There She Is

Painting Val in Central Park on a Perfect Day

We painted Val on a beautiful sunny morning on our little knoll in Central Park in August of 2004.  The weather couldn’t have been more perfect for painting a model in our plein air studio between the Boathouse Restaurant and the Conservatory Pond near Fifth Avenue and 72^nd Street.

Val was one of the 21 young women five of us old guys painted in the park over a period of seven summers, as I described in a previous post.  Some of the girls posed only once, others several times, for our once-a-week painting sessions, weather permitting.  This was Val’s second pose for us.  Like most of our other models, she worked part-time with me in the Visitor Services Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few blocks north of our painting site.

When we arrived at our "studio" on this occasion, Val slipped into a very pretty orange dress with a matching shawl she had recently purchased at one of those budget fashion stores, and deftly doffed her jeans, exposing her bare legs, about as racy as we ever got out there in the park with our models.

  

She instinctively climbed to the top of the biggest rock on the knoll and took a seated, back-lit pose with an elegant line that we all agreed was eminently paintable.  Being the nominal monitor of these affairs, and official timekeeper, I delivered my usual announcement, “Gentlemen, start your engines,” and we commenced our work.

Val, Oil on Linen, 24x20"

I was immediately having a very happy time painting Val in this urban wooded setting.  She held her elegant pose extremely well, and it was easy to capture its rhythm on my 24 by 20 inch stretched linen canvas in my initial lay-in with thinned-down color approximating the actual look of the “tout ensemble.”

During these Monday or Tuesday morning Central Park outings, we worked about 25 minutes at a time on the pose, with five minute breaks, beginning at 9 a.m. and going to about 12:30 p.m.  As the morning wore on I was making good progress on my painting and really enjoying myself, not something I’m accustomed to in the other world.  We weren’t bothered much on this particular day by visitors to Central Park stopping by to ogle, and I could see that my four painting companions were also having a good time painting Val.   Being only five in number, it wasn’t hard for each of us to get a pretty decent view of the model.  We always set up our easels without much fussing about placement, although I did regret on occasion not being constitutionally disposed to exercising the traditional monitor’s prerogative of choosing the first spot.

One of the main reasons I liked painting with these guys is we all had developed our own ways of working after many years and we never interfered with each other’s enjoyment of the process of painting.  We all had received academic training at some level.  The oldest painter, Albert Wasserman, then 83, has been a superior portrait painter all his life.  He began his art studies at the age of 13 and continues to work and teach at the age of 92.  Another painter, Kenneth Wilkinson, had been Frank Reilly’s illustration class monitor for four years, but swore off the photographic look years ago and now works in an exciting, paint-heavy style derived from his love of the Post-Impressionists.  We never gratuitously offered any of those annoying “helpful suggestions” that always destroy your concentration and put you in a foul mood for the rest of the day.  “Do you mind if I say something.”  “Oh no, go right ahead.” You’re doomed one way or the other.  The psychological damage has been done.  Leave us alone, already, to sink or swim to the best of our own abilities.

While I’m at it, it’s crazy to see so many earnest artists chasing after this or that painter’s technique year after year.  They watch hours of “how to” videos or attend expensive “vacation” workshops in the vain hope of becoming “as good a painter as so and so.”  If God had intended for you to paint like Sargent or Grandma Moses, he would have blessed you with the innate ability to do so.   If you want to be a fairly decent figurative painter, though, you do have to study painting for a few years to see how the job is done, there is no other way.  It can’t be learned by reading about it or even just looking at paintings.  You have to see how experienced painters mix paint and apply it to the canvas to achieve the effects that you consider to be inspirational.  But after a few years of getting used to washing your brushes every day, forget about the techniques of your contemporaries and paint as well as you can in a style that suits your personality.  You might not sell as many paintings as those who mimic the unique work of some other painter, but at least you can hold your head up high, knowing you aren’t just another one of many inferior clones of a more talented painter.  I must add that it was different in the old days, when figurative painting was a respected profession with high standards that had to be met or you were shown the door, a direction most of us today would no doubt have been headed for.

Now back to this particular Monday morning in the park with Val.  It was a happy time for all of us.  The August weather was perfect and our incomplete masterpieces were progressing nicely.

