So at long last we have finally come to Sugar Loaf.
Really ... did you ever doubt that the only purpose of this book was to get you to come to Sugar Loaf?
I thought not.
In any case, you are coming to Sugar Loaf because you will find it impossible to avoid the necessity of finally seeing the real deal quintessential artist enclave from which all others have been modeled.
As for Mary and me, we came to Sugar Loaf in 1976 to avoid the misehrtic system that would have blocked our every attempt at a creative independent life.
Make no mistake, what is impossible everywhere else, is manifestly possible in Sugar Loaf.
Before sunrise the morning after our first visit to Sugar Loaf, we each realized the other was awake in bed and asked, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Absolutely!"
We were in town before 9:00 am, tracked down a place to get our start, began building, and never left.
Thus we purposely avoided working at some menial dead end job-of-necessity, choosing instead to work on art full-time — albeit at a subsistence level in the beginning.
But we survived by constantly improving the quality of the product, always fine tuning our process, and by degrees aggressively increasing efficiency.
In answer to being chided as possible sell-outs, I always said, "What ... we should go work for the man, in a totally unrelated job, and only spend a quarter of the remaining time trying to become merely competent artists? On what planet would that not be selling out?"
Being a full-time artist in Sugar Loaf also let Mary avoid the necessity of grants, or kissing the asses of gallery owners while giving them the lion's share of proceeds from her art sales, or relying on a trust-fund situation (had it existed), all of which outside financial sources only encourage the belief that art cannot be sold.
At the same time, such outside financial input also makes it more likely to allow widespread insupportable "ideas" about what art should be to get in the way of actually producing art.
Fortunately, Mary's big leap of faith, opening her own art studio with its direct to collectors one-on-one sales venue in Sugar Loaf, broke down the lies about how art cannot be sold.
Her work sells.
Then her 40+ years of experience, making and selling her own art, put the final nail in the coffin of the trope that art cannot be learned.
She did learn.
Of course, Mary has always understood that true art is not just defined by a concept, especially when that concept is only meant to promote distractive corporate ideas designed to assure individual failure, such as the current major grant-magnet called place building.
She has also seen the lie behind the belief that the quality and success of true art can only be correctly confirmed by people other than the artist herself (you have to be chosen), and how the hegemony of that belief eventually forces many artists to give up trying to control their own fate.
In summary: the major work ethic influence of the three Endico Potatoes brothers (plus her grandfather giving her 25 cents for a watercolor at age four), gave Mary a jump start on the basic tools which freed her to take charge of her worker bee life and do something significant with it.
Diligent study, hard work, and her much loved collectors did the rest.
The significance of Mary's work is most easily understood by the simple fact that during the last half century, Mary has self-sold more than 21,000 of her own original hand painted watercolors directly one-on-one to collectors visiting her studio in Sugar Loaf, New York.
That is to say, for over 40 years Mary Endico has averaged more than $66,000 a year from sales of her paintings alone, not stratospheric riches but really!
We have the records to prove it.
It could not have happened any place but Sugar Loaf, NY.
Nor is there any chance in the foreseeable future that the type of work Mary does will ever be repeated by any means digital, no matter how cleverly artificial robotic intelligence evolves.
A human, is a human, is a human, and the discerning human eye will always be able to recognize human work.
Therefore, the final level of human aesthetic response that Mary's watercolors achieve will always be due to the very close human connection of the viewers recognition, empathy, and identification with the human touch.
Thus the aesthetic response is not triggered solely by the abstract qualities of composition and purposed design (such as Offset 3-tuple), but mainly for the innate sense of empathy and identification with the artistic hands-on process that produced the painting.
This is true despite gains in Artificial Intelligence, which of course will always fool some of the people some of the time but never fool all of the people all of the time.
Don't forget, there are two ways to beat the standard Turing Test for confirming a machine intelligence which is indistinguishable from a human being: 1) raise the level of machine intelligence, 2) lower expectations for what is human writing ... LOL.
No print, screen display, or reproduction device will ever match the quality and character of an actual Endico original watercolor.
In the end, just as it is true that "a human, is a human, is a human", so too is it true that "an original, is an original, is an original", because in the real world one thing is never another, and it never can be.
Simple physics.
Come confirm for yourself the accuracy of the statement that you will never understand the success of Mary Endico until standing with her in her studio surrounded by thousands of her own original watercolors.
I am Bob Fugett, and writing this book has been a real pain in the ass.
Thank you for reading.
Now, the two brochures.