Chapter 3 I met John in the tiny village of Marfil in Guanajuato, Mexico, just outside the city of Guanajuato, the state capitol and the city from which Father Hidalgo started the Mexican revolution. I came to this village originally on a sketching trip with a friend whom I met when I volunteered for a post as a teacher and handyman at an orphanage in a hacienda in the state of Jalisco in Mexico. The trip was a short vacation for both of us. My friend, also an artist, worked at this same orphanage as a full-time teacher. The orphans were all boys rescued from the streets of Mexico City. My friend, whose name I can't quite remember, brought me to the village of Marfil. We sat and sketched together on a decaying stone wall of what once was a barnyard, o a street that overlooked the ancient ruins of a church and a viaduct that served a silver mine. A mine that stood unused since it had been flooded and drowned all the Indian slaves working in it -- a total of several thousand men according to legend. This tragedy occurred over a century before. As I sat on the wall drawing the village in the valley below, I remarked to my friend, "This would be a perfect spot for a studio." These ruins were being renovated and turned into modern though antique styled dwellings by an Italian sculptor, Senior Baloli, married to a wealthy Manhattan heiress. Some years later at this very site my aunt bought one of these remodeled studios, but found she didn't like living in Marfil. She was going to sell it. When I found that out I convinced her to rent it to me instead and took up residence in it. It was here on this cobblestone street, Calle Ariba, that I first met John Nevin. John was coming down a path on the hill behind the street. The path led up the hill to an adobe shepherd's shack John used as a studio. He went there every day in the morning and came down in the evening after a day of painting. He mixed his own paint using an ancient renaissance formula known as egg tempera. He painted landscapes, still life and portraits. His subjects ranged from praying mantises through views of the village to portraits. His canvasses were small. He used tiny brushes. His style was more or less like pointillism but instead of dots he used short thin lines. Of course I wasn't aware of all this when walking down the street checking things out shortly after my arrival when I first encountered John. Thin, slightly stooped, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, I could tell immediately that he was a stateside expatriot. We greeted each other and then John entered his home, a narrow adobe house joined to the small houses on either side of it by thick common walls. I went back to my place, also adobe but larger than John's place and located on an alleyway on one side that gave it more space for windows. My studio was surrounded by a high wall on the alley side, which sloped down to a lower wall at the back end of the property. This was the very spot I had sat on to draw years before. This lower wall had been repaired and was on top of a steep rock cliff that dropped off dramatically some fifty feet down to the highway below. After several days of greeting each other on the street, I got up courage and went over to John's front door and knocked. It was late afternoon, I knew John had returned from his studio. He came to the door and invited me in, introduced me to his wife, Anne, and their little boy Ian. From the outside their home looked like every other adobe on the street, no side yard, flat roofs, high windows on the street side to let in light but not a view. Inside the white walls were hung with John's paintings and collages which he was into then. The furnishings were inexpensive but handsome, with beautiful hand-woven wool rugs on the floors and a wonderful collection of serapes, John's wife Anne was running a weaving business with the aim of creating employment for the locals. John and Anne and their son Ian spoke fluent Spanish. Altogether a well integrated, helpful, community oriented family. So after eyeing each other for a few days, I found myself knocking on John's front door to borrow some sugar. I had purposely waited for John to come down the hill from his studio. It was late afternoon and the sun's rays were coloring pink the "Buffa," a high natural rock wall that stood at the eastern border of the valley. John opened the door and invited me in. Soon we were talking about art, politics, the village, and getting along really well. John introduced me to his wife, his son and their Mexican nanny and then asked if I'd like to see his garden. We went out the back door and suddenly I was in a fantastic almost Japanese garden. The backyard was a small walled off space but John had designed it so that it looked much bigger than it really was. Along the back wall was a large stand of bamboo behind a small pond with several goldfish swimming around in it. Behind the bamboo was a secret cave-like space with a bench next to the far corner of the wall. We sat down on the bench and John produced a joint, lit up, and we both got high. After that we went back into the house and John offered me a martini, a drink we both liked very much. We just hit it off immediately. Needless to say, I floated home with a cup of borrowed sugar in a much better mood than I left with. This soon became a daily ritual for John and me and we grew very close. In those days John was very healthy and did yoga exercises and meditation in his beautiful garden every day. During this period of my life, some time after my New York experience, Richard Nixon was elected and the first thing he did was to give the Mexican government three million dollars to combat the drug trade. The outcome of this move was that one afternoon, John was called down from his studio to face two armed "Federales" who proceeded to threaten him and then extort all his pot and all the money he had in his checking account at the local Mexican bank. This upset John substantially, but he was unable to do anything about it and in the end was forced to consider himself lucky not to have been locked up in a squalid, substandard Mexican jail. We never saw those "Federales" again and, in truth, they could have been anybody. We loved to watch the sun set in the evening on the limestone cliffs to our east. I have one of John's paintings of this event in my present studio here in Indiana. I shall forever remember John and miss his presence on this globe.