No Exit

Peonies in  Large Snifter, Oil on Canvas, 25 by 24 in.

Happy Moo Year, Oil on Canvas, 12 by 14 in.

Recent Drawings, Charcoal Pencil on Smooth Newsprint

Recent Drawings, Charcoal Pencil on Smooth Newsprint

Birth of a Model, Charcoal Pencil on Smooth Newsprint

Well, it was another rough year for this old traditional realist painter and obligatory starving artist, who at this particularly dreary time of the year is really bored painting mediocre still lifes under the lousy natural light entering the two adjacent but insufficient windows in his home studio in his fashionable neighborhood on the Upper West Side of the borough of Manhattan in the city of New York in the state of New York in the northeast quadrant of the country still known as The United States of America, unless I didn’t get the memo.  

I’m bored with this blog as well.  Anything I write about the visual arts and its practitioners has already been written by someone else – and much better, too, especially when it comes to musing about the process of oil painting, something I’m particularly obtuse about, although it has occupied much of my time in the past 30 or so years.  I dream of moving to the High Desert to get some sunlight into my canvases, but that’s a move that seems way too decisive at this late stage in the game of life. 

I tell myself and anybody who is willing to listen that the main reason I remain in New York is because my social club, The Art Students League of New York, provides a free figure drawing sketch class for members from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday during the regular school year, and an inexpensive sketch class for members during the summer months.  I paint most mornings by that abysmal natural light in my home studio I’m always complaining about, eat a slice of pizza and drink a can of soda for lunch, take a nap and then head a short 18 city blocks to the League for the sketch class and a smidgeon of camaraderie.  That’s a pretty full accounting of my day-to-day existence, and this seemingly irrelevant information might be useful if you are considering following in my footsteps on the path to an exciting and lucrative art career.  

You have to go real slow if you want to succeed.  I believe that the Tuscan painter Cennino Cennini (1370-1440), a follower of Giotto, got it right when he advised young artists in his Book of the Art to take it easy, live moderately and drink only  "thin wines."  Thanks to his advice, I don’t get worn out “heaving stones, crowbars, and many other things which are bad for your hand” before I begin a painting.   He offered another sage bit of advice that all you young men with designs on an art career should pay special attention to:  “There is another cause which, if you indulge it, can make your hand so unsteady that it will waver more, and flutter far more, than leaves do in the wind, and this is indulging too much in the company of women.”  I’m only guessing, you understand, but I think he’s right on that score, as well!

To get back on track, something that’s never been easy for me, I was drawing the figure better 20 years ago, but this passionate visual exercise to train the hand and eye remains the only consistently enjoyable activity I have ever participated in throughout my rather long and, without exaggeration, comically wretched existence.

I’ve posted a couple of collages above with images of a few of my recent drawings in charcoal pencil on newsprint.  I’ve never had much interest in drawing with other media.   Why should I?  I’ve been drawing with these pencils on smooth newsprint for 30 years and I still get so much pleasure out of this practice that I’m loathe to experiment with any other medium.  I go through maybe 30 or more 100-sheet, 14 by17 inch newsprint pads in the course of a year and throw away thousands of sheets of drawings.  And so do the hundreds of other artists who draw at the League in various media on a regular basis.  But fear not, Rain Forest preservationists, the League does recycle.  I keep a few of my sketches, but I don’t have a very critical eye, so I probably throw away far better drawings than I save, if truth be told, at least I hope so! 

I’m not much interested in marketing these drawings.    Some years ago, a distant cousin from Norway professed to liking them and bought a few, but that seemed like such a fluke that I never tried to sell any drawings to anybody else.  Besides, they are on newsprint, which is an anathema to many artists because it is not “archival.”  Promoting drawing papers as “archival” seems like such phony nonsense to me.  It’s really nothing more than an annoying advertising pitch to get artists to buy expensive, chemically treated papers that aren’t sympathetic surfaces for charcoal.  Papers with 100 percent rag content are great for drawing, but just too expensive for all these quick sketches I do.

Part of my fascination for this time-honored figure drawing exercise is, most assuredly, the nonjudgmental intimacy permitted in a communal gathering of artists raptly engaged in drawing the nude model.  In this nurturing environment, I can make believe that I am in the company of Van Dyke, Rubens, Sargent and other great masters of the art of figure drawing.  I can always tell when I’m going to have a pretty good drawing session when I start thinking, after a couple of poses, about what I’m going to eat for dinner after the class is over.

I like to start a figure drawing with the head, when the pose presents that opportunity, because I’m drawing a live human being, not a manikin, and I want to capture the spirit of the individual model first and foremost.  The quality of an open pose for me is wedded to the carriage of the head and the expression on the model’s face.  In addition, the model’s pose is usually more graceful and balanced at the beginning, before the position of the head changes, as it invariably does, sometimes slightly, sometimes dramatically.  The body is usually held in the same attitude throughout the pose, so work on the torso and limbs can wait a bit. 