Then around noontime a group of a dozen or so identically dressed young girls from a private school in New Jersey came traipsing by on the path just below our little knoll.  They were a noisy, exuberant bunch and I heard one of them say, “We can’t leave New York without seeing a celebrity.”  I shouted out, “Well, there she is,” pointing to Val posing prettily at the top the rock.  The girls immediately clambered up the rock, surrounding Val, who instantly took to her new starring role as a celebrity, which she certainly was for us already.  She had a great time for a few minutes chatting with the girls and telling them, among other things, about the great buy she got on her dress.  It was so much fun to watch this sweet little impromptu scene being played out on such a gorgeous day for painting that we didn’t mind the brief interruption at all.

Val, LichtBlick Gallery owner Claudia Bousraou and Me

Shortly after the girls had clambered down off the rock and headed merrily on their way, we were paid an unannounced visit by the two women who were planning an exhibition of our Central Park paintings at LichtBlick Gallery on Long Island.  The gallery owner, Claudia Bousraou,  took a great picture of all of us as we continued painting Val for a few more minutes.  And we later had a productive chat with Claudia and the curator, Pam Koehler, about our upcoming show, with the noonday sun continuing to spread its hazy, warm glow over our favorite painting spot.  I left the park beside myself with happiness.  Nothing in life was better than this, at least for me.  I had come to the end of a perfect day.

Chao-Min Liu's Photo of his Painting and Val in Jeans

The enchantment was too great to last forever, of course.  Val was one of the few models we painted twice in the same pose.  So we reassembled at the same spot the following Monday morning to resume work on our paintings.  Almost everything about the scene was different.  It was still a bright day and the rock hadn’t wandered off, but it was so cold that one of our boys painted with gloves on, and Val had to wear her jeans under her gown to keep from freezing her legs off.  The background of green-leafed trees now seemed to be a fractured, illusionary autumnal orange.  I made some adjustments to the background of my painting, but spoiled the look I had achieved in the first sitting.  And I was unable to successfully make some subtle changes in my painting of Val that I had been counting on.  It’s like Renoir said, you go to nature armed with theories and nature throws them back in your face.  In other words, curses, foiled again.

But the memory of that first glorious day of painting our lovely Val lingers on.  I came away marveling that once in awhile even I get close to knowing the feeling of complete contentment.

Luigi Lucioni

"Clouds Over Equinox,"1935,Oil on Canvas,26x47",Gerald Peters Gallery

One of my favorite 20^th Century painters is Luigi Lucioni, who created meticulous still lifes, landscapes and portraits in a highly personal manner that he likened to classical realism derived from his study and worship of the early Italian Renaissance masters.  Lucioni also produced masterful etchings and watercolors that brilliantly showcase his affinity for precise line work.

“Resting Athlete,1938,Oil on Canvas,43 ½ x 48",Gerald Peters Gallery

One goofy reason I like this wonderful painter is because it’s easy to remember his dates.  Born in 1900 in Malante, Italy, moved with his parents to America in 1910 and died in New York City in 1988.  Painters love to check the dates on other painters to see how they measure up with their own creative progress.  He did that one before he was 30?  Holy Cow!  I’m 100 years old and I’ve accomplished nothing!  When a painter’s career straddles the start of a century, you have to “do the math” in a serious way to figure out their career landmarks.

I also like the fact that Lucioni had absolutely no interest at all in photography, even though his work was often described unknowingly as “photographic.”  I like the fact that his painstaking style was consistent in all the work he produced.  I like the fact that he loved opera, which in his case led him to hobnobbing with a lot of celebrities, including Henry Fonda, who received some painting instruction from him.  I didn’t like learning, though, that Lucioni came to dislike Rubens and other brush stroke painters, even though his first painting teacher was William Starkweather, who had studied with Joaquin Sorolla.

“Pattern of Trees,”1943,Watercolor,13x20 ½",www.antiques.com

But most sincerely, I am in awe of Lucioni’s superb draftsmanship, and fascinated by his highly personal choices regarding color, subject matter and design, the latter under the early influence of the skewed perspectives of Cezanne, whom he considered a great artist.   But he loved most the early Italians, especially Piero della Francesca, for their purity of line and form.

I’ve never seen another still life painter use such distinctive, harmonious color combinations to such impressive effect on objects that are so perfectly rendered from nature.  He loved browns, ochres, lemon and dusty yellows, olive and deep greens and mauves, and obviously gave careful consideration to the color scheme in planning his extremely realistic works.  No brown sauce or commonplace color for him.

