Viewing page 54 of 117

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

- 150 - 

delighted with the idea. We agreed that the loom should be set up in the solarium, directly ahead of the front entrance to the apartment. When I assembled it, however, it looked ridiculously small in so large a room. Leon said, "You once spoke of getting a larger loom, Let's get one now." One of his friends was the well known San Francisco csulptor, Benni Buffano. Bennie's gleaming 21-foot statue of St. Francis, in aluminum, stands in St. Mary's Place in San Francisco. Indeed, the whole West has been enriched by his work. My thought was to have Bennie carve a figurehead for the larger loom. He readily agreed. What should it be? The ram's head appears often in Chinese art and I have always been fascinated with the fact that the ram was one of the animals used by Chinese painters and sculptors to develop their fanciful conceptions of the dragon. A huge block of Philippine mahogany was obtained and Bennie set to work.