and so we get together and discuss a lot of things would have evolved into then it was said ok let's let's get the work of artists in town at least i hope to their neighbors and let's encourage the collaboration because that's what roosevelt was all about musicians paupers poets playwrights novelists all those are what makes roosevelt special it's the fact that it's a real community it isn't this is thing going on for twenty eight years and it's a small group of eighteen people who with a core a number of years ago the new york museum was coming on to go on a studio tour  which was happening that year and since my house is so small and i had the studio in the house at the time i could only bring in half of the fifty people that came in on the bus so the tour bus arrives is fifty people i saw lives and the wonderful photographer one day when we were newly moved in here said would you like to grow a few tree and i said i didn't know we could grow thick trees here and he was like sure i have one i'll give you a coming and planted it and the fig trees growing to this day next to our doorway going into the house for the group that was waiting outside waiting to go in to see my studio i told them that please take a look at this fig tree i told him the story about saul giving me the fig tree growing and cutting and turns out that saul had gotten his coming from his fig tree that he had for many years from the artist  fame it was one of mine communities were developed at the time it was the only one that had that mix of agriculture and a factory and retail many members of the community were jewish farmers and they also happen to be socialist it was a plan of the socialist community although i think it was certain plants and jewish community has been shot one of my heroes both socially and artistically so i come from a very sort of a warm place and this is not a holy intellectual for me talking about penshoppe but sean began as an illustrator he made his living he was trained as a lot of for and he was making a living you know as many people need to make a living time and he was a socially aware young man and that that's reflected in his in his early work even when he began to do his own work and began to do commercial work for unions in particular lots of lots of union work i think that sean  two to influence and to change minds and to change the world and he was contributing his small way to that if you look at a lot of big chunks work you'll see a range of things including very early works and very personal works  christmas cards and and he was a jewish artist but he used the traditional christmas cards to create things for family and friends he did books for passover so he was a person who embraced lots of ideologies high i think i was a year and a half old or something like that nine hundred thirty nine they came here and of thirty nine i believe i've been told about it i didn't i was a baby and then i don't remember yeah they came because well because my father had this job he had a mural commission for the when they were building this for the school which is still there  so they came here that's how they throw a couple of people who are very good singers so so they some of these people would go to each other's house and have a sort of just some kind of party or something and two or three of these people would saying you know they were very good singers and seein you dish or in russian was i remember that you know that no other artist started living here until i guess after the war maybe in forty nine or forty six forty nine into that period some other artists started moving to roosevelt because they knew my parents or they knew somebody knew my parents and that kind of things i think around me the first one was  well my parents were both documentary photographers and worked in different organizations like the w p a or a farm security or standard oil files and  they came to roosevelt via have bench on who they had met i think in washington and i'm not sure what the overlap was it might have been from security so then they came here from puerto rico because my father was doing educational films with when you're spending and they were very involved with puerto rico preet prior to moving to rows about but look you know they had little kids and i guess they thought this was like a perfect place  you know isolated in a good place to write in because my father was also a writer but artists and writers and musicians sort of kind of came also and were part of their community it was it was normal for me to grow up in that really you it was perfectly normal because i didn't know anything else so it sort of gave me confidence to be an artist which was really rude awakening when i got into the real world but it was you know it was a very exciting stimulating environment lots of late night discussions and politics  our and they were all really interesting people it was a portrayal of a rose party not necessarily what was going on in my house but there were very wild parties at that time it was the sixty's and seventy's and it was just really a portrait of the parties of one type of party i guess you could say and it was really just really innocent in that i didn't know who read grooms was or any any of the the artists that sort of did caricaturists situations or people and i came back yeah because it really not so much that it was because there were artists here but more because of its location you know it was sort of central to new york and philadelphia and it was like a perfect convenient place to live and i fell into a job at michael graves that was  i fell into place by accident which is kind of the way we got through our life by accident was is that michael would design his murals and four for a particular space and then he would need them painted on a large scale for example this wall here is part of michael graves mural so what you know from from the small image to a very large size i was the one who did the painting in the are young and it was just clicked we met each other there we spent almost every day together after that it was it was i think it was also mutual admiration for each other so often i would come to well rarely comes together on issues of tyler and so i think it's christmas she brought me out here and i thought it was pretty pretty amazing you know and she was really into it too she knew how special it was i met her parents and all these people ever we just kind of drop in on you know like without pollen and you know just real casual and just remember this writer and them stop by and they just talk talk about all kinds of things we felt very welcomed in a very warm interesting them not just artists but everybody and they still are people are really interesting in town but i'm not here for being in an art community i'm here because the  the environment is is conducive to making art it's you know fairly still isolated and remote and near the big cities and and that community itself is very warm and open and you know that the friendships came to town in this school of all these pictures taken by a number of quite famous photographers of the construction of roosevelt and the school when we first moved here we got to know sol whose was part of been shot in scranton is well he's not famous to the public he's someone who's very noble well known history of photography and he became a friend to us should one thing i love about roosevelt in the  that is that it encourages collaboration i mean you know not only poets with poets and other writers but there's a collaboration and i could work with jake and then i there was a composer in town he just in the new jersey council of the arts of war and he was you know thinking about an opera and so we were talking and i thought ok here's a subject and so i ended up writing the libretto for his opera which was done in a concert version that rockery fun because you know being a poet is a really solitary endeavor and that's why it's great for us to get you know it's a privilege get together like this i love getting to go like that but it's also to be able to collaborate with you know a painter or a composer or me that's one of the glories of roosevelt  around and was impressed by that it was it was kind of ugly because it was marked so it was black and why no color at all and you know different things lying in the front yard in the backyard but i was impressed with the uniformity of the architecture uniformity but at the same time the order different obviously different styles of architecture from house to house now a kind of dawned on me that i grew up in near painted not too far from here and when we went to the shore the most direct route to the northern shore was five seventy one so we were back then get another station wagon and drive five seventy wind it was was almost like a day trip as it took two or three hours to get there two or three hours to get back and i  designed the place really had they didn't come with just coming in are all trees down but they kind of nestled into the los and every house had a big backyard and went into the works and it was just kind of place that  really was a nice marriage between the mystic housing and the world so you could get out of the house and go into the woods and like that kind of combination just by chance we had happened upon a place