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Painting in Central Park, 2004, photo
by Claudia Bousraou
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Landscape painters have many amusing anecdotes to tell about
all kinds of bad weather ruining their fun.
Indoor painters in the Northeastern states, on the other hand, complain about
endless days of lousy natural light when it is too dark to paint, but wind and
rain don’t usually alter our painting plans.
And if you don’t care how much more beautiful things look under natural
light, with the dusty air surrounding them, or your studio is in a windowless
basement, you can always put in some “daylight” bulbs and paint 24-7 to your
heart’s content.
So when indoor painters go outdoors to paint on occasion,
Mother Nature has some special treats in store for them. Indeed she does.
Over the course of seven summers, four of my old painting buddies
and I trekked into Central Park one day a week to paint attractive
young girls posing on a rock in our plein air studio near Fifth
Avenue and East 72nd
Street. I was the nominal leader of the group because
I booked the models. I wanted to paint
two or three days in a row on each model to get more than just another quick
sketch, which we were all doing as regulars at the Saturday morning members painting
class at The Art Students League. I
wanted to make a really important outdoor painting with a model, just like
Frank Weston Benson did so many times with his beautiful young daughters! You’d think the other old painters would love
to do that. We’re all old guys. With the exception of one of the guys who was
still working full-time, we had nothing better to do than paint whenever we
wanted. But no, no, no! “I’ve got to do this tomorrow. I’ve got to do that tomorrow. The wife wants to do blah, blah, blah,” and
on and on.
Painting more than one day a week would obviously have exceeded
our ability to get organized. And I wasn’t
confident enough to paint from the model by myself in the tourist-congested
park. So it was settled. We would paint just one morning a week. And it absolutely had to be in the morning
early in the week. For one thing, the afternoon
rush hour traffic would be rough for three of the old boys lugging their
painting equipment and wet paintings on a crowded bus, subway and commuter train
back home to Queens, Long Island
and New Jersey. And we knew there would be fewer people in
the park to ogle us and our fully clad models than there would be on the
weekend. So it was finally settled. We would paint from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
on a Monday or a Tuesday, the exact same schedule we all were used to at the
League on Saturdays! Of course this
resulted in ending at high noon when the lovely morning light we began with was
now the scorching hot overhead light of the sun, completely altering the light
effect on the model at a time when we were just about to put the finishing
touches on our masterpieces. The shadows
that began on one side of the model were now on the other, and so on. What a catastrophe! But what fun we and our girls had!
Our biggest concern was the unpredictable summer weather. Every
morning at 6 a.m. or so on the Day of Atonement, we all began looking out our
windows at the sky to see what Mother Nature had in store for us. And every day when the sky was clear it
rained, and every day it looked like it would rain it didn’t, or so it
seemed. None of us were into computers
or the new texting thing, so we were on the phone to each other around 7 a.m. when it seriously looked like rain for
the morning. But not being potato farmers,
it was impossible to tell by intuition alone.
So we usually chanced it and were rewarded more often than not with
passable weather for painting. One day
our scheduled model was sure it was going to rain, so she rolled over in bed
and went back to sleep. We had to "call
911" to get her out to the park in time for an abbreviated morning painting session,
which resulted in one of my favorite sketches.
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| Courtney F., with our Underpass Shelter in Background,2006 |
One summer we tried working on the same painting of our
models on two successive Mondays. But
the conditions were so different from week to week that it was like painting
two separate paintings anyway. I ruined
my best painting because the background foliage had completely changed from one
week to the next in late August and it was so cold on that second day that we
were all freezing, especially the model and Ken W. The problems with this arrangement were not
all weather related. For example, my
other best painting was ruined on the second day when Courtney F., who had
taken an attractive standing pose that I had painted almost to the point of
perfection, immediately grew dizzy and fell to the ground, nearly hitting her
head on a rock. I only had the one
canvas with me, so when she recovered and resumed in a seated pose, I was
forced to continue to work on the background of my original painting while the
other boys painted Courtney in her new pose. I was not amused. Other models also reported feeling slightly
dizzy while posing still as a rock in the heady outdoor atmosphere. The next year we went back to our usual
routine of painting a different pose each week.
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Gena Posing in the Rain, 2006
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It seemed like we were playing Russian roulette with the
weather once a week for seven summers.
We called off our painting beforehand a number of times and had a couple
of washouts while painting. During one
of these unanticipated rainy days, the model Gena unfurled her umbrella and
continued her pose for a while longer before we all got soaked and called it a
day.
