly and I didn't know what stroke was I just knew there was something really wrong of course I called emergency right away and it started the whole ball rolling I called work I said you guys are on your own I don't know for how long and I focused on ways we have I learned everything I could about stroke I didn't leave the side except to come home every few days I learned everything about the brain about neuroplasticity that I could about why he didn't recognize the right side I realized I would sit in a certain place to get him to work that that part of his brain to get it going again my job was to empathize and just figure out how we could deal with it the best way we could possibly deal with it and I took that on as a full time job for about six months until I went back to work and then it still has been a journey since then maybe it might have occurred to me I couldn't do a good job but it never occurred to me it was something I should question whether I should be doing it or not whether we should be doing it or not or never question our work for each other commitment to each other and I had to learn how to accept my my physical disability and do the best I could with it and that's what I did so I couldn't do what my job was so I really couldn't go back to the store I think I wanted to go back at least on a part of the time I wasn't ready not to work when I had the stroke I was 66 so I mean I could have retired I had no feeling as though I wasn't pulling my own weight or anything it wasn't that I was just I liked the job and I missed the people and all of a sudden not to have a job and not to get up place in the morning was a real was a real downer my going back was really hard it just felt surreal because everything changed when you had the stroke and it was just odd but we had a great employees and it changed into my store instead of our store for the first year I was home from the rehab place I was in a wheelchair and so I couldn't have even gone out to my studio let alone thinking I could do anything out there and I had people always tell me in no way you're never going to get out of this wheelchair and you're never going to work again so you might as well get used to it and I said no that's not true I'm going to get out of this wheelchair and I am going to paint again and I did you'll have to excuse me if I can't be very specific about that it's because I simply don't remember a lot of it you know my brain wasn't really working very well it still isn't but maybe you can tell that anyway we did take him to Florida in a wheelchair and practice with gait belt and braces walking and then he got a lot more help after we got back with home health he still didn't have use of the left hand and arm so he was very clever about rigging up ways to fasten down his medium and his brushes and paint so that he could work single handed and then we worked on that arm and you finally got use of your left hand which helped a lot that was a huge change he's got such acceptance which I'm not a patient accepting person although I've learned to be much more so but as a mentor in terms of dealing with physical limitations and not being frustrated about what you can't do but just accepting where you're at and moving forward he's just a treat to watch that very inspirational thank you the work started out with simple buildings and Vermont landscape and then as I recall you found your voice when you went to Italy the Italian landscape really affected me and the colors and the forms and stuff really really worked on me a lot bunches of buildings and that's where the abstraction started to come from bunches of buildings this is our painting which started about Siena I associate red with the city of Siena and as you walk into the main square in Siena it's a long dark walk into it and then you come in and there's this beautiful gothic cathedral that's white with colors on it and the light just really banked off of it it's really very extraordinary and then you kind of walk around that go down a hill through all these beautiful brick and stone buildings then you could say this painting here was a high point in that group of paintings and then one painting led to another led each painting rather than painting outside looking at something he was painting in the studio each painting suggested the next painting and it was a process that you were really excited about still are and you say to me I don't know where they're coming from but they're just coming the paintings were sort of coming through the ideas and it's very exciting because work is as good or better than it's ever been just different and that's kept going for 11 years now I was back to my abstract expressionist roots where I was and that's what I was learning in art school although I didn't know it at the time because those are the guys that were the the big haunchos and painting at the time people like Robert Woodmubblewell and de Kooning I decided that I was going to kind of within my own structure loosen up the way I painted and that's what I did to apply that to the idea of landscape that I got from Italy and approached it soberly I get such a pleasure out of my painting and just keeps right on going and I have to find my satisfaction and joys within the range that I have left from me and I seem to be able to do that so where's the complete plane what's the sense of complaining there's no sense in it at all Lee and I found out I could with my left hand and so I painted four pretty good little paintings and that's that's been very rewarding but the big abstract ones have just started to come back to be rewarding and and as important as the little ones are I don't want to stop you doing either kind of painting so I can no longer stress my own canvases that's definitely a two-hand job and I can't do it but I still have you know physical problems about walking and I can't do as much around the house as I'd like to thing that keeps me Do you remember like the frustration of first trying to paint or what that experience was like for you when you first picked up a brush again but I was terrible because I was trying to do it