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family oriented, and the artists, who came every summer with a different mate, sometimes a different kid. Of course, we were smoking pot. It was all right to get drunk in town ��� but not pot. That was the tension then. Now the artists have virtually disappeared. You���ve still got a good many over at the Fine Arts Work Center, but you don���t have that feeling that this is a painter���s town the way you used to, when you had Motherwell, Hofmann, Kline, Baziotes, Helen Frankenthaler when she was married to Motherwell, and you had a number of younger artists who were building their reputation, damn good people like Jan Muller, Wolf Kahn, and your father, Peter Busa. For people who knew the art world, there must have been 20 artists here of note any given summer. Now it���s no longer a vanguard, let���s put it that way. CB: I���m very conscious of what you say. I couldn���t live in Provincetown, especially in the winter, without the presence of the Work Center. NM: Get it straight, I���m not objecting to the Work Center. I wish there was more of that. In those days there wasn���t a Work Center, which would have been a very good time to have one. But there were all these well-known painters, and that gave a certain tone to the town, plus an interesting tension. The Portuguese looked askance at the artists. They looked at these great painters and didn���t know what they were doing. CB: There was cross-cultural communication. For example, my father traded plumbing services for painting lessons. The plumber���s idea of paradise was to paint a nude figure. NM: Also, there were women who came up here to study art and ended up marrying or living with a good many Portuguese HYLAND 11