Among us, we three handled quite a few small commissions, from spot drawings for advertising agencies uptown to magazine work and quick lettering jobs.
Each of us had his own specialty besides.
George did wonderful complicated pen-and-ink drawings like something out of a medieval miniature: hundreds of delicate details crammed into an eight-by-ten sheet and looking as if they had been done under a jeweler's glass.
He also drew precise crisp spots, which he sold to various literary and artistic journals, The New Yorker, for instance, or Esquire.
I did book jackets and covers for paperback reprints: naked girls huddling in corners of dingy furnished rooms while at the doorway, daring the cops to take him, is the guy in shirt sleeves clutching a revolver.
The book could be The Brothers Karamazov, but it would still have the same jacket illustration.
I remember once I did a jacket for Magpie Press;
the book was a fine historical novel about Edward 3,, and I did a week of research to get the details just right: the fifteenth-century armor, furnishings, clothes.
I even ferreted out the materials from which shields were made -- linden wood covered with leather -- so I'd get the light reflections accurate.
McKenzie, the art editor, took one look at my finished sketch and said, "Nothing doing, Rufus.
In the first place, it's static;
in the second place, it doesn't look authentic;
and in the third place, it would cost a fortune to reproduce in the first place -- you've got six colors there including gold".
I said, "Mr. McKenzie, it is as authentic as careful research can make it".
He said, "That may be, but it isn't authentic the way readers think.
They know from their researches into television and the movies that knights in the middle ages had beautiful flowing haircuts like Little Lord Fauntleroy, and only the villains had beards.
And girls couldn't have dressed like that -- it isn't transparent enough".
In the end, I did the same old picture, the naked girl and the guy in the doorway, only I put a Lord Byron shirt on the guy, gave him a sword instead of a pistol, and painted in furniture from the stills of a costume movie.
McKenzie was as happy as a clam.
"That's authenticity", he said.

As for Donald, he actually sold paintings.
We all painted in our spare time, and we had all started as easel painters with scholarships, but he was the only one of us who made any regular money at it.
Not much;
he sold perhaps three or four a year, and usually all to Joyce Monmouth or her friends.
He had style, a real inner vision of his very own.
It was strange stuff -- it reminded me of the pictures of a child, but a child who has never played with other kids and has lived all its life with adults.
There was the freshness of color, the freedom of perception, the lack of self-consciousness, but with a twist that made the forms leap from the page and smack you in the eye.
We used to kid him by saying he only painted that way because he was so nearsighted.
It may have been true for all I know, because his glasses were like the bottoms of milk bottles, but it didn't prevent the paintings from being exciting.
He also had, at times, an uncanny absent-minded air like a sleepwalker;
he would look right through you while you were talking to him, and if you said, "For Christ's sake, Donald, you've got Prussian blue all over your shirt", he would smile, and nod, and an hour later the paint would be all over his pants as well.
Mrs. Monmouth thought of him as her discovery, and she paid two to three hundred dollars for a painting.
It was all gravy, and Donald didn't need much to live on;
none of us did.
We shared the expenses of the studio, and we all lived within walking distance of it, in cheap lodgings of one kind or another.

Attending the life class was my idea -- or rather, Askington's idea, but I was ripe for it, and the other two wouldn't have gone if I hadn't talked them into it.
I wanted to paint again.
I hadn't done a serious picture in almost a year.
It wasn't just the pressure of work, although that was the excuse I often used, even to myself.
It was the kind of work I was doing, the quality of the ambition it awoke in me, that kept me from painting.
I kept saying, "If I could just build up a reputation for myself, make some real money, get to be well known as an illustrator -- like Peter Askington, for instance -- then I could take some time off and paint".
Askington was a kind of goal I set myself;
I had admired him long before I talked to him.
It looked to me as though he had everything an artist could want, joy in his work, standing in the profession, a large and steady income.
The night we first met, at one of Mrs. Monmouth's giant parties, he was wearing a brown cashmere jacket with silver buttons and a soft pink Viyella shirt;
instead of a necktie he wore a leather bolo drawn through a golden ring in which was set a lump of pale pure jade.
This set his tone: richness of texture and color, and another kind of richness as well, for his clothing and decorations would have paid the Brush-off's rent for a year.
He was fifteen years older than I -- forty-four -- but full of spring and sparkle.
He didn't look like what I thought of as an old man, and his lively and erudite speech made him seem even younger.
He was one of the most prominent magazine illustrators in America;
you saw one of his paintings on the cover of one or another of the slick national magazines every month.
Life had included him in its "Modern American Artists" series and had photographed him at his studio in the East Sixties;
the corner of it you could see in the photograph looked as though it ought to have Velasquez in it painting the royalty of Spain.

