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love! You'd better believe! Then I began to hear stories about other parts of my family. There was always a sort of legendary person in my family, somebody who beat up a white man down in Mississippi. And everybody left him alone 'cause he was crazy. You know. That Uncle So-and-So. There was always this uncle or aunt or someone. And then, I began to try to put some of this...I turned away from cartoons and things, from covers on the Saturday Evening Post...and I began to try to say something about this dignity as I could visualize it in this naive, almost very mushy kind of romanticism. I used to try to say something about this good old dignity I used to see. And then somehow, I felt pride and I felt that was true also of the friends of mine who were poets, the friends of mine who were dancers, actors. All the people in the arts. They were using their art to say something positive about Self, about a people, which they found a oneness in and through which they could draw the juices necessary for them to emerge into some kind of beautiful, dignified person. This became, this was the groundwork, so to speak, through which our art was being laid...the basis for which it was being laid, which I wasn't aware of at the time. I wasn't aware. So my whole tie at the beginning was an emotional one, and it still is. I wasn't an intellectual painter. I didn't go into the theories of art. It didn't matter too much to me what the theories of

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