Boris was my uncle who every summer took my brother and me out of a motherless home in hot and airless Brooklyn to the paradise of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Boris was taken to Provincetown for the first time in 1940 by his wife, artist Jan Gelb Margo. From 1945 on, my brother and I came with them. During his first summer, Boris moved into the old Coast Guard station on the dunes off Snail's Road overlooking the great beach. He laid claim to this spot and when the old station fell into the sea, he replaced it with a tiny one-room shack. When that shack fell into the sea we built a concrete and timber shack, and finally the small wooden shack that stands there now. It was a source of particular pride to Boris that all of these structures were made from beach salvage.

During his first summer, Boris discovered driftwood that magically corresponded to the vocabulary of shapes he had been working with the previous four years in New York City. That first summer was very productive; Boris executed about fifty monoprints, (figs. 1,2) many of which became the basis for larger paintings.(figs.3,4)