The art colony is an interesting institution peculiar not only to the United States. In fact, you find them even more often in Mexico and Europe, and for all I know all over the world where there are artists. Since retiring from the grind, I have personally lived in such art colonies in America, Mexico, Spain, Italy and Morocco. And always I've found stimulating qualities in both the towns and their populations.

When I say artist, I don't, of course, mean just painters. Your art colonies will attract the practitioners of every art in the book— and some not in the book. There will be painters, sculptors, writers, composers, actors, photographers, musicians, handicraft practition­ers and what not. Above all there will be large numbers of pseudo-artists who do a great deal of talking, cocktail in hand, about paint­ing or writing, or whatever, but very little real work. And then there will be even larger numbers of folk who like to hang around artists and consider themselves intellectuals, whatever that means.

But in spite of the large number of phonies to be found in the average art colony they still have their fascination. Usually there is an art school or two, in case you are interested yourself seriously or just as a hobby, and always there are the stimulating conversa­tions, the strange new ideas, the heated arguments, the striving for expression.

Why and what is an art colony? Well, it usually goes something like this. An artist, or group of artists, finds some cheap place in which to live, trying to locate it in a spot of scenic beauty and preferably where the weather is good. The economical part of it is a prime necessity since artists seem almost always to be short of money. Having located such a place, they write their friends and in one way and another the word gets around. Here is a beauty spot, here are other artists with whom to associate, here one can get a little cabin and work at one's art very well indeed on very little money.

More artists move in, and sooner or later one of the travel magazines or art publications writes the town up, naming it an art colony. So still more people hear about the place, including the above mentioned pseudo-artists and the hangers-on. And the town begins to fill. Where formerly you could rent a little cabin for possibly $20 a month, there is a housing shortage and rents double. Where formerly you could buy a jug of red wine (in the west) or applejack (in the east) for a dollar or so from one of the local citizens, now a liquor store goes up. Where formerly there was a little local tavern where you sat around in the evenings having a beer or two, a flashy nightclub and two or three neon-lit bars complete with juke-boxes, take over. Where formerly you got your milk and butter, a bushel of potatoes and an occasional chicken, from one of the local farmers, now somebody opens a super­market and it becomes the only place you can buy food.

Before you know it, the town is booming. Souvenir shops arise, swank hotels go up, the local beanery is expanded into a garish restaurant with high prices and a French chef.

I've seen this happen more than once. Greenwich Village, in New York City, is far from cheap any more and you have to really dig around to find a real artist there. Woodstock, up in the Cats-kills, is another example—a far cry from the days when Harvey White and his friends first started it. Taos, New Mexico, once the bargain paradise so loved by D. H. Lawrence, is now in the way of becoming a tourist trap, although it's still not too bad if you get out of town a ways. There are many other examples of art colonies that have gone to seed. The Vieux Carre in New Orleans, the beloved French Quarter, once the cheapest part of town and by far the most picturesque, is now a combination of honky tonks, tourist traps, and souvenir stores. And, above all, it's become so expensive that few artists can afford to live there.

Laguna Beach and Carmel, in California; Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts; Boothbay Harbor, Maine; all in their time were ultra-economical beauty spots that attracted the artists by droves. And now they're prohibitively expensive tourist centers, the streets full of gawking visitors hoping to catch sight of a "real Bohemian," whatever that is.

But the artist has a defense against all this. He can always move on to another place, form a new colony. And that's what usually happens. Few art colonies last more than ten or twenty years from the time they are first founded.

Today a great many of our painters, writers and the others are streaming abroad to such art colonies as San Miguel Allende and Ajijic, in Mexico, Torremolinos in Spain, and Positano in Italy, although Italy is by no means inexpensive these days.

But in spite of this trend to move abroad, there are still a good many art colonies in the United States and in every section of the country from Cape Cod in New England to Sarasota in Florida and from Colorado Springs and Taos in the Rockies to Laguna Beach and Carmel on the Pacific. If not every State then certainly every section of the country has its art colony. Some of them will support literally hundreds of artists, genuine as well as the psuedo variety; some will have no more than a dozen or so.

What is the advantage in living in an art colony? Of retiring in such a place?

