Enigmas

Bruce Kurland,  Bone, Cup and Crab Apple, 1972, Oil on Fiberboard, 8 1/8 by10 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

Bruce Kurland, Snipe, 1985, Oil on Panel with Copper Leaf, 12 by 8.75 in., Private Collection

Bruce Kurland, Magnolias and Damsel Fly Nymph, 1979, Oil and Collage on Panel, 14 by 12 in., Private Collection

Bruce Kurland, Self-Portrait, 1972, Oil on Canvas, 24 by 20 in., Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY

Bruce Kurland, photo by Nancy J. Parisi

There probably aren’t many enigmatic Realist painters in America.  Our lives revolve around our painting, and that’s about all there is to say about us.  If we are not painting, we think about what to paint, and how to paint better so we can sell more of our pictures to people who have available wall space that could use a spot of color. 

Most of us aren’t great painters.  We are just “visually inclined” types who discover that painting pictures is more fun than doing anything else and might even offer a way to make a living if we are good at marketing.  But sometimes when you make a minimal effort to learn more about a compelling contemporary artist you become caught in a fascinating genealogical web of serious painters who make well-crafted paintings of often uncommon subjects and who lead lives that don’t fit into your ideas of what painting and being a painter is all about.

In my case, dwelling as I do in a miasmal swamp of regret, discovering these connections is a very humbling experience.  I try to paint pretty pictures that look almost like their subjects and show no originality in paint handling or composition or choice of subject matter.  I’m a lot like those ubiquitous daily painters I often mention, some of whom make a fortune selling their cute little works that aren’t exactly reeking of symbolic meaning and depth of artistic feeling.   I’m painting the same kinds of pictures, with most likely the same level of esthetic and intellectual involvement, only a little bit bigger and a lot less marketable. 

Many of the extremely talented contemporary painters who take nature-based painting a little more seriously than the rest of us sprang from the likes of William Coldstream (1908-1987) and his student Euan Uglow (1932-2000) from the Slade School of Art in London and Charles Hawthorne (1872-1930) and his student Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978), both of whom taught at The Art Students League of New York.  Art for those painters was more than mere imitation. They weren’t interested in painting from life to copy nature closely; they were interested in painting from life to explore the visual world for their own highly evolved artistic purposes and sensibilities.  Some of their descendants stick close to the look of nature, while others take major liberties with respect to form and color.  Coldstream, Uglow and Hawthorne espoused particular methods of working that attracted their followers.  The two English painters were interested in precise mathematical calculations and long periods of study directly from life.  Hawthorne extolled the virtues of rich color, lush brushwork and attention to tonal values as taught by his mentor, William Merritt Chase.

           

Dickinson apparently had a more indirect way of inspiring his students.  One of his most-illustrious students, George Nick (1927 - ), told an interviewer that Dickinson “never pushed his ideas on anyone…he was a wonderful teacher, because he said things I wanted to learn, wanted to know. I think I remembered a lot of the things that were very important to me, and I taught them for over forty years from these things that he taught us:  how to squint, how to draw, how to mix colors, how to recognize warm and cool, how to apply paint and how to see and how to analyze what we saw.”  How to clean your palette was another important part of his instruction, and Nick recalls a humorous anecdote about that in the interview published Oct 19, 2009 on the website “Painting Perceptions.” 

Nick told a former student that Dickinson once said, “The seen distortion is what a thought did to the sight.”  This statement could possibly provide an opening for creative invention for his followers.  For the rest of us, we merely work hard to eliminate any “seen distortions” as quickly as possible.  By the way, many painters more serious and thoughtful than I am are adept at mining the literature for enigmatic observations about this captivating process of painting from life.

As for me, it’s enough to have read that Frederick William MacMonnies (1863-1937), the great sculptor and a skilled oil painter to boot, took to heart his friend Sargent’s profound advice, “Keep painting until the paint is no longer sticky,” or words to that effect.  I can’t recall the exact quote, but that’s close enough for me.  I came across the quote in Mary Stuart's biography of MacMonnies, “A Flight to Fame,” which I was paging through in a museum bookstore.  I can’t find the quote on the Internet and don’t want to spend about $100 for this out-of-print book on Amazon or run around town tracking it down.  That kind of research isn’t worth it for this piddling blog of mine. 

Sargent’s work is hardly enigmatic.  But that’s the way Edwin Dickinson’s complex larger works are described.  George Nick recalled that Dickinson refused to explain their hidden meanings, leaving art critics to puzzle over them. The Wikipedia entry on Dickinson states that his works include “strange juxtapositions and imagery” that “hint at underlying narratives or situations but their purpose is unclear, and Dickinson generally avoided explanation except to describe procedures, technical problems and formal concerns.  Even when he mentioned the underlying subject or theme of a painting or identified figures or objects in it, he acted mystified about some of its particulars.”

It’s hard to stay focused when researching these Realist painters and their successful students.  There is so much interesting material written about them on the Internet by their admirers and art reviewers that it all coalesces into a mind-numbing torrent of words that begins to resemble the bewildering eloquence emanating casually from abstract painters.  The ideas that are espoused by these artists are so thought-provoking that I’m guaranteed a major migraine headache in short order.