But sometimes it’s so difficult to get a satisfactory likeness that I don’t have time to do justice to the rest of the figure.  And that is one of my better rationalizations for why my figure drawings aren’t so great.  Lots of artists who love drawing the figure are as good as or better than I am, so why should I consider my own work worthy of exploitation.  Why,  just the other day I sharpened a black pastel pencil for a 13-year old kid attending the sketch class, and in return for this favor, at the end of the class she gave me a notebook-size sheet of paper with a drawing of the model and a profile sketch of me that was pretty darn good!  How demoralizing is that for an aging artist headed out to pasture! 

This entire blog post seems like déjà vu all over again, but it doesn’t much matter to my phantom audience, so I’ll go through the routine again, even if I may have done so before.  The League sets aside three studios for drawing during this open sketch class, giving artists a choice of three models to draw from.  Non-members can draw for a very reasonable $7 per session.  Two of the studios are dedicated to quick poses -- traditionally 10 one-minute poses and three five-minute poses, then a five-minute break, then a 10 and a 15, another break and then a 20 or 25 minute pose at the end.  Some models at the League will only work in 20-minute segments nowadays, so the timing of the poses is less consistent.  One studio is reserved for a long pose for the duration of the class, but most of the regulars prefer drawing short poses.

There are more female artists’ models in this world than male models, and, in general, the artists, men and women, prefer drawing the female figure for a variety of reasons, including one I used to hear often from Sal, one of the sketch class regulars from years past.  “I never sold a drawing of a male model,” Sal would say, as he dashed from a studio with a male model to one with a female model.  If by some unfortunate coincidence there were three male models for the day, Sal just went home.

It bears repeating that there are no schools for artists’ models, so the training is all on the job.  And it’s gratifying to witness a novice model develop skill and confidence as the weeks and months go by.  I’ve posted five drawings of a League model in one of the collages above that are a case in point.  When this model began posing at the school two years ago, we all found her natural figure a delight to draw.  But she seemed very shy and never fully revealed her face to the artists, typified in the first two drawings of her.  But as time went on, she grew in confidence and is now very relaxed and comfortable on the posing stand.  And she is no longer reluctant to show her expressive face.

So as the new year approaches, I remain in this great city of assisted living because of the figure drawing opportunities, the rent-stabilized apartment and all the public amenities that make going from place to place and acquiring the necessities of life so convenient.  Heck, I’ve got a Starbucks and a Duane Reade/Walgreens drugstore right around the corner.  You can’t beat that in Grover’s Corners, I reckon.  No exit for me, it appears.  But it could be worse.  Out west where the sun always shines I’d need a car again and would have to learn how to deal with black bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions and two-legged evildoers armed with hunting rifles who wouldn’t mind taking dead aim on a city slicker from a mile away.  Or so I’m told.

Walter Ufer's Journey

Walter Ufer (1876-1936),  Indian Corn-Taos, Oil on Canvas, 40 by 50 in., Private Collection

Walter Ufer, Callers, ca. 1926, Oil on Canvas, 50 1/2 x 50 1/2 in, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Walter Ufer, Bob Abbott and Assistant, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 50 1/4 x 50 1/2 in, The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

Walter Ufer, Where the Desert Meets the Mountain, Oil on Canvas, 36 ½ by 40 ¼ in., American Museum of Western Art - the Anschutz Collection - Denver 

On August 2, 1936, Walter Ufer died at the age of 60 in the Santa Fe hospital where he had been transported three days earlier by motor car from Taos some 70 miles away for treatment of a ruptured appendix. 

The tragic and premature death of this outstanding figurative painter must have greatly shocked the storied and tight-knit Taos art colony of the early 20^th Century.  Ufer was a terrific draughtsman and fantastic colorist, who is said to have been influenced by John Singer Sargent’s treatment of hands, faces and garments.

In my opinion, Ufer could draw and paint faster and better than any of the other members of the Taos Society of Artists, although he had stiff competition from E. Irving Couse, Victor Higgins and Ernest L. Blumenschein.  And as good as they all were, none of the 11 other full members of the Society could quite match the brilliant sunlight effect he captured on canvas, a remarkable gift that is bestowed on very few painters -- Sorolla, Zorn, Frank Benson and Aldro T. Hibbard are in the company as well. 

“Walter Ufer has two large canvases that are miracles of painting, in one of which the desert sunlight almost gives off warmth from the canvas,” wrote the reviewer of the 30^th Annual American Art Exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute in the December 1917 issue of Fine Arts Journal.

Ufer also painted some of the most amazing and entertaining self-portraits I’ve ever seen.

