hockney-losangeles - The Monday Morning Memo

painting by David Hockney

“When I first saw Los Angeles I realized that
no one had ever painted what it looked like.”
– David Hockney

“My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking: first with a piece of oil paper, and then with a piece of blue paper, to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label; and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty downstairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.”

- Charles Dickens, who in 1824 at age 12 went to work to help pay his father's debts. From an autobiographical fragment included in John Forster's 1872 biography of Dickens:

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