I had the wall. George had the photos and the know-how. We cooked up the name NixonLoftWorks and registered for Art Walk Kingston. At the time I lived in the Shirt Factory, a funky, clunky, artsy building that would draw a lot of foot traffic for this annual event, and in my loft I had a big bare wall as well as towering industrial windows everywhere else in the building.

I left George alone with a stepladder for the afternoon. When I returned, he'd rigged track lights along a ceiling pipe for gallery lighting, and he'd hung his eighteen photos in perfect grid alignment. Printed on canvas, many looked like paintings. They were of windows in quiet country houses, abandoned factories, weathered brick structures with vines and shadows, windows with as much character as human portraits. In fact, one was my window, the shot that inspired this idea of converting my space into a weekend gallery. A photographer myself, I'd noticed George on an earlier visit, standing at a specific distance from the window with the camera raised to his scrunched-up, concentrating face, but never would I have guessed there was art to be found in my windows. To me, they just rattled in the wind and leaked heat like a sieve in the winter.

Yet the whole point of art is to help us see what we can't see for ourselves. George's photo had framed my windows so that the cloudy gray factory glass panes filled some of the composition but the one clear pane in the upper corner revealed a white neighborhood house in the distance. The window latch floated in the center like a finger pointing to this outside world. More than beautiful, George's windows were like portals to other lives, other ways of being. Later on, when I left the Shirt Factory for a small house in midtown, I had George to hang eight of them in my kitchen. I still ponder them over my morning coffee.

George (George Nicholson, if you're curious) and I had met years earlier through the Woodstock poetry scene. A big guy with a big smile and a big giggling laugh, he was a great storyteller, and most of all he loved to talk about the highs and lows of the creative life, the magic of making art, the crushing aftermath of rejections. I never failed to feel recharged by our conversations.

In time we both left bucolic Woodstock for Kingston. (What's wrong with bucolic? Fair question.) I'd run into him at Starbucks; his clubhouse and laptop workstation. He had a successful career in Manhattan as a graphic designer for corporate reports and materials, but as that wound down with age and the passing of this work to younger generations, he'd become happily obsessed with his camera and digital photography. He'd gotten the photo bug as a student at MIT — Minor White, who treated photography as a spiritual pursuit, had been a major influence — and now that he had retirement time on his hands, George was determined to bring a lifetime of photography projects to conclusion. At Starbucks he'd spend long afternoons tweaking pixels in his digital photo files. After he took a portrait shot of me — the poet at work with his notebook — he said, "You don't want to know how many hours I spent on your beard."

George has had some successful shows, but none to match our Art Walk weekend. That Saturday morning, I picked up a yellow "Art Stop" balloon (I guess you'd call it) from the organizers that I hung outside my window. Not long after the noon start, the first people walked through my open door, and, well, they just kept coming. The photos looked great on the wall under gallery lighting. George was ready with a welcome and an answer to any question. ("Where was that taken?" "It's really not a painting?") Some friends came by, but mostly strangers, which led me to think, I should get out more, there are a lot of cool people around here. Some were having fun walking around artist's living spaces. Some were truly captivated by George's photos. I was glad to meet them all and did my best to gather names for a NixonLoftWorks email list. (A day or three later I learned I'm not very good at deciphering handwriting.) By five o'clock I'd met an artist with my same last name (Sean Nixon), a young fellow who painted wall murals (a dream of mine), as well as an older lady who wanted to buy a glass globe trinket off my shelves. Politely, I said no.

Sunday I was cooked. An introvert, I need a push to go to a party, and Saturday had been like having a new party walk in the door every twenty minutes. Exhilarating, but exhausting. George, a social stalwart, looked tired too, but had no trouble summoning a smile for each new visitor. After all, if you've taken a photograph or created any form of art, what higher honor can you have that meeting a stranger who wants to see what you've done. I dubbed George the Energizer Bunny for going strong till the final five o'clock straggler. Even the yellow helium balloon outside my window had lost its uppity bounce by then. We figured we'd had two hundred visitors; a triumphant launch for NixonLoftWorks.

But all of this was back in 2019. I soon followed up with a First Saturday art walk show of four large paintings by my friend, Al Desetta, who'd grown up in a family challenged by his mentally disabled sister. She'd later spent her adulthood in a group home. Al's paintings were inspired by old family photographs to powerful effect. He later filled a full wall at Green Kill gallery with them, floor to ceiling. A few dozen visitors came to our opening, but no walk-in strangers for a First Saturday tour.

NixonLoftWorks had yet to sell anything. On a New York City trip I learned of a group, New Art Dealers of America, so I joined a gallery tour they led through an art district I hadn't even known was an art district: a few streets near Canal and Broadway at the edge of Chinatown. I asked our tour guide, a gallerist with a well-groomed ponytail and a walking stick umbrella, for the secret to selling paintings. He said his gallery sold perhaps 120 pieces in a year, fewer than ten to strangers who walked in the door. The rest was Rolodex. And he had a good Rolodex because he'd grown up in the art world. Maybe that's what I needed to hear. Not much of a Rolodexer, I should just enjoy what's on the wall.

Covid upended everything. I left the Shirt Factory for my midtown house and a renewed focus on writing and book publishing. NixonLoftWorks lingers as a neglected Facebook page. George moved to Troy. Al ran out of space to store new paintings. Yet the upcoming Art Walk Kingston this weekend, September 19th-20th, has brought back memories of the special time we had. And not just George. Now in its 11th year, this art walk has featured some 800 different artists over time, both in open studios and in group shows in galleries. They've ranged from 12-year-olds to nationally renowned photographers, from ceramists to fabric artists. Very deliberately, the event has a $25 registration fee and a policy of welcoming all comers, such as George and me. It's not for art snobs, yet collectors, curators, and art world cognoscenti do make the rounds, prospecting for new talent or checking in with familiar faces.

Joe Gonzales co-founded Art Walk Kingston with Linda Marston-Reid (then director of Arts Mid Hudson) in 2016 not long after moving upstate from Harlem. When I called to tell Joe of George's story I could all but hear him smiling over the phone. "That's my payment," he said. As a volunteer who does a good deal of good work — check out the handsome Art Walk maps or the easy-to-use online guide — Joe finds his fulfillment in watching or hearing about the successes artists enjoy during this weekend event. Every year, he makes the rounds to try to visit as many participants as he can. (Has anyone seen more art in Kingston than him?) He loves nothing better than walking into a studio only to discover he can't say hello because the artist is already surrounded by five enthusiastic visitors.

The theory of the "beholder's share" claims that an artwork isn't complete until taken in by a viewer. Art Walk Kingston is a weekend for mass completion. George will never forget it. Nor will I.