RIP Richard Serra, surely one of the greats.

Fun fact: Richard Serra grew up on the western edge of San Francisco, a stone’s throw from the beach and just two doors down from sculptor Mark di Suvero. (“I could look out of my bedroom window and see ships go by,” Richard Serra recalled.)

I loved this passage about his early visual inspiration and the two artists’ intertwined youth.

For Mr. Serra’s fifth birthday, his father took him to the Marinship yards as a treat. Later, recalling the experience in a page-long statement entitled “Weight,” Mr. Serra adopts a steel-plated oil tanker as his Proustian madeleine. It was a new tanker, and he and his father watched the launch with a cheering throng as the boat slid into the sea, transformed, as he wrote, “from an enormous obdurate weight to a buoyant structure, free, afloat and adrift.”

In a startling coincidence, Mark di Suvero, the future sculptor, lived two houses down from the Serra household. Looking back, di Suvero, who turns 86 this month, recalled long, riotous afternoons when he and a young Mr. Serra played in the dunes, skidding down them on flat cardboard, having to empty their shoes of sand before their mothers let them back into the house. Their relationship, however, was not completely harmonious. “Our dogs would fight,” di Suvero recalled with amusement. “I had a dog, they got a dog, and his father would say, ‘Let them fight!’”

Fun fact #2: I have a Richard Serra tattoo!!

Text: nytimes.com/2019/08/28/…

Photos: by Martine Fougeron for The New Yorker

Drawing: Hair of The Dog,1996