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And then I met somebody else. Late one evening, as I was alone in the atelier building a model of a futuristic chapel out of balsa wood, a student poked his head through the door and asked, “Do you want to go see Salvador Dali? He’s going to give a drawing lesson at some hotel. In twenty minutes.” I answered, “Sure. Who is he?” He didn’t know, but he said I should take a pad and get to this address now. So, I hopped on my Mobylette and got myself to the lobby of the Hotel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli. There, a small group of students were ushered into a huge salon decorated in gold leaf. We were asked to sit on the carpet. In front of us, was a clear inflatable sofa and an easel. There was a long wait. The master appeared, accompanied by two gorgeous women. He sat on the sofa.

As he started to talk, I wasn’t sure if he was speaking Spanish, French or something else. My mind wandered. I was trying to make sense of a situation that had none. I caught part of a phrase, and understood that were were about to learn how to draw “Le Cheval de la Mort” (The Horse of Death). Still sitting on the clear plastic sofa, he started to draw a multitude of overlapping circles, as he described the muscles and the tensions of a standing horse. We were instructed to copy on our pads as he drew. Then we were given, one by one, our crit. I do not, to this day, know what he said, but he added a few strokes to my drawing. When each crit was done, we were shown the exit. I met Salvador Dali, but still didn’t know who he was.

Around that time, it became clear to me that I was not to become an architect. Normal course of studies would take eight years, and, at my pace, it looked more like twenty.

I looked into commercial art, and more specifically, Advertising Design.

In the background, a song let me know of a place where there was a whole generation with a new explanation, and that appealed to me. Looking toward California, a college catalog at the American consulate library stuck out, that of Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. It was all there: the professionalism and the palm trees.

The campus of Art Center College of Design was on Third Street in Los Angeles. It was the opposite of the Beaux-Arts: extremely structured, with a huge demand for immediate results, as well as encouragement for personal views. It took just a few days to dawn on me that I was not going to work in the metric system. The classes covered graphic design, advertising, type, film and photography. From my point of view, all of the students were foreign, British, Chinese, Texan, Californian.

All was new. All was possible.

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