Self-Portrait, Paint and Indians, 1923, Oil on Canvas, American Museum of Western Art–Anschutz Collection, Denver

An exhibition titled "Walter Ufer; Rise, Fall, Resurrection" was on display from February 7 to May 11 of this year at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.  It featured 60 works by Ufer and his peers.  I would have loved to see that exhibit, but Oklahoma City is a long bus ride from my fashionable neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Ufer was trained as an academic realist in Germany and worked as an illustrator and portrait painter in Chicago before settling in Taos in 1917 for the rest of his life.  Like all the European-trained artists who colonized Taos, he was immediately attracted to the high desert landscape.  But Ufer was primarily a bravura figure painter, and he focused on creating dazzling paintings of contemporary Pueblo Indians posed outdoors, in the clear light of the New Mexican day.  This focus earned him a fair amount of national recognition during his lifetime. 

While some of his Taos colleagues held firm to depicting a somewhat romantic notion of Indians from the Old West, Ufer painted Indians of the New West.  "I paint the Indian as he is. In the garden digging--in the field working--riding amongst the sage--meeting his woman in the desert--angling for trout--in meditation,” he told the author of a 1928 gallery exhibition catalog.  His words echo the advice given 10 years earlier by a wealthy patron, Chicago Mayor Carter H. Harrison, Jr., who used similar language to suggest that Ufer paint “the Indians as they are today.”  Harrison had encouraged Ufer and several other Chicago artists to migrate to the Southwest, and he subsidized their travel expenses.

Ufer was a devoted socialist and supporter of individual freedoms.  One critic thought the painter must have been “struck by the irony of the Indian's lot in this artistic paradise, and he used the language of paint to argue more eloquently than he could have done with words.”   Ufer believed the Taos Indians had lost their “race pride” and wanted only to be Americans.  “Our civilization has terrific power,” he said. “We don't feel it, but that man out there in the mountains feels it, and he cannot cope with such pressure."

Coping wasn’t so easy for the charismatic and enigmatic Ufer either.  He is remembered as a chronic alcoholic, a depressive, and a heavy gambler, who occasionally got bailed out by friends who were never paid back.  But he is also recalled as a generous man with a strong social conscience.  During the 1919 flu pandemic, he worked day and night tending to the sick alongside the town’s only doctor.  Ufer was outspoken about his socialist beliefs, joined protest groups and picket lines of striking workers, and reportedly was a close friend and drinking buddy of Leon Trotsky, the Socialist leader.

Ufer is said to have been warm and personable and had many friends, but he apparently tried the patience of a lot of people, often saying harsh things about his patrons and colleagues behind their backs. Harrison was moved to write Ufer, “Up to the present time you have received $327 of my money, but from your conversations about town, one would suppose you had been very harshly treated.”  Ufer called his good friend Blumenschein, who founded the Taos art colony with Bert Geer Phillips in 1898, a “bald-headed S.O.B.” at a meeting of the Taos artists that Blumenschein did not attend.  And “Blumy” wasn’t even bald, although his hair was thinning. 

Ufer fibbed all his life about being born in Louisville, Kentucky, when he was actually raised there by immigrant parents from the age of one, having been born in Huckeswagen, Germany on July 22, 1876. Maybe it was because it was not wise to claim German heritage during World War I.  And in 1921 and 1926, Ufer won the prestigious Altman Prize at the National Academy of Design in New York City, a prize that is awarded only to American-born artists.

One writer summarized Ufer's career in the following manner:  “When suffering, he was moody and unproductive, and his entire body of work is the product of his better days, as drinking and gambling occupied him during his dark spells.”  It always strikes me that painters in the old days had a lot more fun and personality, as well as raw talent, than today’s realist painters, who are primarily obsessed with creating marketing ploys to sell their computer-enhanced photographic images.

Despite his dysfunctional personal life, Ufer sold many paintings at high prices during the 1920s and achieved national recognition for his art.  His paintings were acquired by several museums and he was made a member of the National Academy of Design.  Once he had a bit of a setback when he adopted an agent’s idea to create a number of paintings featuring the same Indian figure on a white horse against a background of the iconic Taos Mountain.  That series of paintings was a marketing disaster.  But Ufer was generally successful until the Stock Market crash of 1929, which caused his art and investment income to evaporate.  Fortunately, Walter Henry Klauer, a wealthy businessman from Dubuque, Iowa provided some critical financial support to allow Ufer to continue painting.

Ufer’s father was a master engraver of gunstocks and a political radical himself.  Both parents strongly supported their child’s early interest in art.  After an apprenticeship in the printing plant of a Louisville commercial lithographer, Ufer traveled to Dresden, Germany to study at the Royal Applied Art Schools and the Royal Academy.  Following his study abroad, Ufer moved back to Louisville and then to Chicago, where he eventually attracted the notice of Harrison and his friend and partner, Oscar Mayer, the meat-packing tycoon.  The two men sponsored Ufer’s first painting trip to Taos -- in 1914.

