 |
| Pieter Claesz,Still Life With Turkey Pie,1627,Rijksmuseum,Amsterdam |
Very few artists start
out wanting to become landscape painters or still life painters. Those decisions are made for us by necessity,
the mother of all dashed hopes and dreams.
When we wake up that fateful morning and proclaim, “I’m gonna go to art
school and learn how to paint,” we don’t mean we’re going to study the painting
of pastures and pears. No, we’re going
to study figure painting.
Since the dawn of painting, that’s been the hierarchy – people first in
assorted genres and everything else a notch or two below, with the lowly still
life at the very bottom.
So we all have
some great fun for a few years, staring at a human being posing on a model
stand in a crowded classroom and trying our darndest to paint like Sargent or
Bouguereau. But there comes a time, some 30 years ago, when you can’t keep doing that if you want to think of yourself
as a serious artist. You have to get
out there on your own. And then the
trouble begins.
You don’t have
any money and artist’s models don’t work for free. Your
friends and acquaintances won’t sit for you because they don’t think it’s worth
their time, knowing it won’t enhance their reputations to be painted by an
amusing dabbler such as yourself. You’re
not married so you don’t have a wife who will agree to sit for you, although
wedded bliss is no guarantee either. You’ve
known a few painters whose wives simply refused to sit for them.
 |
| Frank Weston Benson,Eleanor,1907,Boston Museum of Fine Arts |
Not being married
and not running an orphanage generally means you also don’t have access to children
who will sit for you, unless you have a lot of friends and relatives with children,
can afford to hire models to pose for you, and live in the 19th
Century. Such was the case for Mary
Cassatt, that exceptional painter of mothers and children, who devoted her entire
long life to art, and once opined, “There's only one thing in life for a woman;
it's to be a mother.” For some reason, by
the way, almost all of the best paintings done of children have been of girls,
although Robert Henri made quite a few good portrait sketches of rowdy boys in
his fast and loose bravura style. The
Boston Impressionist Frank Benson, for example, painted his son maybe once or
twice, but painted his three lovely daughters on numerous occasions, creating
several absolute masterpieces of fine art in the process.
 |
|
A portion of the Studio of Sir Gerald Kelly, R.A. (1879-1972)
Print of Russell Westwood’s Photograph in the collection of
the National Portrait
Gallery, London
|
 |
| A Smaller Studio |
You would love to
be a real portrait painter, working only from life in a grand manner, but your home
studio is the size of a closet. You pine
for a 30x40 foot room with huge windows and high ceilings in which to paint full-length
figure paintings and commissioned portraits, the proper studio size for such
work, according to the painter Richard Goetz, whose loud pronouncements to his
class at The Art Students League were often a source of information or
amusement when you were drawing in the free members’ sketch class across the
hall.
But you do have
room for a bean pot and a couple of pears.
You turn the bedroom of your apartment into a home studio. First you put the bed in the living
room. Then you try to figure out where to
put those pears to get the best possible natural light on them from the two small,
adjacent windows facing west/northwest. That’s not an easy task for indecisive you. Madeline T., a painter friend, saw it right
away. Then you block the windows about three-quarters
of the way up with dark curtains to get at least a little downward angled light
on your subjects, instead of a less attractive side lighting effect. You squeeze in a model stand against the north
wall at a right angle to the windows for the occasional portrait sketch, and figure
out some wacky, makeshift ways to elevate your still life setups at varying
heights on the model stand for perspective variety.
You lug a heavy
old mirror you found on the Lower East Side all the way to the Upper West Side
and put it on the opposite wall to check your work from a distance, lay down a
couple of beat up old oriental runners on the floor, attach a couple of
extension speakers near the ceiling and you’re ready to roll.
After a couple of
years, you get in touch with an apprentice carpenter to custom-build an easel
with a base and wheels that is just six inches short of the 9-foot ceiling. The easel, featuring strong, double mortise
and tenon joints for the base, looks in
profile a bit like the easel shown in a photograph of Sargent’s studio in Paris.
It’s been your stalwart pride and joy for
nearly 30 years. Finished paintings and
fresh canvases are crammed into wooden racks, sectional metal shelving and
closets. The room shrinks with each
mismatched storage addition.
This setup leaves
many things to be desired, due mostly to the fact that you are extremely
impractical and mechanically disinclined, but it serves its purpose quite well if
you paint fairly small – 24x30 inches tops. It’s your sanctuary. You put it all together in haphazard fashion by
your inept lonesome self. And it’s just wonderful.
For most of us,
it takes a couple of years after art school to really get a feel for painting groceries
and pots and pans, after such a heady experience of painting the human form
divine. The art schools in the big
cities today are able to stay in business in part because they are loaded with students
who only want to paint the figure and can’t afford the expense of private
models. And many perpetual students,
even those who can afford model fees and a proper studio, stay in the classroom
because they aren’t able to handle the one-on-one interaction necessary to work
privately with a model or portrait client.
 |
|
Luigi Lucioni(1900-1988),Bread and Fruit,1940,14x18"
www.christies.com,private collection
|
 |
| Peonies,18x16",Private Collection |
I’ve always
admired former League students who have had the guts to pull up stakes and head
for the hills to paint landscapes, the next best thing to painting the
figure. It isn’t as easy to transition
emotionally to still life painting in order to establish a career as an
artist. But I have found that it can be almost
as satisfying as any other genre, once you finally understand that “sacrifice” is
the low-income painter's middle name and “painting” is the name of the game.