There are various advantages for some types of people.

If you are interested in the arts yourself and particularly if you have ambitions along this line, the advantages are obvious. You will find others to help you, give you pointers, instruct you. But even though you have no desire to practice any of the arts yourself, you might still find enjoyment in the atmosphere that prevails in an art colony.

A feature desirable to many is the complete informality. Usually, you'll find that denims are the standard dress and often for women as well as men. Clothing in general is not something you have to worry about. Your fellow man in an art colony is more interested in what you think and do than he is in how you look.

Nor are there pretentions about your house. If you have a little two or three room shack and do your own cooking on a two burner stove, and serve nothing better than dago-red in the way of refreshments to your guests, it's not going to keep even the most successful artist or writer in town from coming to your parties. The only thing that counts at a party in an art colony is the quality of the conversation because although conversation is an art rapidly disappearing in our country, it certainly is not in the art colony. Here it still reigns supreme.

The last thing in the world that people will care about is the age of your car (or whether or not you have one at all), the clothes you wear, the food you eat or the house in which you live. They are more apt to turn up their noses at you if you spend a great deal of time looking at TV or listening to the radio. You are more apt to be snubbed if they catch you looking at a comic-book. You are more apt to be left off invitation lists if your idea of conversation has to do with the relative sizes of the mammary glands of Miss Lollabridgida and Miss Monroe, rather than sub­jects on art, politics, and world affairs.

There is one other element in living in art colonies that perhaps has a snobbish sound to it, but is very real to many people. In your usual way of life, assuming that you are an average American with an average job and income, you are not apt to have the opportunity of meeting the celebrities of the world. Even though you may be interested in writing (or reading) it is unlikely you will ever meet Hemingway, even though he might come to the city in which you live. Even though you may be interested in art, and even paint a bit yourself, it is unlikely that you will ever meet Picasso. Even though you are interested in the theatre it is un­likely that you will meet the big name actors, or even a movie star or so. Not if you're the average American.

However, in the art colony the barriers go down.

I am not a "celebrity hunter" myself although I have found that usually those persons who become celebrities as a result of their work are of more than usual interest. However, during the length of only one summer while I was living in the art colony of Tor-remolinos, Spain, I met among many others MacKinley Kantor, who won the Pulitzer prize with his novel Andersonville that year; Paul Lucas, the movie star, lived next door to me; Dominguin, currently the world's top matador, came to a couple of parties I also attended; Ben Stahl, one of America's outstanding painters, became a friend of mine; Count Felix Von Luckner, the "Sea Devil" of World War One, was about town; William P. McGivern, one of the top mystery writers, and Maureen Daly, his wife, who is famous for such books as Seventeenth Summer, were also good friends; Betty Bryant, who is Mrs. Leslie "The Saint" Charteris, a top night club singer back in the 1930s, used to sing at some of my parties, and sometimes the songs of Jimmy Campbell, who was also in town, among others Jimmy wrote Goodnight Sweetheart, Show Me the Way to Go Home, Echo In the Valley, Try a Little Tenderness. British writer Alec Waugh was also around and Baron Wrangle, who never wears that patch he has in the Hathaway shirt ads in public. And, oh yes, one night when I was having a quiet drink in El Remo Prince Rainer and Grace Kelly came in for dinner and a mutual friend introduced us—although I haven't the vaguest idea why. I suppose he thought that everybody would like the opportunity of meeting Grace and her prince.

But that's the way it is in an art colony. Complete informality, no one better than anyone else. If a celebrity comes to town, no matter what field he might be in, you'll meet him at one of the local parties, one of the local bars, or possibly sitting around on the beach or at a sidewalk cafe. This, of course, applies to American art colonies as well as European ones.

CASE HISTORY No. I. I mentioned in an introductory chapter that some of the case histories I planned to use in this book were ones that concerned me personally and this is one of these.

In my easy going travels about the United States, I arrived in Taos, New Mexico in the summer of 1949 and was immediately impressed by the great beauty of this section which British writer D. H. Lawrence once described as the most beautiful valley in the world. It was a time when I was more than ordinarily pressed for funds because I had been doing a great deal of traveling—just for the fun of it. I decided to settle down awhile to recoup my fortunes.