Ufer met his future wife, Mary Monrad Frederikson (1869-1947), in Chicago at the J. Francis Smith Academy, described as a division of the Academy Julian in Paris, where the Danish born Mary had previously studied.  John Francis Smith (1868-1941), a Chicago native, was a painter and illustrator who had studied in Paris with Boulanger and Lefebvre and taught in Chicago from 1905 to 1914 before moving to California.  

Mary Ufer, who was seven years older than Walter, encouraged her husband to leave illustration and take up portrait painting, which led to his being noticed by Harrison.  After the couple settled in Taos, Mary continued to paint, but “Walter’s alcoholism, increasingly poor health, debts and the low demand for his paintings put a strain on their marriage,” according to one online biographical account. “To help with finances, Mary delivered lantern-slide lectures on artists both at the Art Institute of Chicago and on a traveling lecture circuit.”

After Ufer’s untimely death, the family was left destitute, but Blumenschein helped raise money to ease the burden on Mary, who was a pretty good artist with an interesting life story as well.  But this blog post is getting out of hand, so if you want to know what happened to Mary, the story is here: http://mabeldodgeluhan.blogspot.com/2012/04/mabel-dodge-luhan-and-early-women.html   

When Ufer fell ill, the other Taos artists raised several hundred dollars to pay his medical expenses and to buy gas for the Taos painter Martin Hennings’ Ford, which was used to transport him to St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe in a futile attempt to save his life.   

I think I read somewhere that Blumenschein went along on that ill-fated journey.  Blumenschein had been particularly close to Ufer, despite their often spirited rivalry, as recounted in Ernest L. Blumenschein: The Life of an American Artist, by Robert W. Larson and Carole B. Larson.  The two pals had shared many confidences on art and other matters in conversation and in correspondence.   

So it was “Blumy,” that “bald-headed S.O.B.,” who conducted Ufer’s memorial service at the end of the road.  Wasn’t that a time.

Walter Ufer, Coming from the Spring, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 24 by 30 in., Private Collection

Walter Ufer, Builders in the Desert, Oil on Canvas on Aluminum, 50 ¼ by 50 ¼ in., Private Collection

Walter Ufer, Summer in Taos

Walter Ufer, Their Audience, 1917, Oil on Canvas, 40 by 50 in., Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame

A Withdrawn Painting

Edward Henry Potthast (1857-1927), Blonde and Brunette, circa 1910, 16 ¼ x 20 3/8 in., Private Collection

A Walk on the Beach, Oil on Canvas laid down on Panel, 18 by 22 in., attributed to Edward Cucuel

Edward Cucuel (1875-1954), Fragrant Summer, Oil on Canvas

Edward Cucuel, Woman Reclining by a Lake, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Forging works of art is a highly contagious disease spread primarily by intimate contact with cold hard cash.   As we all know, there is a lot of fake art of every kind on display in museums, galleries, and private collections worldwide.  The late Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, figured that forgeries comprise up to 40% of the art market. 

We can’t tell a fake Paleolithic tool or Picasso painting from a real one.  But big spenders like owning an original something or other, and the experts who authenticate such things are like expert witnesses in court cases; they can go either way.  So a lot of forgeries enter the art bloodstream and it sometimes takes generations to cleanse them from the system.

Of course, we’re talking here about a different art market than most of us traditional realist painters are familiar with.  We're happy just to show our paintings at libraries, community centers and Lutheran Church basements, as well as the pay-to-play art clubs we join so we can get our work out of storage once in awhile.  I’m guessing we would rather paint our own paintings, sign our own names and take the consequences of our principled stance, even if it means living in squalor for the rest of our allotted time on this great, green earth of ours.

Besides, if you get caught selling a fake work of art, you could go to prison, although it seems the chances of that happening are pretty slim.  The notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory, who fooled a lot of people with his fake Picassos et al., did spend a couple of months in jail on the island of Ibiza for the crimes of homosexuality and consorting with criminals.  But he never served any jail time for forgery because he denied ever signing any of his forgeries with the name of the artist he was imitating.  It’s not a crime to paint in the style of another artist, of course.  If it were, we’d all be in jail.  But it is a crime to sign your painting with another artist’s name and sell it. Two of de Hory’s associates made big money off his paintings, giving him a measly $400 monthly allowance, and they may have been the ones who actually signed the paintings with the names of the famous artists, according to de Hory’s Wikipedia entry.

