Firmly ensconced in my penultimate role as a painter of
pictures, I am certain there is no finer calling in life than a career in the visual
or performing arts. Whenever a painter I
have known personally or by reputation passes from this vale of tears, I shake
my head sadly and say to myself, “he’ll never paint another picture.” When I reflect on the greedy big shots who
rule the worlds of commerce, politics, art, etc., I say to myself, “Yes, but
can they paint a picture?” Some of them
can. And when I discover that fact, I am
somewhat mollified. I try to discern the
root causes for their wretched excesses.
Consider Hitler. What would have happened if he hadn’t been
rejected twice from the Academy of Fine
Arts in Vienna,
in 1907 and again in 1908, because of his “unfitness for painting?” Painters aren’t interested in such trifling
pursuits as world domination.
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| Melchers,The Communion,1888,Johnson Museum,Cornell University |
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| Melchers,My Garden,1900-1903,Butler Institute of American Art |
One version of a statement made by the American painter Gari
Melchers perfectly expresses my own attitude, and hints at why we often
entertain thoughts of suicide. Melchers,
who could paint and draw naturalistically with the best of them, turned more
toward impressionism in later years, no doubt influenced by fellow artists who were
jumping on that bandwagon. He was only being
honest when he said: “Nothing counts in
this world with the painter but a good picture; and no matter how good a one
you may paint, you have only to go to the galleries and see how many better
ones have been done.”
I really must beg your pardon, but I just can’t help myself,
having been a charter member in the 4th Grade of the “We Never
Guess, We Look It Up” club. Here’s the
earliest published version of that quote making the rounds on the Internet: “Nothing matters in this world to the
painter, but a good picture. And it must
be a mighty good one to compete with those already done. Galleries are full of masterpieces, and the bad
painter has no place – and he should have none.” The use of the word “mighty” and its pedantic concluding sentence make
this version seem somehow more authentic, but much less suicidal in implication. Geez, I hate the Internet!
At any rate, given the tremendous importance we attach to our paintings, suffering humiliation as a painter is a very bitter pill to swallow. You can experience enough of that anyway by
just being your generic self.
I often replay one memorable humiliation in my idle moments.
It involves my attempt to paint a beach
scene in Margate, New Jersey,
a popular “island” community on the Jersey
Shore near Atlantic
City.
I had been invited to paint there about 20 years ago by a
painter who was getting married to a local girl I knew from The Art Students
League. She was a good painter. He was an excellent painter, one of the best
I’ve ever known. But when the marriage
collapsed after a couple of years, he retreated to a hollow in his native Arkansas,
where he now seems to live and paint in virtual isolation from the outside
world. I hope he will resurface some day.
Getting back to the beach.
Everything went wrong for me from the get-go. He had loaned me an easel, some paints, and
some brushes of a kind I didn’t use in my own work. I set up in the shelter of an overhang on the
porch of the clubhouse. He was sitting
on a folding stool on the beach in full sunlight, and in short order was painting
multiple figures superbly on a small panel, to my chagrin. I had never attempted a beach painting
before. The brilliantly lit sand and all the beachgoers in the distance seemed
an impossible subject for me, accustomed as I was to painting portraits, still
lifes and the occasional tree in Central Park.
After struggling for about an hour and growing more
frustrated by the minute, two newly pubescent girls, the kind who always make
me nervous when they run in packs, were leaving the beach and passed near the
clubhouse. Without even seeing my
painting, one of the girls, stout, round-faced and in a one-piece bathing suit,
looked up at me and shouted out, “Hey Mister, do you know what you’re
doing?” Her friend said, “Aw, leave him
alone.” But the damage was done. I had been exposed. I had been living a lie. I was not a painter after all. They didn’t even have to see my pitiful effort
to know that.
Years later, the memory of that beach encounter on a bright
sunny day in Margate, N.J.
lingers on, but at least I can laugh a little bit now about what was then an excruciatingly
embarrassing and humbling moment for a prideful painter.
