"Sondra"
1972
oil on canvas

Entry by Jack Beal from an essay by Wade Saunders, on artists' assistants:

"In 1970 I briefly taught at San Diego State University and met a student named Dana van Horne. He came East that summer and stayed with us upstate. Over the next few summers he helped us rebuild an old mill. I encouraged him to attend the Whitney Museum's studio program and then Yale's graduate school. In 1974 I was offered the chance to do a mural-size painting (four canvases each 12 1/2 feet square) for the Department of Labor in Washington. At that time I had an apprentice named Bob, but knew I needed a second person so in January 1975, I asked Dana to come work full-time.
The job was much bigger than anything I had ever attempted before, so my ego sort of washed away and I was able to accept suggestions from all over without being defensive. It was a kind of freedom I had never experienced. I mixed the colors. Bob, who had been a hard-edge painter and had never worked realistically, did all the hard-edge elements; Sondra painted the still-life stuff, Dana painted the landscapes and I did the figures. We all worked together in a 24-by-foot 36-room; only one person could paint on a canvas at a time because they were so large that they bounced. It was a two-and-a-half year process; we worked mostly seven days a week. Some weeks we would take off Sunday mornings and go to town and intend to make a further excursion, but would usually end up coming home and, before I would know, someone would have slipped off to the studio and gone back to work. I paid Bob and Dana a modest monthly wage and gave them room and board; they ended up making more from the project than Sondra and I did. Every night one person would stop painting around 5 PM and prepare a gourmet meal for the rest of us. There was no possibility for Bob and Dana to do any of their own painting during the project; after a year and a half of working on the paintings Sondra returned to her own work."