Near the end of our seventh summer, we took a chance on
another 50-50 weather day. We set up our
easels on the same little knoll we favored most often, a beautiful spot with a
couple of big rocks facing each other that we usually posed our seated models
on to get either front or back lighting.
This no-name knoll is halfway between the popular Boathouse Restaurant
and the Conservatory Pond, where kids sail their model boats and where the famous
statues of Hans Christian Andersen and Alice in Wonderland are located. It was a very convenient spot for us, because
the nearby restaurant has public restrooms and the pond has a snack bar with outdoor
seating, where we relaxed and ate lunch after painting.
This little knoll was truly a glorious outdoor
painting studio, particularly on a bright sunny day. When we set up our easels at the beginning of
each session, I often said out loud, “upon this rock I will build my church.” At the end of our morning sessions, I would always
look up at the marvelous light streaming through the canopy of trees. It was a heavenly place on earth for painting
our girls.
Another advantage to this spot was its elevated
location. Tourists walking on the path
between the boat lake and the pond wouldn’t see us if they didn’t look up. If they did, they swarmed over us with their still
and video cameras to regale, I presume, their friends back home with the antics
of these old painters at their easels, and especially their lovely models
posing so attentively. The young women
were not professional models. They either
worked alongside me at my part time job in Visitor Services at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art or were friends or family of other staff members. All were so wonderful that we made sure they
were paid well for their trouble.
On this particular morning near the end of our seventh
summer, though, the elevated location proved to be our undoing, because we
never had a Plan B to escape the rain that eventually came, unwittingly choosing
instead the nearest shelter, which proved to be a big mistake.
I felt that I had gotten a terrific start on my painting of Lauren
R., who was particularly inspiring in a simple standing pose, leaning against a
rock, which seemed to capture her nature so completely. Al W., a well-seasoned portrait painter,
suggested the perfect position for one of her hands and it made the pose
work. I knew this painting was going to
be great, maybe my best one of the 40 or so paintings we managed to squeeze out
of those seven weather-beaten summers.
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| Lauren R. Painted Just Before the Flood, 2008 |
During the first rest break, a few rain drops started
to fall. We thought we could get at
least one more 25-minute session in, but it was not to be. It started to rain heavily, so we all ran for
the nearest cover, which was an underpass at the bottom of the knoll, leaving
our paintings and all our painting gear to fend for themselves. The rain turned into one of those impressive summer
cloudbursts. We were huddling in the
tunnel with a few others, including a small group of rock musicians from Europe,
joking and getting acquainted and hoping to wait out the storm in dry comfort. But then a torrent of water began pouring off
a neighboring knoll, heading straight for the low-lying tunnel. In the blink of an eye the water was ankle
deep. The downpour was relentless, so we
were trapped in the tunnel, with no nearby shelter on higher ground to run to. The surging water kept rising. When the rain let up a bit I rushed out of
the tunnel and headed up the knoll to see what damage had been done to my
painting. Some of the others decided to
wait a little while longer before leaving.
The water kept pouring into the tunnel until our sweet model was
standing nearly waist deep in it.
The rain finally stopped, and my buddies and Lauren went
back up the knoll to survey the damage.
Al W. was working in watercolors and his painting was erased
completely. The rest of us had been working
with oils, so our unfinished paintings survived pretty much as we left them, but
the umbrellas had been knocked over and everything else got a thorough soaking
– French easels, rolls of paper towels, equipment bags and ourselves. The park was a soggy disaster scene. We paid our courageous, waterlogged model and
sat on a couple of wet benches for awhile to discuss the meaning of life, before
taking our thoroughly soaked selves out of the park to head homeward.
I sang jauntily to myself while rolling my painting gear all the way from my apartment on Broadway and West 75th Street to the bench in the park at Fifth Avenue and East 72nd Street, where we and our models congregated before heading for the knoll. For seven summers on my way through the park, I enjoyed seeing the same hard-working gardener watering Strawberry Fields, the lawn dedicated to John Lennon's memory just off Central Park West and 72nd Street. While painting I was positively giddy with delight. I was no stranger in paradise. That was where I belonged.
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At Our Gallery Exhibition in 2004. From the left: Chao-Min Liu, Research Chemist and Painter;
Albert H. Wasserman, Portrait Painter; Al Herr, Courtroom Sketch Artist and
Painter; Kenneth Wilkinson, Painter, and Me
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