But that somehow did not stop him from producing a vast outpouring of art over the years, from informal abstracts to large canvases using gold and silver leaf to plaster sculptures to Polaroid pictures and videos.
Ralph produced a vast body of work over the years - from informal abstracts to large canvases using gold and silver leaf, from plaster moulds to polaroids, montages and videos.
"You can jack it up," but because of the stress on the walls and ceilings and the brittleness of old materials the lovely leaf-shaped plaster moldings would be cracked and ruined.
Were Colonel Hamilton to walk into the parlor floor of his house today and gaze upward, he would recognize the intricate vine-leaf-vine plaster decoration and the perforated band of acanthus leaves running around the ceiling, paint-choked though they are.
Like film sets, these are places more ephemeral than they first appear; what ought to be stone, marble, and gold leaf is really plaster, faux finish, and shiny paint.
Benjamin Franklin played an even greater role, inventing the foremost safeguard against counterfeiting: After pressing a leaf into a plaster mold, he'd cast the delicate texture in lead and then use the lead as a stamp, inking his currency with the unique pattern of the leaf.
The layered drawing, dense surfaces of tiny irregular lines and veins that might be found on a leaf, with small white plaster casts of upper facial parts affixed to it at various points, makes a particularly rugged skinscape.
Local worthies have added a plaster fig leaf to the well-hung sculpture, and the brazen young art student (the exotic Rachel Weisz), who percolates with a hatred of "fake" art, is about to take things in hand, as it were.
Along with about 100 objects from the museum's collection, like an 18th-century Japanese ivory horse figurine and an 1850s plaster fig leaf used to make the museum's male sculptures less shocking, evidence of Swann's fictional life is strewn about, including a passport, cigarette butts, unpaid bills, models of unrealized buildings and a biographical script 100 pages long.
During my night at the schoolroom surgery in Kitchanga, the doctors told me about a teen-age boy who had been found naked except for a banana leaf, which he had plastered over the back of his head and shoulders.
