I’ve just been going through old photos and came across photos from 2002 of my cousin Mike’s place in Arizona, which he called Eliphante. Mike was one year younger than me and we hung out when we were kids. We looked a lot alike.
He was an artist all his life, painting and drawing from an early age. After high school, I went off to Stanford and he went to UC Santa Barbara (where he threw the javelin on the track team), and we didn’t get back in touch until the ’60s, when we both were caught up in the cultural revolution, psychedelics and all.
By then, he was living New York, where he did portraits and sold paintings on the sidewalks around Washington Square. Then he moved to Provincetown, Cape Cod, where he worked as a waiter to support his painting habit.
In the ’70s he moved to the Arizona desert and, and partially based on seeing Bob De Buck’s wild creations in Shelter (pp.144-147), he started building what turned out to be a series of buildings. The windows in the room above are auto windshields he got for free, and stained glass applied inside with silicone caulk. There is a section on Mike and his wife Leda in our 2004 book Home Work (pp. 121-129).
Mike passed away 10 years ago, but Eliphante lives on.
