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BEATRICE WOOD
Happy Valley

8560 HIGHWAY 150 OJAI, CALIFORNIA 93023 TELEPHONE (805) 646-3381

May 15, 1993

Dear Jack,
That I haven't written you sooner is I had festivities going on around my hundreth birthday than continued well past that date. A bad cold and six weeks went by before I fired a kiln.

I am pleased that you liked the box for I was not very sure about it when we sent it off. The figure on the back is not Marcel Duchanp except unconsciously. I started my friendship with Marcel in 1916 and loved him as did everybody who ever knew him. He had a great influence because he encouraged me to draw and allowed me to do so in his studio. When he would look at my scrawls and say bad, bad, good, bad, bad, bad, good, bad, bad, good....the sketches he responded to were just from the unconscious.

It is hard for me to do anything reasonable for I am wanting to live fifty more years to work at all the ideas I want to do in clay and experiments with fromulas. Those of us who have opportunities to work at things that attract are really the lucky ones on this earth.

Since I am writing I will do a bit of propaganda. It is time that television stop all its violence which has set the world afire with guns so that even children are using them for fun. Television could do so much to lift the minds of men in other exciting ways.

Seething thoughts from a fading old lady who wants to sbe buried in clays

Beatrice