We met in Hollywood, but he hailed from Milwaukee, where he learned to paint. Though he was thick-skinned, he had surprisingly many friends, because he was gregarious and talkative as all Poles. We met again in Paris where he studied with a very successful Polish painter of great skill, who painted with the palette knife, which produces accidental strokes as of a clever brush. He startled his teacher by leaving many paintings unfinished when, under his tutelage, they traveled the picturesque places of France. He learned the specific technique of the palette knife, however, which can be effectively used to dazzle the onlooker, even if the painter has no knowledge of painting or Art.

When he had twenty canvases finished, he suddenly had to leave his teacher, returning to Paris, I met him there as he was arranging an exhibition of his paintings. The day before the opening, a French Art critic came to him with a ready article about the greatness of his Talent, the length of which took a few pages. I am so profoundly impressed by your paintings, said the man, that I wrote this long article. However, printing of it will take $900, for the publisher has to omit another critic's article about another artist. My new acquaintance was so pleased, that he wired for the money from the United States, and paid.

Back in Hollywood, the rave about the new genius discovered in France reached me and numerous other people. With such evident success, he gained enough patronage to buy exclusive property in Westwood, where in his home he received many other Culture Vultures eager to associate with Genius.

So far, I had never seen any of his paintings. When I did, I was incredulous how, with bluff and a vocabulary of a truck driver, he had been able to fool people so readily. His charming wife was an asset, however, so that with her, his crudity mixed with jovial insincerity and his uncritical friendliness to one and all, seemed merely put on.

One day I said to him:

Eddy, why don't you join three students I have and learn how to draw, by discovering the secrets of Light and Shadow? To this he agreed and the next day he was in my studio on Cahuenga, way up on its concrete stilts, overlooking Hollywood. Months later, I learned that the very next day he had gone to the Art Center School, telling the director, Mr. Adams, that he had evolved a new method of teaching Art, explaining the principles I had just revealed to him. He got a teaching job, which position he retained for a few years. He worked with me for awhile, but gave that up soon, feeling he was too busy teaching, which he had not told me about.

A few years later, he published a book about his Method (no, not Stanisławski's named after me). His written discourse began with the egg, with which I always begin my talk on Light and Shadow. When his book came out, he stopped seeing me. He had not developed any Talent in spite of my Method, for, being a Pole with pretensions to Culture, he was incapable of sitting down to work. He was like a Shaman priest or a politician, bluffing his way to easy living and a set of admirers of his art who never even saw what he did. Two years after his book came out, he died, unbemoaned and unnoticed.