Page 26 - David Bermant Foundation

“My income was pretty sporadic and David’s commissions really helped . . . I really relied on David for my living for, I don’t know, a few years.”—George Rhoads25“George called me up one day and said, ‘Dave, I want to do a piece that you can either hang on a wall or put it on a shelf and it’s gonna have a lot of little balls rolling back and forth, up and down, something like your “Indestructible I” yet completely different. All kinds of different things happening.’“I said, ‘How much will it cost?’“He said, ‘I have no idea.’“ ‘How come?’“He said, ‘Well, I have to build one first and I’ve never built one, but I’ve just got a small section going, and I think you’d like it very much.’ “I said, ‘Go ahead. It’s fine with me.’“So what we would do in those days is he would send me a figure for the materials so he could at least buy his materials, and then I paid him like a plumber. Ten or twelve dollars an hour, I think. And then George would go and build it and take as much time as it took. And they take a lot of time, believe me! And when he got through—and I trusted him implicitly, even though he may be working on hundred thousand dollar pieces now—and when he completed the piece it cost $5,289.”“I had Ivan Karp look at it, and when Ivan saw it he said, ‘I want you to have George make a lot of these for me. These are the first works of art by George Rhoads that I think I can sell from the oK Harris Gallery.’“So I became George’s partner. I did all the financing, paid for all the materials, paid for his time, then he hired new people. We even did a few with Chris Hopmans, my curator.“That’s why I know what it takes to do and how long it takes to do them, because they’re very intricate. But I must say, at the very end, Ivan was selling these individual wall pieces for $25,000 each. This is still #1. It’s as good as any that he’s done, although he has done some very, very beautiful ones, but this one is extremely beautiful.”