I had a long talk with him.
We went into Mrs. Monmouth's library, which had low bookshelves all along the walls, and above them a Modigliani portrait, a Jackson Pollock twelve feet long, and a gorgeous Miro with a yellow background, that looked like an inscription from a Martian tomb.
The fireplace had tiles made for Mrs. Monmouth by Picasso himself.
Like certain expensive restaurants, just sitting there gave you the illusion of being wealthy yourself.

In the course of our talk, Askington mentioned that he spent part of each week studying.
"By yourself"?
I asked.
"No, I take classes with different people", he said.
"I don't think I've reached the point, yet, where I can say I know everything I ought to know about the craft.
Besides, it's important to the way a painter thinks that he should move in a certain atmosphere, an atmosphere in which he may absorb the ideas of other masters, as Durer went to Italy to meet Bellini and Mantegna".

He made a circle with his thumb and fingers.
"Painting isn't this big, you know.
It doesn't embrace only the artist, alone before his easel.
It is as large as all of art, interdependent, varied, multitudinous".
He threw his arms wide, his face shining.
"The artist is like a fragment of a mosaic -- no, he is more than that, a virtuoso performer in some vast philharmonic.
One of these days, I'm going to organize a gigantic exhibition that will span everything that's being painted these days, from extreme abstract expressionism to extreme photorealism, and then you'll be able to see at a glance how much artists have in common with each other.
The eye is all, inward or outward.
Ah, what a title for the exhibition: The Eye is All"!

"What do you study"?
I asked.
I was fascinated;
just listening to him made me feel intelligent.

"I'm studying anatomy with Burns", he replied.
"Maybe you know him.
He teaches at the Manhattan School of Art".
I nodded.
I had studied with Burns ten years before, during the scholarship year the Manhattan gave me, along with the five-hundred-dollar prize for my paintings of bums on Hudson Street.
Burns and I had not loved each other.
"I'm also studying enameling with Hajime Iijima", he went on, "and twice a week I go to a life class taught by Pendleton".

"Osric Pendleton"?
I said.
"My God, is he still alive?
He must be a million years old.
I went to a retrospective of his work when I was eighteen, and I thought he was a contemporary of Cezanne's".

"Not quite".
Askington laughed.
"He's about sixty, now.
Still painting, still a kind of modern impressionist, beautiful canvases of mountains and farms.
He even makes the city look like one of Thoreau's hangouts.
I've always admired him, and when I heard he was taking a few pupils, I went to him and joined his class".

"Yes, it sounds great", I said, "but suppose you don't think of yourself as an impressionist painter"?

"You're missing the point", he said.
"He has the magical eye.
And he is a great man.
Contact with him is stimulating.
And that's the trouble with so many artists today.
They lack stimulation.
They sit alone in their rooms and try to paint, and only succeed in isolating themselves still farther from life.
That's one of the reasons art is becoming a useless occupation.
In the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, right up to the early nineteenth century, the painter was a giant in the world.
He was an artisan, a man who studied his trade and developed his craftsmanship the way a goldsmith or a wood carver did.
He filled a real need, showing society what it looked like, turning it inside out, portraying its wars and its leaders, its ugliness and its beauties, reflecting its profound religious impulses.
He was a propagandist -- they weren't afraid of the word, then -- satirist, nature lover, philosopher, scientist, what you will, a member of every party and of no party.
But look at us today!
We hold safe little jobs illustrating tooth-paste ads or the salacious incidents in trivial novels, and most of our easel painting is nothing but picking the fluff out of the navel so it can be contemplated in greater purity.
A bunch of amateur dervishes!
What we need is to get back to the group, to learning and apprenticeship, to the cafe and the school".

He could certainly talk.
The upshot of the evening was that I got the address of Pendleton's studio -- or rather, of the studio in which he gave his classes, for he didn't work there himself -- and joined the life class, which met every Tuesday and Thursday from ten to twelve in the morning.
It was an awkward hour, but I didn't have to punch any time clock, and it only meant that sometimes I had to stay a couple of hours later at the drawing board to finish up a job.
After a short time, both George and Donald joined the class with me so they wouldn't feel lonely, and we used to hang a sign on the door of the Brush-off reading out to work.
It was mostly for the benefit of the mailman, because hardly anybody else ever visited us.

In a way, Askington was right.
"Stimulating" was the word for it.
I don't know that it was always as rewarding as I had expected it to be.
Partly, it was because Pendleton himself wasn't what I anticipated.
I had come prepared to worship at the feet of this classic, and he turned out to be a rather bitter old man who smelled of dead cigars.

No, that isn't quite fair.
Actually, there was a lot of force in him, which is why I kept on in that class instead of quitting after a week.