Ron Poznicek, a high school friend who lives in San Francisco, is someone I admire a lot. He has painted—& improved—for decades, with his only goal, as far as I know, to do excellent work. This is just one of his many paintings that I love for its beauty & big-heartedness.
He is also a very nice person & has a twin brother.
Ron and I graduated from high school together in Sioux Falls. Even though we hadn’t seen each other in decades and weren’t even really friends back then, when we saw each other in San Francisco, we quickly fell into the school shorthand: I wanted to be a better artist than a certain fellow gradiate, he said, and I knew every shade of meaning in that sentence. That kid was handsome, athletic and from a well-to-do family. Beating someone like that at anything validated your own existence.
Ron is a serious artist, who gets better with every painting. His command of color and composition is remarkable. He’s not trendy, an Impressionist not someone making groundbreaking or startling art. Up close, "Docking Boats" is almost abstract; only from a distance is the picture clear (my photo by no means does it justice). This painting lets me go out on the Bay, gives me a summer day in my basement office. That’s as good as art needs to get for me.
My sister Varda had the artist Sally Mara Sturman make this bowl for my birthday last year. You can't see that around the inside it says "The Great Game of Bingelbumpf," which is a card game Vee & I invented 15 or 20 years ago. There are endless rules (which are printed on the outside of the bowl). These madden most people. The only four people to ever play Bingelbumpf willingly even eagerly are me, Vee, our sister Lindsay, & our brother Charlie. Others (et tu, Lara?) bizarrely claim that we make things up as we go along, which only seems to be the case because we can't remember all the rules from game to game. What the hell was Fujitsu Fujitsu Fujitsu? Tim Wiles remembers it as the central rule, but we have lost it altogether.
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