Girl Drawn after Piazetta. At the Schuler School. I remember I stayed up almost all night to do this. Black charcoal and white chalk. I was staying at a board and breakfast. I sat at the kitchen table to do it. Piazetta was 18th Century. A divine draftsman. But when he picked up the paintbrush—labored and uninteresting.

Painting technique was at its nadir during this time. Jacques Maroger, a father of the Schuler School, was right: the loss of the painter's medium was a technical disaster for two hundred and fifty years.