Harold LaVigne

Transcription of verso: "6/26/66 Lani and I pick up Bryan at his house and walk downtown after he eats breakfast; we sit in Union Square listening to music and the birds singing; drawing; then to Market Street Doggie Diner where we draw; Bryan relates that he recently saw Rick Barton and that he was not drawing, supposedly, Bryan said, because he thinks with the assassination of painters in China, what hope is there? I suggest we try to find him; called Dean Andersen's where he is staying; Dean says he thinks he has gone to visit Bob Copley, so we walk to Copley's house and find nobody home. Then to dinner, and a Samurai movie in Japanese town; later to Foster's Van Ness + Geary for coffee; Norbert Nichols joins us; he's trying to organize the city into doing something with the pigeons except exterminate them, which they seem intent on doing soon. I want to help, but 'think of human beings first' I say to myself, knowing very well how little difference there is between killing a pigeon animal and a human animal; can't keep from thinking about Rick so Lani and I excuse ourselves and go to Copley's house again, no answer. So we walk downtown thinking we may run into them: coffee and donuts at Plush Doggy at Market and Powell. On our way home we walk by Copley's house again without success. Walk home to Mahler's Titan Symphony. 6/28/66 Yesterday went to Copley's on arising. Lani comes too, and Rick is at Copley's. Rick seems in good spirits: we converse to Mahler's 6th symphony. Then Copley to work and Lani, Rick, and I go to the Federal Office Building Cafeteria for coffee, there to Flax's where Rick and I each buy a India ink pen. Lani gets some sea bass from Pamela and we three are picked up by Dean and eat a marvelous dinner which he and Lani prepare; after conversation. Dean is drunk and speaks of the horror his life with its sad love affairs, and of how bitter he has become. Rick stays to café for him as we leave.
Harold LaVigne settled in San Francisco in 1957, and along with his brother, Robert, became part of the creative ferment of the Bay Area counterculture. He kept company with a circle of artists and poets that included Rick Barton (1928-1992), Byron Hunt (1905-1993), and David Nelson (b. 1941). In 1965 LaVigne opened a short-lived gallery called Joker's Flux on Fillmore Street. Between 1965 and 1971 he operated Running Elk Press, which published print portfolios, including his own Persons (1966) and The Penis is an Angry Face (1967) by Barton and Nelson, both in the Morgan collection. Barton trained LaVigne in his distinctive style of line drawing, which LaVigne took up in earnest. He introduces his own repertoire of subjects, including portraits of his wife, Lani Chamberlain, and his children, at times seamlessly blending public and domestic spheres in a single drawing. He marked his drawings with a red chop of a running elk, his totem. LaVigne remained in the Bay Area for a little over a decade, later settling in Carson City, Nevada, where he taught art at Western Nevada College for twenty-five years.