When I was 21 I up-sticks from a wee town in NE Scotland called Lundie (it had 12 houses) and went to NY to study painting at Pratt. I met with the Dean over dinner (a meeting graciously arranged by a friend of my late father's). She pored through my folio without a word and after a deep sigh said, you don't need art school, you're better than half of our professors, just paint. So I took a job mucking stables at a horse barn in Amagansett NY. The house owners gave me a two-car garage for a studio and left for Spain. Months passed and they failed to return, I felt like Conradin of Saki's Sredni Vashtar. Every afternoon after shoveling dung I would retire there to beat at canvases. Their elderly Irish housekeeper would call me for tea and cakes at 4, then again for dinner at 7. It was seventh heaven. On weekends the housekeeper would hold bridge parties and drag her buddies down to the garage for private viewings, invariably cajoling them into buying sometimes wet unfinished canvases. At first this upset me but as the money started to pay for long-weekend misadventures in Manhattan I found it harder and harder to complain. One day whilst painting a corn field by the side of the road an elderly and very notable artist wandered along and stood behind me, pondering, grunting. I knew who he was but could not imagine what he was thinking throughout his long grumbling consideration. Finally he spoke the greatest compliment any artist could wish for, especially one so young, he said, "I have driven past this view a thousand times and never once did I think to stop and paint it. You make the ordinary extraordinary." My heart soared like a hawk. He walked away. We became friends. Sadly he's dead now but his words ring eternal in my memory's ear.