January 3, 1947, Baptist Hospital, New Orleans, I am born. A couple of years shuffling back between St. Rose and Destrehan (upriver from New Orleans) and we move to Baton Rouge. My father becomes a chemist, my mother sings gravelly barroom songs, and I wander the lake banks catching turtles for a living -- until I am sentenced to twelve years of misery in Catholic and public schools. There is redemption in college. I attend LSU. It’s big and fun and I can hide in large gangs of really interesting people. I fail in: pre-med, pre-law, Sigma Chi, dating girls. I succeed in: playing pinball, starting a band and making money playing frat parties (Sigma Chi included), convincing my parents that the only way I would get out of university would be with a degree in painting (my soul is napalmed on the levee making my first painting with some art students who hang around the band). I enroll in the Department of Art and I am awakened. I learn so much about painting from so many really wonderful artists* who spend a lot of time and energy on me, both at LSU and at Queens College (CUNY) where I receive my MFA in 1970.

I am tenderly cajoled into the arts at a very early age by my maternal grandmother, Mary Hammond Buford, a high school literature teacher. I spend a lot of my youth with her and her passions. I hear her reading Papa Hemingway to me: Nick Adams stories, novels and poems. She worships him at an altar of his books, in a scrapbook she keeps of his global escapades as reported in magazines both literary and scandalous, and with the famous 1951 Life Magazine cover, which is framed on her living room wall. I the child think he is a member of the family. She shows me books in which paintings by Cezanne and Van Gogh are told to me in her odd stories of colors and objects. She teaches me to cook. She makes me read and write. She makes me be free. It is her, and her phantom lover Papa, together in a dream coldly awake and alive, who lead me to Venice, where I find them drinking wine with Palladio next to the Redentore. They send me packing to the Accademia and the Scuola San Rocco and a colossus of painting that I am still trying to mount.

February 23, 2004. I am not teaching this my 33rd academic year. I am on leave painting an exhibition of 30 paintings about one fictive night. I am beginning a big, big painting. I am beginning a new series of works on paper. I am trying to finish a book of sonnets and laments, and start a book about painting, and a book of stories. I am feeling very ambitious and the other night even fantasized never returning to the university. But this morning I am missing students and their effort and its effect on me. I will return next fall with all of my projects underway and undermining what will be my revised and fortified effort. You see, I am lucky. And very grateful for this luck.

August 31, 2006. I am enjoying this summer in the studio struggling with a couple of large oil paintings that I will be exhibiting the month of September. They will be surrounded by hares dancing in large watercolors, my beloved summer obsession. I also promised the muse that I would draw every day, paint a portrait of myself, and paint a portrait of someone else. I am tending my word: discovered colored pencils and am filling journals with little images in their marks, lured a friend to sit in my gaze (bait: hot ginger tea & long post-painting lunches & the completed painting, hung a mirror and am contemplating my wrinkly face -- in colored pencils, what else?! Out the door of my studio are heat sublime and wet darkening green; “gentle here full of loving rain” proclaims my friend the portrait sitter. One hundred paintings of my dogs in the studio is the project set in mind, soon in hand. Avanti.

*Edward Pramuk, John Hazard Wildman, John Botkin, Paul Georges, Jack Wilkinson, John Ferren, Libby Tannenbaum, James Brooks, Charles Cajori, Robert Pincus-Witten