“Harmony in Minor Key,c. 1974,Oil on Canvas,22x26",www.godelfineart.com

His tabletop still lifes feature ordinary, often unusual household objects and superbly painted draperies with a multitude of folds in them.  Folds are very hard to paint convincingly, and most of us eliminate them whenever possible.  That’s one reason you see so many flat backgrounds in works done by today’s painters.  “Keep it simple” could be construed to be the mantra of the lazy painter.  I’ve been advised on several occasions to put more draperies in my own still lifes, but I paint them only once in a great while because of the difficulty in getting the folds to look right.  Lucioni obviously embraced the challenge of painting folds, a common task for the early Italians.

"Dominant Colors,"1956,Oil on Canvas,20x28",www.antiques.com

In Lucioni’s work, a single lemon or a small grouping of fruit placed judiciously often serve as significant color accents in the prevailing tonal theme.   He didn’t paint the ordinary very often.  For example, he frequently painted the devil out of a bouquet of dried dieffenbachia leaves in an earthenware jug or a potted, green dieffenbachia in the midst of cascading drapery, finding beauty in the overall color scheme he selected.  He liked to paint oddly shaped pots or bottles and place things on their side for design purposes. 

Many second-rate artists like to flippantly respond “a lifetime,” when innocently asked how long it takes them to finish a painting.  But we are told that Lucioni worked nearly a month on each still life.  He was obsessed with the beauty of accurate line and form, and he had the patience to study and render in exacting detail all the essential facts from nature that would bring life to his paintings. 

Rendering crockery, fruit and other objects with well-defined contours, as Lucioni did, can sometimes result in a “cut-out” look, an opinion of some of my painter friends about his work.  But I think his sharp contours are perfectly in keeping with his reverence for the line work of the early Italians, and all the objects he paints sit comfortably in their artfully staged environments.

Lucioni never tried to fool himself or the viewer with tricks to overcome drawing difficulties, like smudging form into form, or employing the much-abused concept of lost and found edges so fashionable with many of today’s realists, who misinterpret their occasional use by the older painters.  He tackled the most difficult passages, such as where shadows and cast shadows of juxtaposed objects come together, and succeeded in keeping separate the firm contours of each object, just the way close observation with the human eye would reveal.  

“Village of Stowe, Vt.,”1931,Oil on Canvas,23 ½x33 ½",Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Lucioni’s attractive, airy Vermont landscapes, with their precisely outlined birch trees and barns and distant hilltops, stand apart from those executed by most other landscape painters, who adopt a broader, less focused manner of painting the great outdoors.   His landscape etchings and watercolors most clearly exhibit his love of the precise line.

Lucioni spent summers in Vermont and the rest of the year in New York City, painting seven days a week, holidays included, with opera music playing in the background.  By his own account, Lucioni painted every day from 9 a.m until noon and from 1 p.m until 4.  “I enjoy painting, so for me painting is not work,” he once said.  When he wasn’t working at his art, he enjoyed the city’s rich musical life and the companionship of his beloved Scottish terrier, the two other great loves of his life.

“Two Silos,”Etching,1942,Indianapolis Museum of Art

Not many people are familiar with Lucioni’s art these days.  A woman who moved to Vermont after art school didn’t know he painted still lifes.  And I didn’t know he painted landscapes until I saw a show of his work at the Richard York Gallery in 1991.   His etchings and watercolors were a complete surprise to me until a few years ago.  Part of the reason may be that he kept to himself during his long career as an artist, working right up until the very end.  He had few artist friends, preferring the company of musicians, and had long given up on entering juried competitions.  “I find artists get along better if they are separate rather than together,” he once said.  “There's always a kind of jealousy and all that sort of thing you know.”

The story was quite different early in his career.  During the Great Depression, when other artists were working for the WPA to get by, Lucioni was selling every one of his carefully crafted paintings.  He had his first solo exhibition in 1927 at the Ferargil Gallery in New York City.  And in 1932, he became the youngest contemporary painter to have a work purchased by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a still life titled “Pears with Pewter.”

During an oral history interview conducted by Robert Brown on July 6, 1971 for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, Lucioni had some interesting things to say about Realist painting and photography.

Lucioni said he tried to find “the thing that makes it real without copying all the little trivial things.  People say I paint every leaf on the tree. I don't…I paint what I think is there.  I mean I try to make it look as though it belonged there, but very often when people look at my landscapes and look at the painting I am doing, ‘Oh, you changed this, you changed that,’ they don't realize that…you can't cope with nature, as you know, and therefore you can't put in all the little things that nature can do so easily and you can't. So you have to get the essentials of these things and that is my idea of realism…for me nature is the greatest artist that ever lived, you know, and all the great artists have tried to follow nature, well, [nature] can do so many things that a brush can't do, I mean, for instance, how can you paint, well to begin with you can't paint sunsets, you can't paint sunrises, you paint a blue sky, but if you paint it blue it looks absolutely opaque where nature can have it transparent. Nature is a great, great inspirer, but also a terrible tease for an artist, but you do the best you can.”

