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who continue to play children’s games with goo, and dirt, with chalks and powdered minerals mixed with oil and dead embers and so on, dabbing, smearing, scrawling, scraping, and so on, for all their natural lives. When they were children, though, there was just they and the Universe, with only the Universe dealing in rewards and punishments, as a dominant playmate will. When picture painters become adults, and particularly if other people depend on them for food and shelter and clothing and all that, not forgetting heat in the wintertime, they are likely to allow a third player, with dismaying powers to hold up to ridicule or reward grotesquely or generally behave like a lunatic, to join the game. It is that part of society which does not paint well, usually, but which knows what it likes with a vengeance. That third player is sometimes personified by an actual dictator, such as Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini, or simply by a critic or curator or collector or dealer or creditor, or in-laws.
    “In any case, since the game goes well only when played by two, the painter and the Great Big Everything,
three’s a crowd.
    “Vincent van Gogh excluded that third player by having no dependents, by selling no paintings save for a few to his loving brother, Theo, and by conversing as little as possible. Most painters are not that lucky, if you want to call that much solitude luck.
    “Most good painters I have known wish that they did not have to sell their pictures. The graphic artist Saul Steinberg said to me with whimsical smugness one time that he got to keep most of his creations, even after he had been paid well for them. Most of them are models for reproductions in books and magazines and poster shops, and need have no public life of their own. Steinberg makes a living from copies, but keeps the originals.
    “Both my grown daughters make pictures and sell them. But they wish they could keep them. It is the third player who forces them to put them up for adoption. And that player is full of vehement advice about how to make their pictures more adoptable, how to run a successful baby factory, so to speak.
    “The younger of those daughters is married to a painter who was poor for a long time, but who now is having what is called success. What do he and she find most exciting about this new affluence? It means that they can now
keep
their best pictures for themselves. They, too, can be collectors.
    “My point is this: The most satisfied of all painters is the one who can become intoxicated for hours or days or weeks or years with what his or her hands and eyes can do with art materials, and let the rest of the world go hang.
    “And may I say parenthetically that my own means of making a living is essentially clerical, and hence tedious and constipating. Intruders, no matter how ill-natured or stupid or dishonest, are as refreshing as the sudden breakthrough of sunbeams on a cloudy day.
    “The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to Asian influenza.
    “As for the founders of the Abstract Expressionist movement in this country soon after World War II: The third player crashed into their privacy suddenly, and especially into that of the shy and dead-broke Jackson Pollock, with a bewildering uproar equivalent to that of a raid by the Vice Squad. Pollock was goofing around with spatters and dribbles of paint on canvas on his own time and at his own expense and on the advice of nobody, wondering, as indeed a child might, whether the result would be interesting.
    “And it was.
    “That was his first masterstroke, surely, something of which a child would be wholly incapable: recognizing how enchanting to adult minds pictures made in this fashion might be. His second masterstroke was to trust his intuition to control his hands so as to show, doing now this with this and then that with that, how mysteriously whole and satisfying such pictures might be.
    “Some people were very upset with him, feeling that he was a