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We were at a residency called Ox-Bow, on Lake Michigan.
I did not know how lucky I was until I met Sam.
I was in awe of him.
He was one of the most famous artists I had ever met.
He was tall, had a tremendous laugh and charisma that made me want to be like him.
He was rhapsodic in his responses to the world and the people around him.
I felt like he existed on an artistic astral plane.
His huge Technicolor paintings, draped without frames, crossed over into sculpture tabernacles to fearlessness and radicality.
The epic scale of these paintings intensified the minds of viewers.
They felt fun, thrilling, revolutionary an advanced vocabulary of familiar things acting strangely.
You could not turn away.
By his 30s, Gilliam had already cracked the code of the canon.
Id never felt the past, the present, and the future congeal quite this way.
The effect was like poetry, sedentary sails singing duets in space, abstract gardens hovering in air.
The two of us stayed up very late every night and talked about life and women and art.
This was one of my great sentimental educations.
Gilliam and I remained close all that summer.
I stayed; he left.
And that was that.
What happened next is a story far too common.
As important as he was, Gilliam became less visible.
I lost track of his work altogether.
Excised from the timeline was a great artist who kept making great art.
We will never know how often this story was repeated.
Fate changed for Gilliam.
His orbit turned out to be as strong as it was when I first met him.
