And another time, as if to prove that he knew more about visual arts beyond Grandma Moses, Joe Luna told me that he had happened to see an HR Ocampo exhibit that morning. He then told me to stand by his room as he dashed off a review. “In 20 minutes flat,” he said. In no time, I heard the piece of paper being yanked off his typewriter—“Here, read,” he said. In single-spaced, big-margin format that didn’t even run to three pages, there it was—a review of an HR Ocampo exhibit held to mark the artist’s recent death. It had quotes from HR—on his art, his life—retrieved from Joe Luna’s encounters with the newspaperman-turned-artist. And—he made sure I took note of this—all in a few hundred words. A masterpiece of brevity.
And, he called it “just a potboiler.”
Name the offense, I must have committed it. But having broken me down, they also built me up. It was a learning experience like no other.
But to me, it was a piquant piece of “writing on the run,” set- ting for me the bar for art reviews and coverages—nothing pedantic or pretentious, just straightforward, clear and infor- mative, intimate and witty. I didn’t focus on art reviews later in my career, perhaps unwittingly, mindful of the standards that had been set, on my mind at least, and always anxious that my readers would see through my lack of authority, or even ignorance. I felt more competent writing fashion reviews.
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