The Friendship That Wasn’t Enough

This thread traces Rabo and Terry Kitchen’s companionship through shared artistic aspiration, creative transformation, and painful estrangement.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

A Bought Family

Friendship and Support The Cedar Tavern Circle Rabo uses his money to help painters, including Terry, and is welcomed into their talk and company. The group gives him a substitute family after the war and his earlier losses. Unequal Gifts Terry is talented in law, music, sport, and the military, yet chooses painting as his personal challenge. Rabo admires him while providing practical help, creating a friendship built on both companionship and dependency.

The Spray Rig

A Sudden Calling A Purchase That Changes Things Terry asks Rabo to buy a surplus spray rig, and his personality seems to shift before he even uses it. The first bursts of paint give him a new artistic language and a sense of direction. A Friendship Reoriented Rabo witnesses Terry’s emergence as a major painter, but also feels that the friend he knew has become inaccessible. Artistic fulfillment brings admiration and distance at once.

The Friendship’s End

Loss Without Consolation A Violent Death Terry shoots his father and then kills himself, in an episode Rabo describes as accidental in its final outcome. The death follows alcoholism and a life of artistic intensity, without offering a simple explanation of either. Later Denial Rabo insists that the artists’ suicides had nothing to do with their painting, resisting a romantic story that equates art with self-destruction. The friendship remains part of his life, but no longer a living source of comfort.

After the Second World War, before Terry’s breakthrough

A few years after the war, during the move toward the Hamptons

1956, after Terry’s suicide