I got to thinking about this topic the other day after I had thumbed through an old Sotheby’s American Art auction catalog I picked up recently at the flea market that sets up on Sundays in my fashionable neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Picking up low-priced auction catalogs for 19th Century European Art, American Art and Impressionist Art is one of the few important guilty pleasures in my life and I can’t seem to break the habit.  That Sunday at the flea market, a guy from Russia was selling 20 or so catalogs for $1 apiece that he had picked up at the estate sale of a New Jersey art collector.  Now that’s a great price for these old catalogs.  I won’t pay more than $5 for them, but some junk dealers think they are worth $10 apiece, and that’s simply outrageous.  I bought eight of the catalogs and was tempted to buy more, but they weigh a ton and I didn’t feel like lugging any more of them home with me.  Most were catalogs for auctions of American Paintings at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.  They were one-owner catalogs in very good condition with limited mileage on them.

As I was evaluating my bounty at home, I was taken aback by Lot No. 72 in the catalog for Sotheby’s New York auction of American Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture on March 23, 2005.  The painting illustrated was titled A Walk on the Beach by Edward Cucuel (1875-1954), who was born in San Francisco, but spent his most productive years in Germany.   There was no date or provenance given for the painting, which was described as “oil on canvas laid down on panel,” 18 by 22 in., with an estimated price range of $30,000 to $50,000.  The lot description stated it was signed “Cucuel” at the lower right, when in fact the signature appears lower left on the painting.

The painting didn’t look at all like a typical Cucuel painting, although he did paint many pictures of attractive young women outdoors and indoors on bright sunny days.  But the painting did look a lot like a painting by Edward Henry Potthast (1857-1927) titled Blonde and Brunette, circa 1910, 16 ¼ x 20 3/8 in., which is in a private collection.   I’ve written separate blog posts about each of these artists and I admire them greatly, although their styles are radically different.  Potthast’s figures are solid, like the work of Benson, Tarbell and a lot of other American Impressionists, while Cucuel’s Impressionist work has the bravura fluidity of painters like Sargent, Boldini, Sorolla and Helleu.

  

How this obviously fake Cucuel painting came to be is anybody's guess, other than to those in the know.  Cucuel, like the older Potthast, was a very busy and successful painter.   But here's a highly unlikely and rather goofy scenario I wasted some precious time coming up with: Cucuel might have seen Potthast’s painting in an American gallery on one of his frequent trips back to New York, decided to dash off a copy of this theme he might like to explore later himself, and the copy ended up in his estate sale, where it was purchased by someone who signed Cucuel's name to it.  The chances of that having happened are close to zero, I suppose.  For what it’s worth, the alleged Cucuel signature is in a light-colored paint, while all the Cucuel paintings I have checked on the Internet are signed in a dark paint.  I don't want to speculate any further on how this alleged Cucuel painting came to be in the Sotheby’s catalog, and with pretty high expectations for a sale, as well, considering the auction estimate.

 

Since I couldn’t find any information online regarding its disposition, I called Sotheby’s and was told only that the painting had been “withdrawn” before the auction.  While I don’t know what took place at Sotheby’s with regard to this painting, a Wikipedia entry on art forgeries states that if a dealer finds the work is a forgery, he may quietly withdraw the piece and return it to its previous owner -- "giving the forger an opportunity to sell it elsewhere."

Perhaps this “Cucuel” painting is on display somewhere in the world right now.  And why not?  While I think it’s cropped a little too tightly at the top and bottom, it’s a pretty good interpretation of the Potthast original and might make a good story for the owner at a cocktail party, if it didn’t cost an arm and a leg to acquire.

Apples

Apples and Copper Pot, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

Apples and Brass Artillery Shell Coffee Pot, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

Apples, Pears, Grapes and Brass Coffee Pot, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

It’s probably a good thing to eat apples regularly, but I never got into the habit.  A 94-year-old painter I know eats one just about every day for lunch, after he finishes his organic peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  With his trusty Swiss Army knife, he elegantly carves the apple into slices, offering one or more to any lunch companions.  Al still teaches two one-day-a-week painting classes, belongs to a couple of art clubs where he continues to exhibit his paintings, and draws and paints in open sessions offered to members of The Art Students League, where he studied 75 years ago.  No doubt it’s the apples that keep him going.

My usual lunch, ever since I started painting more than 30 years ago, consists of a slice of pizza and a carbonated, caffeinated beverage, often followed by a fat-laden, sugary snack and a cup of coffee.  Maybe that’s why I’m always exhausted, my stomach is upset and I have a sour disposition.  By the way, it’s impossible these days to get a good slice of pizza in my fashionable neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  All the good pizza parlors have been replaced by ritzy sushi bars, trattorias and patisseries.

Like Cezanne, I’ve painted a lot of pictures of apples.  Cezanne might have enjoyed eating apples as well as painting them.  But I doubt if he would have written a stupid blog post about it one way or the other.  But we have heard that he once boasted, “With an apple I will astonish Paris.”   About all I’ve ever done with apples is use them as props for my still life paintings, with absolutely no thought of astonishing anyone other than myself.  I usually throw the apples in the garbage after I have harvested a crop of paintings featuring them.  I’ve tried to be less profligate.  A few years ago I bought a juicer and used it for a little while to blend apples and carrots into very tasty smoothies.  But gulping down the thick drinks quickly to “retain all the vitamins” and then hurrying to clean the dozens of juicer parts was so bothersome that the device now sits gathering dust on a top shelf in my kitchen.