After a few days in town I found that although rents in Taos proper weren't particularly high, you could beat them amazingly by going out to one of the nearby towns such as Arroyo Seco, or Arroyo Hondo, both of which were about eight miles out of town.

I looked about and found also that this area supports some of the most poverty stricken people to be found in our country. They are of Spanish and Indian descent and a considerable number of them, even though they and their ancestors have lived in this country since before the Pilgrims landed in New England, don't even speak English. They are usually small farmers, and seldom very successful at that. In season they go north to herd sheep in Colorado and Wyoming or to pick fruit or potatoes.

They build their houses of adobe, finding the materials on their lands, the wood for the vigas which support the ceilings, from the forests on Taos Mountain.

I bought a two room adobe house with two acres of land for $400. There were only three windows and the floor was of mud. There were no cooking facilities, no electricity, no bathroom— obviously. A "Chic Sale" in the back yard sufficed for plumbing.

However, under Rural Electrification, I had electricity brought out for fifty dollars, and hired two of the local Spanish Americans to re-mud (adobe) the house both in and out. I also had them put in a picturesque fireplace which cost me exactly seven dollars. The adobe floors I had redone with ox-blood and linseed oil which gave them a rich, linoleum effect, difficult to describe but of a beauty and nature that goes back to primitive times.

I bought a second hand butane stove and a few pieces of furni­ture, borrowed a few paintings from artist friends, and knocked together what other furniture I needed from orange crates and such. Don't let this give you the idea that I'm handy with tools, I'm not. However, when I was through I'd spent possibly another hundred and fifty dollars and had a very "Bohemian" looking little house. The view out over the Grand Canyon of the Rio Grande, I might mention, was superb.

I didn't have the four hundred dollars to buy the house, by the way. I borrowed it from the First State Bank of Taos. A writer friend, Walt Sheldon, signed for me since I had no credit locally being a newcomer.

I lived in this house for possibly four months until a school teacher from Sante Fe, about seventy-five miles to the south, became enamored of the place and insisted I sell it to her. She gave me $800 with me keeping such furniture as I'd acquired.

With the $800 I bought six acres of land not far away, and with an even more beautiful view out over the Taos Indian Reservation. There were two houses on this piece of property, both adobe, one of them over two hundred years old and with five rooms; the other was another two room place. No plumbing, once again. I hired my Spanish American neighbors for a remodeling job (by the way, they worked for two dollars a day), knocked down two partitions, put in a fireplace, began accumulating furniture once again.

I also, in spite of myself, began accumulating animals. A friend gave me a horse (horses are dirt cheap in New Mexico), some other friends willed me two milk goats and a buck when their marriage broke up. I bought fifty day-old chicks and raised them in the smaller house, and got two pigs, six weeks old, to eat up my garbage. Without even trying, I was becoming a farmer, and, believe me, I didn't particularly like it. The land was in alfalfa, which fed the stock, and the buck goat given me had a long pedigree so I made stud fees from his services.

These cheap adobe houses were beginning to intrigue me and when one became available down the road a bit I bought it for $500—through the bank, of course. But before I got around to fixing it up, a newly arrived artist in town saw it, saw my house and what I was accomplishing, and insisted I sell the place to him. I did, realizing a $500 profit.

One day I looked up and to my surprise found that I was getting much further into permanent ties than I wanted at this time in my life. These little two and three room adobe houses were available all over the area for anywhere from $400 to a thousand. A hundred dollars would get one wired for electricity, a new fireplace, a new floor, and a "Bohemian" atmosphere. The newly arrived artists and pseudo-artists couldn't "see" them until they had been fixed up, but they were such attractive little deals with some money spent on them, that they gladly planked down double or triple the original amount when finished.

As I say, I didn't want to get tied up with this sort of thing. My goats had been multiplying like mad, the way goats do (they throw kids twice a year, almost always twins, and a baby grows so fast that in six months a female can be bred). And I was beginning to acquire ducks, turkeys and rabbits. My mare threw a colt and that's when I threw up my hands.