with my right hand the paint I had always painted with and I couldn't do it at all couldn't you know couldn't control it at all so that was really awful and then I then it occurred to me I wanted to do it I was going to have to do it with my left hand and that became that seems such a natural thing for me to do that I had no trouble with it I really liked it pretty much after I realized I could no longer do it with my right hand at all that was kind of that was a good in a lot of ways because it gave me a new way to see things and express myself and so it wasn't really I didn't look at it as a a real like a handicap the handicap part of it for me is that you know I have a hard time shaving or doing the dishes or anything like that that I can't do anymore that really bothers me a lot but I don't dwell on it I can't dwell on what I can't do and I got much better more out of figuring out what I can do and getting better at it that way than sitting around trying you know thinking of all the things I can't do anymore you know I love to skate skating all my life I played hockey until I was 50 and I'd love to get on the ice again but I know I'm not gonna go down I'll fall down and you know I'll end up in the hospital again I have to let go of things and I think that's what the secret to surviving a stroke or anything else like that is you have to go with what you got and you can't dwell on what you used to have so you can't do any good anymore and the other thing is well I can't imagine what it would be like to have a small child and get a stroke I mean god or lady I can't imagine what that would be like to lose half the sight of my body still have to deal with a three year old something god three day old but I didn't have any of that I waited until I was older I waited until I was out of social security god or mighty what would have happened if I had it younger good lord the money the pills I have to take I think I take 25 pills a day and you know none of them are cheap right unbelievable cost more than drinking Bill hi Bill Pelton I just wanted to say even though we've lived in the same area for many many decades and we certainly know each other by name we've never had the opportunity to get to know you well thank you for taking the leap for being so incredibly open and thank you Nat for having the idea or making the film and I want to say I'm a bit interested in film and video myself and I won't say that the differences in you know shot quality and so forth went completely unnoticed down to it what matters is the storytelling and I thought you both did a wonderful job with the storytelling and you know both in having the idea the way you chose to shoot it and I'm sure a lot of it happened in the editing room so I just wanted to say thank you very much for a wonderful warm human project thank you Jerry and overall notice that in this you've had a lot of troubles through your life but there always seems to be silver lining in all of these things and that's the thing that comes out to me it's a but almost temperature these troubled times the silver lining is quite amazing it feels that way too I think it's the only way to do it that's right, it is not much choice I mean what's the other choice to sit around and feel sorry for yourself sit around and blame other people say I could have got better doctors okay you probably never think of using your left hand unless you had it destroyed oh no I would not no I would not absolutely yeah that was really quite amazing to me there's a guy over there in the back hi Mark I wonder about I'd love to hear you comment Ray about how you see the things that you're painting now compared to the way that you saw them before because I haven't seen a lot of your work over the years and knowing your skills and seeing some of the examples of your born again landscapes post-stroke you can paint that way still and you choose to but the abstraction is something that you didn't seem to really gravitate towards before but now you're actually intrigued by it and you're filled with it and you're motivated I'm wondering if somehow it isn't just the physical act of painting but just you're seeing things in a different way and I wonder if you have some comments about that I don't know I can't I can't I can't say if I'm seeing things differently because I don't remember how I used to see them you know I can only see them the way I see them I'm going to jump in here for a second because I remember a lot more of the post-stroke the initial post-stroke you stand up Jody so people can hear you sorry I have a low voice anyway I remember more of the initial strokeways memory about that is not that great but one thing that really hit me was it never occurred to me that he wouldn't paint ever, no matter it was just it just was non-issue and in terms of work he was quite once he got a routine of painting he was very liberated to be able to get away from small fussy landscapes that he did on-site he did outdoors that wasn't possible for him anymore but he really loved it was kind of astonishing that the way the abstract compositions were coming and you were really happy with it I think he said that a little bit that it was very exciting still is originally he painted well he told you that a little bit he started out abstracting school but this is a whole different thing the paintings were sort of painting themselves one after the other and he was like wow where is this coming from it was really nice like those in the back wall and prior to that you were painting for an audience so you also felt free you just were painting only what you wanted to paint when you went abstract and not painting paintings that you thought people would like or buy yeah I suppose that's the other thing I remember I still paint because I like to paint I don't mind if I sell them but one thing that some of you may not know is how prolific Ray is very he how many paintings would you say for the last 20 years you would paint in a week or a month well I didn't paint that many before I had the stroke because you were one of those things very good I was going to say since you got sober