fig.134.2) and a pack of smokes, that's every young boys dream. We had a book filled with good plates of his work in my high school art seminar. I would pour over those images, absolutely beguiled. While many other painters of the time seemed to be painting upwards towards the heavens, with their eyeballs planted firmly on the elite, the clergy and the landed aristocracy of the day Bruegel himself seemed to be drawn from plainer stuff. There was a commodiousness to his work. It seemed to me that those pieces were filled with corners rounded honestly and the panels shone through with the ambience of people gathering for work or to simply be and this was good to see. I found his paintings to be both immediately funny and cosmically quizzical in a way that for me presaged the earthy truisms of Benjamin Franklin's writing or the warm and mopey sadness that's common to Charles Schulz. At the time I hoped to one day be a painter of merit, to be the catalyst for other'...