But sometimes you get a second Internet wind, so to speak, when you read about an exceptional painter who doesn’t quite fit the mold of all those other serious, hard-working, contemporary creative artists, and you can’t figure out why.

It’s easy enough to trace a successful painter’s stylistic roots, thanks primarily to the Internet.  We study with inspiring painters; we look at the work of other painters we admire.  Some of us borrow a little here and there.  Others commit grand larceny.  And art critics delve into all of this in great detail so we don’t have to.  

But it’s impossible to fathom why a painter blessed with a gift for picture-making and a singular vision would choose to curtail a successful career, sometimes in dramatic fashion, as was the case with Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000), a mesmerizing painter, categorized imperfectly as a magic realist.  Gillespie was found dead in his studio in Belchertown, Massachusetts, at the age of 63, apparently a suicide by hanging.  Shortly after his death, I was on duty in my part-time job at the Information Desk of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when a man came up and demanded to know why the Met wasn’t displaying the Gillespie painting in its collection in recognition of his passing.  I totally agreed that it would be a well-deserved tribute and dutifully recorded the visitor’s suggestion, but nothing came of it, as was to be expected.  Although Gillespie was revered by many painters and collectors, he wasn’t well known to the vast public the Met caters to.  Gillespie’s 8 by 8 foot mixed-media painting called “Studio Corner,” an anonymous gift to the museum in 1986, remains off view.

Another painter who ostensibly abandoned a promising big career, although not in such dramatic fashion, was Bruce Kurland (1938-2013).  With consummate skill, he created exquisitely designed little paintings of subjects far removed from the canon of traditional still life painting that I am satisfied to adhere to.  You knew right away that here was a painter who had something special to say, even though you had no clue about what it might be.

Kurland’s work was given quite a bit of attention in New York City from the early 1960s until his last one-person show in 1990, and he won a lot of awards and good press notices for it.  Then he just disappeared off my radar.  I learned of his passing recently when I saw his name posted on the memorial board for deceased Art Students League members, students and teachers that is positioned off the lobby next to the elevators.  That board is a depressingly blunt account of the creative lives of so many artists I’m familiar with coming to an end. 

I had thought about Bruce Kurland once in awhile over the years.  Sometimes I couldn’t recall the name of this gifted still life painter.  But I remember being extremely impressed when I first saw his work in a gallery.  One painting was of a delicately rendered winged insect perched gracefully on the rim of a cup, if memory serves.  It was the most beautiful thing imaginable.

A lot of still life painters routinely assemble a group of the oddest things they can think of for their setups in hopes of establishing a brand name for themselves.  Essays are written on the contrived symbolism in their paintings. But the paint handling and compositions are boring and conventional and you can spot the phoniness in their efforts a mile away.

Kurland’s work was not like that.  You can’t fake the feeling that comes across in the kind of well-crafted paintings he created.  You felt there was something genuine in his choice of subject matter.  He was said to have been influenced early on by Chardin, Carel Fabritius and Morandi, as a lot of still life painters are.  But his work showed evidence of a far more sophisticated sense of design than that of the average painter.  And wouldn’t you know that his teacher at The Art Students League was the inscrutable Edwin Dickinson.  Coincidentally or not, when Kurland abandoned New York City, he settled in a little town in Western New York near Buffalo, where Dickinson grew up. 

But Kurland occasionally disappeared from the Buffalo art scene as well, once for an inexplicable escape to Oakland, California after a “stunning” retrospective of 76 small works and a marital breakup, then off to Ireland, then back to Buffalo, and frequently to indulge his passion for fly fishing and the great outdoors, from which he extracted dead birds and other detritus to compose his exquisite still lifes. 

Anthony Bannon, executive director of the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, wrote a moving tribute to Kurland in which he discusses some of the painter’s traits that caused many of his friends, acquaintances and admirers to consider him an enigma.

  

Describing Kurland’s “older” presence at two of his favorite gallery hangouts, Bannon observes, “People were attracted to him because he was a rough enigma, quiet and handsome, compelling, unknowable, sitting there with his wine and cigarettes…Death hung over him. So did life, but dangerously. He didn’t speak a lot. But the people knew he was very smart about art. People knew he had done well in New York City and for some reason now he chose to live up here, out in the country, outside of Arcade, in a hamlet called Curriers. Not many had seen his work. People said he painted still lives.”  http://goo.gl/XRIULW

Bannon wrote that many years ago Kurland told Jean Reeves, art critic for the Buffalo News, that he moved up there from New York City “to find out what was really important about painting and what was important to me.”  Did he succeed?  It seems to me the answers to his two stated objectives are yes, and probably no.  But then enigmas aren’t likely to get a handle on that last one.

William Coldstream, Colin St. John Wilson (1922-2007), painted over 96 sittings from

1982-83, 101.6 by 127 cm., Pallant House Gallery, West Sussex, England

Euan Uglow, Duck (1965), oil on panel, 48.8 x 75 cm.

Edwin Dickinson, An Anniversary, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 72 by 60 in., Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

George Nick, Park Street, Haverhill, MA, 1978, Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 in., Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC

Gregory Gillespie, Studio Corner, 1983-86, Oil, alkyd, acrylic, graphite, paper and wood

on wood, 96 x 96 ¼ in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art