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the walker out of arm's reach, and if Hertz is on the gravel surface of the studio/gallery's elaborate outdoor garden, for instance, he doesn't have the strength to power his wheel- chair. Tat's when he feels as if he is sinking. Life changed on May 14, 2006, a Sun- day. He was walking with a friend at Wa- terfront Park, and the benign meningioma had mushroomed to the point that it caused a seizure. With his index finger, Hertz presses the groove on his face where fore- head meets nose, indicating that the tumor once clenched a nerve cluster and artery be- hind his eyes. As he went to the ground, he knew he could die. He tells this and other stories, and he can hardly push the words out, his deep voice becoming a nasally alto as laughter-tears douse his eyes. Tat's right, he's cracking up, revealing both rows of teeth. "I was really afraid my sister would get power of attorney," Hertz says, "and keep me alive like she did her cats!" He wipes his wet red cheeks with his hands and contin- ues. "I wanted to make sure that if I needed to go, I could go. I at least had that much clarity. Tat was the thing that scared me: Not death, but being kept alive. Good body but a dead head." Hertz is very much alive. He completed almost 50 new paintings in 2011. (In his most productive year, 1987, he did some 150 pieces.) From Jan. 1 to Feb. 21 of this year, he finished eight abstract urban land- scapes for a show at the Jewish Community Center, although something was off during that batch. Turns out, an antibiotic wasn't getting along with the "brain pills" that help with mobility. "Te final two days of paint- ing, I was holding on to the easel for dear life to get the last strokes done," he says. Now it is mid-May, and he will paint again soon. His daily uniform is a paint-smeared plain colored T-shirt, dingy cotton gym shorts, bulky white socks, black-and-gray New Bal- ance sneakers and a diamond stud in his right earlobe. "Even in the wintertime," he says. He describes the ankle brace on his right foot the only way he knows how: "It lifts my toes so they don't drag when I walk and sound like I'm farting." Laughter-tears. He and his partner, Tom Schnepf, have been living here on South Preston Street, about a mile south of Broadway, since August 2008. For almost three decades, before the word "NuLu" existed, Hertz lived on Mar- ket Street. Te artist has been downtown so long that he considers the Highlands the suburbs. "Without Billy's enthusiasm and plain-old pushiness, I'm not sure Market Street would have progressed into such a vi- sual-art nexus," says Diane Heilenman, who was the Courier-Journal's art critic for almost three decades. Paul Paletti, whose law office/ art-photography gallery is on Market, says Hertz "is one of the most important people in Louisville's entire visual-arts history." Te main building at the Preston com- pound is an airy brick rectangle from 1911, a former vaudeville theater and, more re- cently, a plumbing-supplies company. For Hertz and Schnepf, it was a tabula rasa. Tey had the original 18-foot tin ceiling coated in silver radiator paint. Te white in- terior walls — which give shape to the gal- lery, Hertz's studio and a modest, art-filled living area — aren't nearly that high. Te easel in the studio is 10 feet wide, seven or eight feet tall, and hinged to a north-facing wall for plenty of natural sunlight. It comes out at an angle, just far enough so one of his three rolling chairs can squeeze beneath it. Te easel's surface is rainbow-splattered, and when that color mix, an organic piece of art in its own right, becomes distracting, the wood gets a fresh layer of white. A couple of months typically pass before it becomes clean or, if Hertz is really churning out can- vases, only a few weeks. He spent a lifetime standing while paint- neighborhood in the '70s and '80s. Hertz officially introduced his work to Louisville by inviting people into his home/studio on Nov. 17, 1979. "At that time, there was re- ally no contemporary art in Louisville," says Chuck Swanson, who moved his gallery from Bardstown Road to Market in 1998 after Hertz recruited him. "Billy was one of the first artists I met doing abstract paint- ings instead of birds or something." (Swan- son bought a Hertz painting some 30 years ago for $1,000 and paid it off in monthly $100 installments.) Swanson describes the neighborhood back then as a "frontier." Heilenman, the former C-J critic, says, "Te wine drunk there was not in glasses." Tere was Muth's Candy, Joe Ley Antiques, Wayside Chris- tian Mission and no hint of the gallery- restaurant-shop saturation of today. Smith still refers to what's now the popular Garage Bar as "the service station on the corner." Schnepf moved here from New York in '83 (Schnepf's sister in Louisville had set them "When I'm painting, I'm in another place, another time. That's when I'm happiest. I'm not aware of anything," Hertz says. ing, so it took a while to get comfortable doing it in a chair. Tis, of course, came af- ter weeks of relearning to move his fingers and arms, learning to stand up and put one foot in front of the other again. Sometimes Hertz struggles to pronounce a word. He can't drive, doesn't have the arm strength to cook. He forgets phone numbers now, hasn't gone upstairs since March. "I have to maximize my time to get the most out of my working hours," he says. "I'm good at delegating, always have been." For help, he has Schnepf and assistants and interns (one of the first things they learn, Hertz says, is "the kitchen"). But it is not these things that discourage him. He drinks a pot of coffee, or at least three- quarters of one, each day before switching to Diet Mountain Dew, and he really wants to be able to carry a mug to and from the kitchen. "I make little goals," he says. "It's really hard being dependent on somebody for everyday things. I don't get frustrated a lot, but not being able to carry my own cof- fee cup?" He pauses. "If I can do that, then anything is possible." H ertz came to Louisville from his na- tive South Florida in 1974 to attend graduate school at the University of Louisville, where he studied painting. By 1978 he was renting an apartment on Mar- ket Street from his friend Barbara Smith, who'd purchased a dozen properties in the up on a blind date a couple of years before), and the two owned 636 E. Market (now home to Wiltshire on Market) by '84. "Billy and Tom, I guess you'd call them the fathers of Market Street," says Judy Look, who was visual-arts editor at LEO in the '90s. Galerie Hertz officially opened in their home on Sept. 13, 1991. Hertz was often inspired by a trip to Italy in 1995 — he and Schnepf would buy a place in Panicale in 2001 — and his paintings often depicted Umbrian landscapes in a vibrant palette, from vistas to a single branch of an olive tree. "He creates colors that have yet to be named," Look says. "It's magnificent, but you just can't call it yellow." Another series, called "Earth Rips," was the result of being indoors all winter watching a Discovery Channel program about plate tectonics. "Mathematical imperfections on the can- vas create tension and make them vibrate," Hertz says. "It may look chaotic, but what I'm doing is very intentional." "Tey were a destination way before it was a viable area, and other artists and busi- nesses eventually followed," Paletti says. "Tat's really the genesis of how this became a viable neighborhood." Hertz and Schnepf bought more properties — 632 E. Market plus some buildings on the 300 block — that housed the gallery during various stages of growth. Hertz helped make the First Fri- day Trolley Hop popular. Elinor Maloney, the great-aunt of Smith's 7.12 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE [71]