An interview with Basil King conducted by Michael Seth Stewart (Published 2025)

Excerpt from the webpage above

The irascible and brilliant painter and writer Basil King, an eternal kid in his mid-80s, has seen it all. In this conversation “Leave Home, Meet Strangers, Learn to Draw” with his good friend (and erstwhile student) Michael Seth Stewart, editor of the letters and journals of King’s old friend John Wieners, he gives us hair-raising stories, lessons in art history, gossip about dead geniuses, and some of the wisdom he’s accrued over several decades of making art in New York City. Basil “Baz” left his native England as a child during the Second World War and hit the ground running in the United States. He was the enfant terrible of Black Mountain College, then a painter among giants in midcentury New York, with teaching stints here and there. Zooming with Stewart from the Brooklyn brownstone where he’s lived with his wife, the writer Martha Winston King, for decades, Baz opens up about all this and more, in a rollicking and often blistering portrait of the artist as a (perpetually) young man.