Twilight at the League for Saturday Models

Among my Saturday Models, photo by R. Nakaya

The Great Wall of 104 16x20s, composite photo by Yves Leroux

What’s wrong with the Administration, the Board of Control and most of the members of The Art Students League of New York?  Don’t they realize that the natural light entering the League’s north-light studios is worth far more to artists than any amount of money that can be offered by any fabulously wealthy, property-gobbling real estate developer?  Everybody else does.  All over Manhattan, skylight studios once rented by starving artists have been preserved and converted into designer apartments for mega-rich financiers and lawyers.

What should be of paramount concern for League artists who paint in those north-light studios during the day is the inevitable loss of natural light that will result from the impending construction next door of Extell Development Co.’s residential condominium skyscraper, which will include a hotel and a Nordstrom department store on the lower floors.  It will be the city’s tallest building and could rise anywhere from 1,423 to 1,550 feet.  That’s extremely bad news for the light at the League.  But Extell also wants one-third of its residential tower to cantilever high in the sky over part of the League building in order to give its billionaire condo investors a peek at Central Park around a 920-foot apartment tower that will be built right behind it by Vornado Realty Trust.  That skyscraper will block even more of the natural light entering our skylight studios.

I wrote about the imminent loss of natural light in the League studios in my previous post.  Our Board estimates that if Extell builds its skyscraper straight up it would block 20 percent of our light, and the cantilever would further reduce the light by up to nearly 5 percent.  I’m guessing that those are very low-ball estimates and that a minimum of one-third to one-half of our natural light will be gone forever when both skyscrapers are completed.  Good morning, Mr. Edison, and welcome to the League.

I suppose I’m one of those cranky artists that Michael Kimmelman mentioned in a Dec. 23 article in The New York Times under the headline, “Seeing a Need for Oversight of New York’s Lordly Towers.”  At the end of his article, Kimmelman writes, “Members of the Art Students League haven’t yet voted whether to approve the sale of their air rights to Extell for the Nordstrom Tower. While the league stands to gain millions, cranky artists might still succeed where Landmarks failed, and shelve the cantilever. Here’s hoping they do.”  

In the late 1970s, I spent a little over two years studying figure painting at the League in Studios 6 and 7 on the fourth floor.  I came to appreciate the exquisite beauty of flesh color as revealed under the unparalleled light of day streaming through the skylights in those studios. I’m hopeless at describing visual effects, but suffice it to say that artificial light is simply crap by comparison when it comes to painting flesh.

Under artificial light, colors are delineated very clearly by value and hue, but they have absolutely no sensual appeal.  All subtle tones are lost, along with the delicate blue/gray atmosphere that embraces everything under indirect daylight from the north and can cause you to swoon at the first sight of an onion bathed in such atmospheric light.  Artists drive themselves crazy searching in vain for a passable studio lighting system to substitute for nature’s light from the distant sun.

In the following 30-plus years, I have faithfully attended a Saturday morning painting class for members in one or the other of the five north-light studios on the top two floors of the League.  We never turn on the lights, no matter how overcast the sky. Those sessions with League models are often the highlight of my week.  I receive such emotional pleasure from these alla prima painting sessions that I can’t bear to paint over my portrait sketches, although I have destroyed some I considered miserable failures.  I have saved more than 400 of these sketches, mostly 16 by 20s.  

A couple of years ago, Chashama, a nonprofit arts organization, allowed me to have a show of more than 300 of these portraits in one of their temporary gallery spaces in the city.   My "Saturday Models" exhibit ran from March 22 to April 8, 2012 at Chashama 461 Gallery, 461 W. 126th St.  I honestly didn’t care if I sold any paintings.  I just wanted to pay homage to all the unsung League models who posed for me and my friends.  And I wanted to give my sketches a little fresh air.  As I wrote in my text accompanying the exhibit, “This exhibit fortuitously answers my prayer of deliverance for all these former easel companions of mine.  They remained stalwart throughout the usual stages of triumph and despair as I struggled to bring them to life, but soon after they were consigned to that burgeoning graveyard of superfluous paintings familiar to us all.”

You might have skipped the frosting in writing that yourself, but I’m pretty sentimental and pretty irrational about a lot of things.  In fact, I didn’t even publicize the show at the League, figuring the models have been painted so often they wouldn’t be interested in seeing the show themselves, and the artists who have painted the same models would probably all be chorusing, “My paintings of the same models were a lot better!”  

So it went unheralded at the League, and in the public arena, as well.  That was fine by me, but a few friends and a few strangers did buy some of the head sketches for $100 apiece.  I threw in one or two for free to people who said nice things about my work.  And a very sweet elderly woman I forgot to get the name of walked out with two of my paintings under her arm without paying me on the spot, although several months later she did send me a check for them.  I had a swell time sitting in the huge warehouse/gallery, mostly all alone, listening to cassette tapes on my really great $20 flea-market boom box, the first one I’ve ever owned.  The paintings and I were on holiday for a couple of weeks, that’s all, and most of them came back home with me to reestablish their superfluousness in perpetuity.

I love the League and was horrified when one of the paintings on a web album I created for the exhibit ended up as the first item in a Google Image search for The Art Students League.  I almost passed out from anxiety.  My insignificant image should not be sullying the grand tradition of the League, where just about every famous American artist you can think of spent some time studying or teaching.  I panicked and deleted the image and the album, which resulted in the deletion of all the images from my hard drive, leaving me with only a few shaky, hand-held images of the exhibit that I hadn’t uploaded to the album. 

Now Extell and my beloved League are poised to dim the natural light in the studios and spoil my Saturday fun.  Like Ralph Rackstraw, the lowly seaman in HMS Pinafore, this Extell affair has plunged me into a “Cimmerian darkness of tangible despair.”  I’ll ask this one more time, “Why me, Lord, why me?”