I just tended to another crop of apple paintings inspired by a four-pound bag of  “seconds” of varying shapes, sizes, colors and conditions I bought for $2 at the local farmer’s market a couple of weeks ago.  As usual, I very much enjoyed working on each of the five paintings illustrated here that I pulled out of the bag.  And as usual, I regret being unable to see the obvious drawing flaws while the paint is still wet.  Going back to correct them when the paint is dry is not at all enjoyable, but sometimes necessary to soothe my troubled soul, even though I end up losing the freshness of the initial paint handling and remain a troubled soul forever, at least with respect to the paintings.

I ran out of fresh stretched canvases in the size I wanted (16 by 20 inches), so a couple of the paintings are over old ones I scraped down a little to get rid of the heaviest ridges of dried paint.  I wish I had properly sanded and re-primed the surfaces with a quick-drying oil primer, but I was in a hurry to finish my latest apple cycle and didn’t want to switch gears from painting to priming.  Those apple paintings will probably self-destruct in less than 200 years.  At the very least, I expect a little pentimento revealing the head sketches I painted over.  Quel dommage!  

John Singer Sargent, William M. Chase, N. A., 1902, Oil on canvas, 62 1/2  by 41 3/8 in, Metropolitan Museum of Art

My favorite story about this particular oil painter’s curse appears in James Montgomery Flagg’s autobiography, “Roses and Buckshot.”  The story concerns the nearly full-length portrait of William Merritt Chase hanging in the Metropolitan Museum that Sargent dashed off in his London studio in 1902.  The amusingly acerbic Flagg considered Chase a stuffed shirt and a “silly little painter of fish” who couldn’t draw.  He wrote that Chase’s students collected $10,000 to pay Sargent to paint the portrait.  Sargent apparently didn’t have a fresh canvas either, so he turned an unfinished Wertheimer portrait upside down to paint the Chase portrait.  “Years passed, and in the crotch of Chase’s breeches gradually emerged a head of Wertheimer upside down,” Flagg wrote.  “This sort of thing can happen when you paint over a used canvas.  An expert has since touched it out, and happily for the world of art, Mr. Wertheimer no longer gazes upside down between William Chase’s legs.”  I believe the Met’s conservators are on the case and monitor it closely.  The paint surface does look pretty distressed in that area of the painting.  

Accompanying the apples in two of my paintings is a brass coffee pot fashioned out of a World War One artillery shell.  I picked it up years ago at the famous weekend outdoor flea market that used to operate at Sixth Avenue and 26th Street.  Celebrities went there early in the morning to get the prime stuff before us late-risers made the scene.  The guy who sold the coffee pot to me said it came from the dining room of an ocean liner.  The initials UAL are inscribed on the coffee pot.  That’s one of those many historical details you come across that are interesting but seemingly impossible to research online.  There is a venerable Dutch shipping company that operates the Universal Africa Lines (UAL).  That seems a likely provenance for the coffee pot, but there’s no readily accessible indication that the cargo shipping outfit was around way back when and serving coffee to the crew from an old artillery shell.  If you think your coffee pot is heavy, try pouring a cup out of this brass monster, something I’ve never tried myself.  The servers on board the ship must have been recruited for their muscularity.

Apples and Pears in Wicker Basket, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

This painting of the apples in a wicker basket was my first in this series and a real disappointment.  I loved the arrangement, which could be considered sort of a vague reference to that famous still life painting of fruit by Caravaggio.  But it was rainy and cloudy on the two days I had set aside for painting it.  Consequently, the values and colors are muddied and unsuccessful.  What can you do?  I’ve tried adding artificial light on such days, but the mix of daylight and artificial light seemed so unnatural that I abandoned the practice.  And I won’t paint solely by artificial light, against the advice of such eminent authorities as the London-based painter Bernard Dunstan (1920 -).  Dunstan wrote a couple of excellent books on painting techniques, including a little one on still life painting in which he states he is indifferent to the type of light he paints under.  “One cannot always be waiting and putting off work because of the light; very little would get done at all at certain times of the year,” Dunstan wrote.  ‘If one intends to get a regular amount of work done, it is essential to come to terms with this problem.  Artificial light is at least steady and unchanging, and it can have a beauty of its own.” 

I emphatically don’t share Dunstan's enthusiasm for artificial light, but I agree that you can’t put off the work waiting for great daylight.  Although experience has taught me I’m being foolish, I stubbornly paint on with the idea that if you get the light effect right the painting will look good, no matter how dull the daylight is.  Painters of the past have proven that it can be done, so it’s not impossible, just improbable.  The subject matter has a great deal to do with the success or failure of such efforts, and objects whose great charm is their local color, like apples, are probably not the best choice for painting on a dull day.