I sold the animals, getting a hundred dollars for the goats alone. Sold my current house for $2,400 and on the proceeds went on down to Mexico.

If I'd stayed in Taos, I would have continued to get further and further into real estate, doubling my money or better each I turned it over, and I didn't want to get into real estate, or anything else including farming, right at that time. I wanted to see the world.

CASE HISTORY No. 2. Clark Collins, the science fiction and travel article writer, was one of my Taos acquaintances. Clark and his wife had come to Taos by the way of New Orleans. This is their story.

Clark had been an I.B.M. operator on the West Coast. When the war came along he went into the Army Transportation Corps and became a ship's officer on an army transport. Following the war he found himself out of work for a couple of months and just to kill time tried to write some short articles. One of the dozen or so that he wrote he sold to Esquire much to his surprise. Nothing else was accepted.

For the next few years he went from one job to another, never feeling happy about the rut he was in. He never had the time nor the energy after a day's work, to try any more writing. When he met Jeanette, his wife, she made him a proposition. He thought he could write, if he had the opportunity and was free from the need to work. Fine, she said, she'd support him for two years while he tried. If at the end of this time he was making a living at writing, then that would be that. But, if at the end of two years he wasn't, then would he please shut his trap about writing and forget about it.

They went to New Orleans for the experiment and Jeanette got a job as fry cook in the Walgren Drug Store on Canal Street while Clark settled down to writing mysteries and science fiction. He sent out his manuscripts in a deluge to the editors and they came back just as fast. He worked for six months without selling and the suspicion at last struck him that perhaps that original sale to Esquire was a fluke.

At the end of six months he sold one short science fiction story to Planet Stories magazine at a penny a word rate. A total of $35. Clark and Jeanette were so pleased that they went out on the town. Had dinner at Antoine's, had drinks in the Old Absinthe House and LaFitte's. They spent $40 in the celebration.

There were no more sales for quite a spell and depression sank over Clark again. The New Orleans heat became oppressive in the summer and besides Clark wasn't meeting the other writers he'd hoped to find in the Vieux Carre. For one thing, he couldn't afford to hang out in the bars in the French Quarter where the writers congregated.

So they packed their things and took off for Taos, New Mexico, where they'd heard things were cheaper. They arrived almost broke but Jeannette was able to get a job in the Rexall Drug Store on the Taos plaza as fountain manager. They rented a house from Tom Wheaton for $35 a month.

And this is where their luck changed. Science fiction and mystery writers Fredric Brown and Walt Sheldon were also living in town and took Clark under their wings. They introduced him, by mail, to Harry Altshuler, their agent, and began criticizing his manu­scripts.

Writing, like any other profession or art, takes a lot of learning but Fred and Walt were old pros and knew every trick of the game. They put Clark to work doing short stories for the pulps, the easiest market into which to break, and after three weeks he sold two stories to Sam Merwin who was at that time editing Thrilling Wonder Stories one of the popular science fiction magazines. And then, with the new agent, the sales began to come. Before the year was out Clark had sold just about every science fiction magazine in the field under the Clark Collins by-line and various pseudonyms.

Jeanette and Clark bought a house and settled down for almost four years in Taos before deciding that a writer owed it to himself to see the world and departed for other art colonies in other lands. The last time I saw Clark was in Torremolinos, Spain, where he was currently selling a great many tongue-in-cheek travel articles of the "sin-city" and "live-it-up" variety. If you're interested you can find his stuff in such men's magazines as "Mr." and "Men's Adventure/*

CASE HISTORY No. 3. Robert MacFarland of Riverside, Cali­fornia, was consumed with an urge to get rich when he got out of the army. The war had caught him when only eighteen years of age and as an infantry sergeant he participated in the Battle of the Bulge and later spent two years in the occupation.

Back in California and with a brand-new wife, he looked about for an opportunity and found it. Southern California was booming and a new cement plant of tremendous proportions was going up in a nearby town. It was having difficulties because it needed com­paratively small quantities of off-size pipe and none of the larger steel works wanted to be bothered.

