Pages 1 to 10 Pages 11 to 20 Pages 21 to 30 Pages 31 to 40 Pages 41 to 50 Pages 51 to 60 Pages 61 to 70 Pages 71 to 80 Pages 81 to 90 Pages 91 to 100 Pages 101 to 110 Appendix 1 to 13

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29



Bathers San Blas, 1989


Lotus, 1997

30


Fischbacher and Kokoschka

There is a photograph of Reich teaching watercolor, and he is holding a long brush by the very tip of the handle, holding it with complete confidence in his precise control, like a surgeon holding a scalpel, or a fencer holding a foil.
“Go at it like fencing,” Amelia Fischbacher told him when he studied with her at Sacramento City College. She tried to free her students from their color conventions by feeding them blue potato salad. She dressed in watermelon pink.
She told her students to, “Draw with your shoe if you have to, to get a line that is different.”
She had studied with Kokoschka, and Reich admired the impecunious Kokoschka, partly because he once raised money very quickly, defying his friends, by finding a valuable painting in a junk store and selling it at a high price a few minutes later. Don did the same thing with antiques, including 19th Century bottles which he dug up in Gold Rush dumps. He pioneered bottle-digging in Northern California, and it interrupted his painting career for a period.

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