Meanwhile, my mercifully unwaxed farmer’s market apples aren’t quite finished yet, so I might get another painting or two out of them before they get tossed in the garbage -- the apples, that is.  The fate of the paintings is yet to be determined.

 

Apples in Bowl, Oil on Canvas, 15 by 18 in.

The Blame Game

Milne Ramsay (1846-1915), Peaches and Wine, Oil on Canvas, 27 ¼ by 48 in., Gold Medal, 1907, American Art Society, Private Collection

Milne Ramsay, Still Life with Lobster, 1898, Oil on Canvas, 26 by 39 in., Detroit Institute of the Arts

Milne Ramsay, Apples and Cider, Oil on Canvas, 19 by 31 1/4 in., Private Collection

Ella G. Wise, Milne Ramsay in his Studio, circa 1888, Oil on Canvas, 27 by 36 in. There is a similar photograph of Ramsay in his studio that might have provided the impetus for this painting.  Little is known of Ms Wise, but she was probably one of his students.

I blame Milne Ramsay for all the troubles I’ve had as a painter over the years.  I’m joking, of course.  I wish it were that simple.

Milne’s certainly not responsible for all my many art-related problems, no indeed.  Some are caused by the lousy west/northwest daylight I’m forced to paint under in my substandard apartment studio in dreary Manhattan to preserve my legendary reputation as a stickler for painting under natural light exclusively.  Well, almost exclusively.  But Milne did entice me to take the wrong fork in the road in my formative years as a painter.

After two years of great fun painting models in art school eons ago, the money ran out and I was compelled to figure out how and what to paint for myself.  I took to painting portraits of fruits and vegetables, carefully selected from the fancy grocery store across the street.  I thought this practice would be the easiest and most-sensible course to follow to become a certifiable (1st and 2nd definitions) professional artist.  I would throw in some pots and pans and fabrics to accompany the produce, because everybody else had done the same thing in the past.  So that’s what I did, and do, mostly, to this day.

When I first learned, with far more difficulty than I had anticipated, how to paint an apple or a peach to the point where someone other than myself could say, “It looks like a photograph,” or, “It looks so real you want to eat it,” I was quite pleased and greatly relieved. 

Not long after that epiphany, I picked up a little catalog at the Strand Bookstore for an exhibition of the work of Milne Ramsay (1846-1915), an American painter of still lifes and landscapes.  It was easy to see that he could paint his apples, peaches, brass pots, porcelains, lace tablecloths, wine bottles, and everything else for that matter, far better than I could, with excellent drawing and textural distinctions, along with lots of atmosphere.  I’ve seen a few of his paintings in the galleries and they are wonderful. 

But that wasn’t the enduring problem he created for me.  The problem was the way he composed his still life paintings.   Heck, all he ever did was distribute his apples and peaches and decorative brass and copper pots on a cloth-covered tabletop in a low-relief zig-zag pattern right across the picture plane from one edge of the canvas to the other.  What could be simpler?  Following his attractive example, that’s about all I’ve ever done myself.  How boring is that?  He turned me into a boring still life painter without my having ever attained the same level of skill at rendering that he had attained or having ever acquired the same de rigueur 19th Century artist trappings that graced his impressive studio.

Just look at Milne above, relaxing in a swell armchair, taking his ease, and contemplating his latest landscape masterpiece in that grand studio of his.  I wanted a studio like that.  I wanted all the requisite trappings – rich oriental rugs, big brass and copper pots, Asian porcelains.  This studio in Philadelphia, one of the many studios Ramsay occupied over the years, was compared favorably with the well-documented, elaborately appointed studio in New York City of William Merritt Chase.  I wanted the painter’s life that Milne Ramsey had then.

After seeing his beautiful paintings, I couldn’t be bothered with all the talk of the Golden Mean and all those complicated, segmented diagrams showing how the Old Masters achieved their masterful compositions.  I’m not painting decorations for the Sistine Chapel for God’s sake.  I’m painting pretty little pictures of apples and peaches for modest parlor walls.

Besides, we’re inundated with movies, television, animated films, computer games, videos and still photographs – most of them artfully composed.   Everybody in  the world today knows what makes a pretty decent composition.  All we have to do is look through the LCD screens of our digital cameras, move the camera around a little bit until the scene before us looks real nice, and shoot.  The next thing you know, we are winning awards for our amateur snapshots.  That’s the story of composition for most of us today.  As a still life painter, I simply move things around until the setup looks good.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt if you position an apple or a peach, preferably cut in half, or, better still, an orange slice, in the Golden Mean now and then, just to be safe

Milne Ramsey was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 16, 1846, one of six sons and two daughters of Alexander Ramsey and his wife, Anna Eliza Milne, whose surname became his first name, as you can plainly see.  Not easy to name eight kids, I suppose.    His father was a prosperous cotton merchant before the Civil War, during which he lost his prosperity and after which he set up a family-run notary public and collections business in Philadelphia. 