Bob wasn't particularly trained in this field but his father was a master mechanic, a top man of the old school who could do every job in the shop from setting it up to welding. So Bob applied for and got the contract to make the pipe. With his father's assistance, and with an advance from the cement company, he went to work. The business boomed, as everything was booming in California, and Bob's father soon left his own job to become full time partner. And the business boomed some more.

Bob was working sixteen hours a day, and growing to like it less and less. He built two houses, even put some investment into an orchid growing scheme. But he was unhappy.

When his wife left him, fed up with the pressures of the business and the small amount of time she could spend with her husband, Bob sat down and figured it out.

He said, bluntly, "The hell with it."

He'd always wanted to study art, had messed around with it since high school days. Now he decided to go to a real art school and did so at the art institute in Los Angeles.

Neighbors and relatives thought he'd gone stark raving mad. In the first place they felt it was his duty to work in the small steel works he'd started. Secondly, artists were all "queer." Something was wrong with anybody who wanted to be an artist.

At first Bob didn't mind, then he got fed up. He sold his two houses and went down first to San Miguel de Allende, the art colony in Guanajuato, Mexico. He made an agreement with his father who took over complete management of the business and in the future received 18% of the firm's net income, that amount in view of the fact that his father was working on the job while Bob was now doing nothing.

This amount came to approximately $150 a month at that time, not a great deal of money in the United States but very nice indeed in Mexico.

Bob stayed in San Miguel Allende for a year or so and then took off for Tangier, Morocco. Six months or so later he went over to the art colony of Torremolinos and then up to London to have a show of his work. From London he decided that Greece was one country he shouldn't miss and took the Simplon-Orient Express to that country on the far side of Europe.

But in Torremolinos Bob had met Jeanne, a gal from Australia, and they'd been married in London. Now, in Greece, Bob found that for the first time in his life he was about to become a father. He was a bit worried about medical care in Greece, although there was no need to be, but the family back in California wanted to see the new bride anyway, so back they went.

His father wanted him to return to the firm which was still growing, but it wasn't for Bob. He'd tasted free life and wanted no more of the old routine. After the baby came and was old enough to travel Bob and Jeanne packed up again and headed for the art colony of Sarasota, Florida. There they are living at this writing. Bob and Dalton Works, of Ruston, Louisiana, another refugee from the rat-race, who has a navy pension, have started an artist's pic­ture frame shop to augment their small incomes, but there is one thing for sure, neither of them are going to let it interfere with their freedom and the good way of life they've found in the various art colonies they've made their homes.

CASE HISTORY No. 4. When I first met Laurie Garel she was living in Taos, New Mexico, with her husband Leo, whose cartoons you have seen in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post. Laurie had gone to school at Black Mountain, North Carolina^ a "progressive" type college stressing the arts. While there she had taken a course in ceramics, just to stretch out her subject list. At the time she had probably never figured on using the art after graduation.

However, in an art colony you sometimes feel out of the swing of things if you yourself aren't studying or practicing painting, sculptoring—or what have you. Laurie had ceramics and one day became intrigued by some of the clays and glazes utilized by the local Indians. She gathered her equipment together again and began turning out everything from tiny saucers to gigantic platters and Yases.

From the beginning her things made a hit in the local art stores and galleries. Each piece, of course, was an "original" and a purchaser knew that there wasn't, couldn't be, a duplicate anywhere.

Since sales were limited only by her production, Laurie upped prices and upped them again. She refused to allow any inferior work to be displayed no matter how large the demand for anything she turned out. If a piece wasn't beautifully artistic, delicate and soul-satisfying in its unique qualities, Laurie destroyed it.

As her work became more widely known, she began to display it in Sante Fe, seventy-five miles to the south and also known as an -art colony.

Unfortunately, the Garels broke up after a few years in Taos, and the last we heard of Laurie she had gone to Los Angeles. However, she had no intentions of taking up life in a factory or •office. She opened a ceramics shop right in the Farmer's Market in Hollywood and when last I heard of her, was making a tremen­dous success of it, working only a few hours a day—those days when she feels like it.

Frankly, though, I have a sneaking suspicion that I'll be seeing Laurie again one of these days, in one of the art colonies. Her soul is too free ever to be happy in a big city, no matter how much money she is making and no matter how few working hours a ^week she must put in.

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