“You can use this for now,” he said, passing me an orange-capped key with PRINT STUDIO written on the label in tiny, impeccable handwriting. “It’s for those doors.” He pointed to the locked lower doors of the lodge, the ones around the side. “Get to it. You don’t have a lot of time.”

“Until what?” I asked, but he was already driving away.

Alone again—but now there was somewhere to go.

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

I unlocked the doors and discovered a full basement-turned-printing-studio beneath the lobby. It had four huge tables, at least four feet wide by ten feet long; three slop sinks and a washout room; a full ventilation system; and long windows that looked down the sloping hill that led to the Mission and the lake. Along the walls, deep shelves were packed with bright jars of ink and yellow-skinned screens; a pegboard was hung with custom-cut squeegees of every size. The light was good.

One wall had no shelves at all. Instead, in hand-painted letters, it was covered in a quote I knew by heart:

The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling…Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.

The passage, written by William Blake in a descriptive catalog to accompany one of his own exhibitions, was on the wall in the senior lounge at the Academy. Someone had typed it out in the 1940s and tacked it to the corkboard with a little metal pin, under the headline WE KNOW EACH OTHER BY OUR LINES—and nobody ever moved it. Generations of us ran our fingers over the lines and copied them down. Ask any Academy graduate how we are different from the others. We know each other by our lines is the answer. We know the bounding line.

Though the trend during my time was to avoid figuration, we nonetheless, as was tradition, entered the Academy with a natural hand and left with sharpened claws. Some of us were more talented than others. The gifted draftsman can use dime-store acrylic paint on a palette knife like David Hockney did in the ’60s, rendering the subject flat-faced, buck-toothed, bug-eyed—and still the subject will feel as though they have been seen like never before. A line like that is the rarest of gifts. Blake had it, and Marlin Mayfield had it.