The young Milne served nine months in the Pennsylvania militia during the Civil War.  After his release, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and had a studio in Philadelphia for a short time before shipping off to Paris in 1868, where he studied for five years in the atelier of Leon Bonnat (1833-1922), a very successful academic painter of portraits and historical religious themes.

  

Milne was active in the American expatriate art community in Paris and frequently exhibited academic figure paintings, still lifes and landscapes during the 10 years he lived in The City of Light.  He was one of the founders of the Society of American Artists in Paris, which at one point had 40 members.  Milne won considerable success in Paris with his academic work, but most of those paintings haven’t been located.  He also painted and dated small plein air landscape studies to record his travels in and around the Normandy and Brittany countryside.  Back in America, he continued to produce small plein air sketches of American scenes, many of them thickly painted with slashing brush strokes on cigar box tops.  Ramsay’s paintings often show up at auction.  On its website, The Smithsonian American Art Museum lists 163 titles of works by Ramsey obtained from galleries or auction houses.

The Milne Ramsay exhibition catalog I picked up was published in conjunction with a major exhibit of 81 of his works at The Chapellier Galleries in New York City in 1974.  The stated purpose of the exhibit was to revive interest in this prolific artist, who was much-celebrated during his lifetime.  I suppose the gallery also hoped to sell a few of the works it had corralled.  The catalog includes an interesting essay on the artist’s life and work written by William H. Gerdts, an American art historian and the author of more than 25 books on American art.

Near the end of the essay, Gerdts notes that Ramsay “seems to have gradually withdrawn from art activity in Philadelphia as time began to pass him by and new artistic trends developed.”  Ramsay didn’t exhibit his work as much, although he continued to paint still lifes and spent more time working on his landscapes.

 

During his peripatetic painting career, Ramsay had many addresses, both in Europe and America.  On one of his return visits to Philadelphia from Europe, around 1870, he got married and had two kids before the heartbreak of divorce.  One of the kids, Charles Frederic Ramsay, also became a painter and was one of the first artists of the famous art colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania. 

Milne married again, at the age of 46, to a woman lawyer and painting student of his who was 17 years younger.  They had five kids.

  

At various times,  Ramsay had studios in Philadelphia, New York City, Atlantic City and Bronxville, New York, where he built a house and studio.  The family moved back to Philadelphia in 1900.  His last studio was in the Baker Building, a center of artistic activities in that city.  One of his neighbors on the 4th floor was his friend Prosper Senat (1852 - 1925), who was known for his watercolor landscapes.  Senat's widow remembers Ramsay asking her husband for "a tube of daylight."  Gerdts believes this friendship was one reason why Ramsay turned increasingly to watercolors in his later years. 

The Chapellier catalog illustrates a number of Ramsay’s small, impressionistic, plein air landscapes, painted in oil on panels measuring approximately 5 by 7 inches, which were usually painted on the New Jersey coast or in the marshlands.  The paintings seem to be filled with the brilliant light of high noon.  The staging area for these paintings must have been the Shelburne Hotel in Atlantic City, an opulent seaside resort that his wife had inherited.

Gerdts writes, “Ramsay’s late landscapes are poetic evocations of a little explored region, while his late still lifes continued a 19th century tradition of which he was one of the most proficient practitioners, but by his death in 1915, he was virtually forgotten.”  That gallery exhibit 40 years ago doesn’t seem to have done much to revive Ramsay’s reputation among the general public.

A lot of painters I’ve read about who achieve great commercial success and win a lot of awards for painting traditional figurative work, still lifes or landscapes early on become disillusioned when the trendy art market passes them by.  Some just get worn out or bored from creating the same paintings over and over and switch to a completely different art form – even go abstract.  Quelle horreur!  Some give up painting altogether

. 

Most of us traditional realists needn’t worry about getting bored or worn out, at least for those reasons.  We don’t get much notice for our work, except from our friends and relatives.  As for me, I’m still greatly surprised, excited and relieved every time I paint a decent-looking apple or peach.  I can’t blame Milne Ramsay for that!

Milne Ramsay, Still Life with Roses, Bowl, and Oriental Urn, 1887, Oil on Canvas, 23 by 36 in., Private Collection

Milne Ramsay, Flowers on a Table, 1873, Oil on canvas laid down on masonite, 36 by 29 in., Private Collection

Milne Ramsay, Apples, Ming Plate and Earthenware Pitcher, Oil on Canvas, 18 by 24 in., Private Collection

Milne Ramsay, Brandy and Peaches, Oil on Canvas, 32 by 25 ½ in., Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska