sweetheart redux

As you know if you are a frequent reader, the late painter and personality Renate Druks, friend to Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Kenneth Anger and other bizarre luminaries, was a close family friends whose care we coordinated in her last years.  To thank us, she left us with her beautiful paintings and other artifacts from her long, sad, interesting life.  I long ago took over the maintenance of the website displaying her works (my dad started it), but I was always dissatisfied with it, because it did not meet the set of aesthetic standards she held.  I have worked a lot on the site recently and I feel that it is finally beautiful and organized enough to memorialize her, though of course her spirit lingers right over my shoulder as I type this, haranguing me for not buying the right kind of shampoo. http://renatedruksart.com/ Renate Druks, Catharine Ross and James Caan in front of Druks' painting "Games"

There are some stories I would like to tell that I don't because it seems too hard to start at the beginning, or else there is too much detail there that I didn't appreciate at the time and too many cool things I let slip through my fingers when I had the chance, so I just try to move on, to avoid pangs of regret.  My stepmom's friendship with the artist and old Malibu art scene personality Renate Druks is one of these stories.   My dad and stepmom inherited all her artwork and personal effects when she passed away, and I think the heavy ghost of Renate was too much for them, too, because they have longterm loaned her artwork and effects to Mike, a Renate aficionado who has done a remake of Renate's 1973 experimental short film Spaceboy.  Mike is sort of the curator of her stuff for right now, and I feel like my entire family sort of relies on him to show the proper homage to and interest in her and her work.  I can't overestimate how hard it i...