Much of what I know about painting I learned from Bill Dickerson and his wife, Betty, or Mr. and Mrs. D. as they were known to their students. Together they ran the School of the Wichita Art Association on the 19th-century French-atelier model. I started with them when I was nine.
Every August, Bill would load his dust colored van with painting supplies-it was his portable studio-and head west to New Mexico. When he returned in mid-September, the van would be filled with paintings, nearly every on a stunning essay on how to bring forms in nature to life on a two dimensional surface. 

The watercolor I have is dated 1970, from one of his last trips out west. I bought the picture from a dealer sometime in the 90’s. It hangs in my house in East Hampton, and I can’t look at it without feeling a deep sense of nostalgia for that lost time when the classical verities of painting were passed down as a laying on of hands. I don’t often cry, but that picture can do it. -David Salle

For Esquire Magazine