 "Steeple Through the Birches,”1977-79,Oil on Canvas,23x19",www.artfact.com

He said his realism is “not a copy of nature, although lots of people think so. But let them think so, it's alright. But the realism is something else. First of all, you have to know what a thing looks like, what a thing is made of…I studied the things that I painted, I studied the trees, I'd go and look at them up close and then when I would go back I'd try to simplify by a line or two. It doesn't always come off.  But you try awfully hard to make a thing look as though it was casual.  But I don't think there is anything casual in art.”

He said the goal of his carefully planned still life paintings is to make the objects within “as absolutely alive as possible…even more alive than they really do look like to you when you are looking at them.”

Asked how his work compares to photography, Lucioni replied:

“I don't think it compares with photography at all. People say, ‘Oh you can take a photograph and make it look as good.’ You just can't, to begin with. I don't think realism and photography have anything in common, for my point of view, I may be wrong. In fact, I am really not a good photographer. I can't take good snapshots or anything, and I never. . .People say, ‘oh we can do that from a photograph.’ I never work from photographs. I couldn't possibly work from a photograph…I cannot imagine a tree. I have to study, I have to be in front of it in order to get it. See, that's one of my limitations…you can't imagine something that you just don't know. I mean, you have to know about it. But there are a lot of people who do work from memory, but I am no good at that, I can't do that. I mean, it's as I say, it's my limitation, but it's me and there's nothing I can do about it. I am too old now to change, and I don't know if I would want to change or not.”

I understand completely this immensely gifted artist’s sincere, fumbling attempts to describe the nearly indescribable act of painting from nature, which stirs up so much emotion.  And I’m extremely happy to know that we share many of the same feelings about the work.  Like Lucioni, all I want to do is make the things I paint look real on canvas.  And I, too, am trying to do the best I can.

Sorolla's Last Stand

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, “The Tuna Catch,” (Ayamonte), 1919

about 12x15 feet, The Hispanic Society of America

Painters don’t exit the No. 1 subway train at 157^th Street and Broadway to dine on cuchifritos or have their eyebrows threaded.  They are there to visit the Holy Grail for lovers of Bravura painting at The Hispanic Society of America at 155^th Street and Broadway.  Soon they will stand in awe before the 14 mural-size canvases depicting the provinces of Spain that Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida executed on commission for the railroad heir Archer Milton Huntington.  Sorolla’s paintings, each ranging from about 12 to 14 feet in height and totaling 227 feet in length, cover the walls in a room specially constructed to house them in Huntington’s palatial edifice devoted to the culture of Spain.

Sorolla’s “Vision of Spain,” which he began in 1913 and completed in 1919, represents one of the major achievements in the history of painting, if only for its scale alone.  Rubens and Tintoretto would be green with envy if they saw what Sorolla had accomplished.  These were no mere Renaissance formula figures on canvas, with Seraphim and Cherubim cavorting in the heavens.  There were no able studio assistants standing at the ready to fill in the blanks around the Master’s central figures.  Sorolla’s canvases are filled with real people painted life-size and from life by one man in possession of prodigious skills and the enormous energy necessary to complete this mind-boggling project.

Painters know what effort it takes to make even a semi-decent life-size bust portrait come to life on a 24 by 20 inch canvas when painted alla prima.  After a couple of hours work you’re exhausted and longing for a nap and someone to wash your brushes for you.  Sorolla painted multiple figures on canvas in that manner throughout his career, all in natural poses and brimming with the impression of life itself. 

Drawing the entire human figure dead-on accurately in a direct attack on canvas with a fully loaded brush is nearly impossible, as those who have tried it soon discover.  Even excellent painters like Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase fell short of the mark nine times out of ten in one aspect or another – proportions and gestures among them.  And hands must be in pockets or held behind the back, of course, if you are going to succeed. Then you have to master color and chiaroscuro to breathe life into just one figure, much less a multitude.  Sorolla was one of the very few artists who had all the tools for such work.

For a period of only 50 years or so in the long history of art, Sorolla and a few contemporaries, Zorn and Sargent among them, painted one figurative masterpiece after another entirely from life, and then, like dinosaurs and other giants of the past, their like just disappeared from the face of the earth.  But none of those contemporaries came close to matching Sorolla’s heroic last stand on display at the Hispanic Society of America.  To top it off, Sorolla was no kid when he took on this work.  He was already 48 years old.