you've been quite prolific yeah well I can say right right now I got oh I got I think about 10 paintings from last from 2019 or 2018 probably when you had done 10 paintings in the last two weeks I've done 10 that sounds more like it that's what we were talking about like little like these 10 new ones since January yeah yes I was intrigued by the paintings of Sienna abstracted ones of Sienna but it seemed like the trips to Italy were they all before the stroke no they were all after the stroke they were a couple before no oh they were all after the stroke they were all after the stroke they were very France and Ireland and England our first two trips to Europe before right but Italy I rented a car and a place to stay and thought well we'll do what we can find out and then we went back and back over there Heidi when you were with your students trying to help them learn how to do something you tried to troubleshoot what they were doing and that could have stood you in good stead to teach yourself after your stroke oh yeah because you're finding solutions and that reminds me to go to a place like that which I think is really wonderful yeah that's right it was kind of like teaching myself all over again mm-hmm I feel now trouble like taking the boxes off a tube of paint with one hand you know that's pretty tricky should I have teeth yeah that's why I have teeth I don't have teeth if you want hi I'm Mary Raine and I've always admired your work and I really enjoy the way you talk about your creative process and how that works through you and it just comes when I'm really on top of my game that's how it is there's no thinking the minute I think it gets in the way I always say I go into the studio and I check out and my creative process takes over but the one thing I found was when I was drinking I was limited to the conscious world as far as making my work but when I'm not drinking I have access to the universe which gives me far more reach and I think that this is well expressed in this movie in this documentary yeah right the idea that the last paintings I painted before I stopped drinking were were little paintings like this but there was every painting of glass was painted with great detail and they lost any spontaneity they were they were too realistic to be they were more like photographs why didn't I just take a picture of it yeah is that Dr. Butch? yes remember when we were did Butch? an old hockey player I've known you in many ways over the years, first on the ice then in the hospital then in the store one time in your home studio I think this evening it seems to such a higher level so inspiring reaching across so many different people this evening in the community and we're so fortunate to have you and Jody and Matt none of us could ever do what you've done you were once a teacher I wondered if you ever thought about teaching art and I also wondered if you have any old Boston stories for us tonight you've done art for 35 years I don't know if you missed that part more than 35 years no, let's see no, I only taught oh no, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm wrong 21 years 35 years at the drawing board wow I'm right I just want to thank Jody and you both for letting us into your life that was such a powerful amazing thing you've been an inspiration and I'm so proud and pleased to see you in the documentary address the drinking because I first met you in the rooms and you've been a great inspiration both of you and a great share thank you hi Ray I like the beginning where you're talking about going to see the Coral Paintings in the Boston Museum I'm wondering what painters are you looking at now and maybe to net are there filmmakers that you're inspired by these days I can think of any I can't remember I can't remember who's the guy who painted the the school is Sean Scully Sean Scully yeah Scully is one of the painters that I like and that that Italian guy yeah you still have my book on it yeah right oh what are you doing with that book George Overland I'm the Ray we're all witnesses go ahead I'll just answer part two of that question real quick when I was a film student I studied with I'm getting older too I can't remember and Ed Pincus from down at MIT film school they were from the Cinema Verite I'm a big fan of the nasal brothers and other famous and then Vermont there's some great filmmakers in Vermont starting with Nora Jacobson who I worked with very closely on the Vermont movie but there are many others but anyway I'll keep it short my name is Fred and Ray Mike question is on Boston was he your grandfather or great grandfather that owned the Bruins and was it the 20s or the 30s that was my grandfather that he ran the Boston Garden and he brought the Bruins into the Boston Garden and he owned them in the 20s and 30s in the 20s in 1926 he bought there was a professional team in Boston called the Tigers and he bought the Tigers and they had yellow and black striped uniforms and that's why the Bruins had yellow striped uniforms he just changed the name on the front there and then it was his uncle who started the Celtics after his grandfather died he had the first black basketball player walked around got an article somebody from the Boston Globe saying well what do you think? he said I don't care he's purple polka dotted he could put the ball in the net that is cool I should mention that the dedication at the very end his son Dylan and his older brother George died on the same night this past December wow so that was after all the interviews but yet another major crisis or setback that he's revamped it from yes we've had this conversation before where I've told you you've been such an inspiration to me you got started painting a long time before I ever did and I always look to you maybe you'll teach me some short cuts going outside critics and you have so thank you for that and Jody thank you because you have an older partner who's had some health problems and I've learned from you helped my older partner so that's been great and I admire your honesty both of you in this presentation and thank you Nat for sharing thank you okay thank you