Despite the immense size of the canvases, Sorolla painted all but one of then en plein air.  He worked in a studio on his first painting.  All the other massive paintings were completed on location, painting models from life posing in the costumes of their respective regions.  That first painting, a conjoined panoramic view of two regions, Castile and Leon, featuring hilltop towns and a bread festival, was painted in a specially constructed studio outside Madrid from March until September of 1913.  It is the largest painting in the series at 45 feet long, and with more than 100 life-size figures.  This studio effort, for me, is the least interesting of the lot, although a colossal undertaking to be sure.  The composition is uninteresting and the figures static, unlike the vivacious figures and excellent compositions of the plein air paintings. 

I suspect Sorolla was warming up to the assignment and used a few photographs to get this initial mural out of the way so he could get to his first love, and his strength – painting figures from life in the great sunlit outdoors, a routine that was observed and recounted by many of his contemporaries.  And he painted fast.  "I could not paint at all if I had to paint slowly,” Sorolla once said.  “Every effect is so transient, it must be rapidly painted.”

But the commission took its toll on the mortal man.  By 1917 Sorolla admitted to being exhausted.  In 1919 he began work on the final painting, “The Tuna Catch” (Ayamonte), on May 10 and completed it on June 28.  This is one of my favorite paintings of all time.   The color harmony, the shimmering light effect on the water, the entire composition – it’s just a beautiful work of art.  The three lounging sailors in their brilliantly white suits, so perfectly realized in attitude, provide a joyous contrast to the hard-working laborers, rendered so convincingly on an opposing diagonal in the canopied fishery at Ayamonte.  It’s another day filled with the joy of life that this great artist loved to depict on canvas.

I was deeply moved when reading about the eyewitness account of a young student of Sorolla’s, Santiago Martinez Martin, who observed the completion of this final masterpiece of alla prima painting.   Martinez Martin's recollections are detailed in an essay in a catalogue for a traveling Sorolla exhibition that I viewed several times at the IBM Gallery in 1989.   Worn out from his work on this commisson,  Sorolla "had to caution himself against the heightened emotionalism he experienced while painting, for, ‘after a few hours…I’m undone, exhausted.’” 

Martinez Martin "witnessed how Sorolla, often using yard-long brushes, in one morning painted a catch of tuna as it was delivered from ship to pier, covering almost 10 [feet] by more than 3 feet of the vital foreground of the Ayamonte panel in a single session.”  When the younger painter approached, Sorolla was slumped in exhaustion before the large canvas and was "regarding it with feverish eyes."  And in a visceral way, we are transported to the scene.  We understand, we know.

On July 20, 1919, Sorolla wrote, “Now, with God’s help and after considerable suffering…I have given the final brush-stroke to the commission.  The panel I painted in Ayamonte, in its background the coast of Portugal which I had before me, is splendidly satisfying [and] I believe the finest of all.”

You come to realize that Sorolla literally worked and worried himself to death on this commission, for which he received a payment of $150,000 from Huntington.  I’m sure that was big money then, but Sorolla was doing very well without it.  Just before accepting the commission, he had pulled in $80,000 from sales and commissions during a five-month exhibition of his work in Chicago and St. Louis in 1911, his second highly successful trip to America. 
 
The painter had anticipated spending five years on the project for the Hispanic Society, but it took him seven years of single-handed effort to complete his “Vision of Spain,” and he never lived to see its installation.  The very next year he suffered a stroke while painting a woman’s portrait in his garden in Madrid.  Paralyzed for over three years, Sorolla died at the age of 60 in 1923.  The room housing the Provinces at the Hispanic Society opened to the public in 1926.

A couple of years ago, the Sorolla room was renovated and his mural paintings were restored.   Both are looking much finer than when I last saw them 15 years ago.  At that time, the wide swaths of turpentine washes that Sorolla had used to cover huge background expanses were showing signs of erosion. 
 

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, “The Fish” (Catalonia), 1915

 about 12x15 feet, Hispanic Society of America

A glass-topped, counter-height cabinet that was in the center of the room has been removed, and now the sight lines are much better for the paintings, which have been lowered to almost eye level.  That cabinet housed Sorolla memorabilia, including faded photographs of some of the costumed models, whom Sorolla had most certainly painted directly from life.  As I was studying his magnificent murals, three middle-aged ladies were examining the photographs in the cabinet.  I heard one of them exclaim to her friends, “That’s what they really looked like!”  End of Story.  Not even the great Sorolla could win them over!