Choices

New York City is a terrible place to live if you want to make a living as a painter.  Oh, there are a handful of superstars living in swell style, thanks to a lot of high-end gallery hype swallowed whole by wealthy art investors and collectors.  You read about them far too often.  Everybody else has to teach or work part-time to support their creative habit.

Most career-minded artists want to live off their art income after their student days.  Many quickly understand that will be impossible here, so they marry a fellow artist and move to the hinterlands, where housing is cheap and ordinary people still buy traditional paintings in sufficient quantity to allow them to live modestly off their art income alone.  Some have to advertise their services as painting instructors to make ends meet.   

A few towns that were popular destinations in the early 20^th Century are still swarming with artists, including Taos and Santa Fe, NM, and Rockport and Gloucester, MA.  Now the Internet and mail order art stores are shipping canvas, brushes and paints in large quantities to every state in the union to feed the fast-growing artist population.  It seems most art-school artists choose from the following menu: the New England states for green hills and coastal harbors, the Southeastern states (all those postbellum belles) and Connecticut for portrait painters; the Southwestern states for Cowboys and Indians and deserts, and the Rocky Mountain States for the rocky mountains.  Landscape painters have to decide whether they prefer painting greens or browns in warm or cold, dry or wet climates.  Still life painters can live anywhere.  Having a spouse with a steady income is the general rule of thumb for almost all working artists in America today.  Every year for 30 years or so, I’ve heard gallery owners and artists sing the refrain, “business is slow right now.  People just aren’t buying paintings.”  I wonder if plumbers ever say business is slow.

But New York City is the cultural capital of America, so you choose to stay for a variety of valid reasons, including:  you don’t have to own a car because public transportation is excellent, you are lucky to live in a rent-stabilized apartment, there are plenty of art schools to refresh your skills and you can see great art whenever you choose, except on Mondays, the Art World’s traditional Day of Rest.  

Most likely, though, it’s just inertia.  You are already here and don’t want to risk becoming isolated in unfamiliar territory, where museums are few and the malls rule.  So you wrangle a teaching job at one of the many art schools, senior citizen centers, YMCAs or other community organizations.  Otherwise, you work at art-related or non-art related part-time jobs to help pay the rent.   

Peter Paul Rubens, “The Meeting of Marie de Medici and

Henri IV at Lyons,”1622-25, The Louvre Museum

Jeff Koons,Balloon Dog,Versailles, Stainless Steel,2008

commons.wikimedia.org

Some celebrity artists like Jeff Koons hire dozens of well-trained but financially struggling artists to create the work they sign.  Nothing really wrong with that, is there?  Rubens did the same thing.  On at least one occasion we know about, he had to assure a client in a letter that everything in the promised painting would be done “by my own hand.”  Koons probably has to promise clients that nothing will be done by his own hand, except the signature.  There is plenty of part time work to be had in the city for waiters and waitresses, concert hall ushers and museum security guards; not so much in rural Montana or West Virginia, which you wish were only a short subway ride away so you could paint the scenery on weekends.

Selling your paintings within the city itself is nearly impossible now for the traditional painter.  You can spend a fortune to join a co-op gallery or pay for an exhibition at a “vanity gallery.”  The few sales you make to your friends and relatives at the wine and cheese reception in Chelsea are not nearly enough to live on, but the exhibit serves to pad your resume.  There are a couple of traditional art clubs that have a lot of juried exhibitions, but they are mostly ego-gratifying operations for the members, who pay high annual dues for the privilege and seldom sell any work, although the networking potential is not insignificant. 

The handful of successful commercial galleries that sell some form of traditional art in Manhattan have a certain “look” that they want, tending these days to photo-like realism, which isn’t to every painter’s liking or level of patience.  Besides, they aren’t looking at digital images of the work of thousands of artists who are out there, so don’t waste your time trying, unless you have a well-connected recommendation in hand.  And these galleries pay such high rents for their spaces that they have to take on artists whose work they can sell for thousands of dollars.   It’s “no representation without reputation” for most of the top galleries, especially for well-seasoned painters.   An old friend, Harry B., a retired illustrator who painted and sold quite a few landscapes and Westerns at reasonable prices, said the director of New York’s once-prestigious but now-defunct Grand Central Art Galleries told him, “Harry, we like your work, but we just can’t charge enough for it.”

If you are lucky, you can connect with one or two galleries in the metropolitan region to sell enough of your work to more than cover your expenses so you can identify yourself as an Artist to the world and Uncle Sam. 

As the years slip by, your options become even more limited.  You view New York City as one big assisted living facility.  You never have to mow the grass or shovel snow or fix a flat tire.  And the nearest park bench is waiting for you right around the corner from your apartment building.  Every year you say you are going to spend the summer in the country painting landscapes.  But every year you don’t because you can’t pay rent on two places at once.  Subletting your apartment could get you into trouble with the landlord, and you don’t like trouble in your life.  You also don’t have kindly relatives who own a cottage in the Berkshires that they would let you use for free.  And anyway, you don’t have a credit card to rent the car needed to get from one scenic spot to another in the country, or even to the country itself.  One of your proudest moments was receiving the letter now pinned up next to the telephone on a kitchen wall denying you credit to buy your computer because “no credit report found.”  Now that’s worth celebrating!

You think about relocating, but you can’t decide where.   A little paperback book describing the best small towns in America for artists is an inspirational read, but no more than that. 

Painters don’t usually settle in those little towns unless they have a strong family support system. So, you shrug your shoulders and just keep painting pictures right where you are, wishing the worlds of art and commerce would heed the closing message of the stirring gospel song written and recorded 60 years ago by Sister Wynona Carr: “Life is a ballgame, but you’ve got to play it fair.”

Apples and Pears

Two still life painters who got the picture dealers and art critics squarely behind them were Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) and Robert Kulicke (1924-2007).  They both had plenty of money, so they painted pictures and sold them just to feed their creative egos.  Not having to worry about money is a very good way to prolong an artist’s career.  It’s an especially good thing if you are a perplexed painter like Cezanne, who jumps from style to style and thinks way too hard about visual theory, but still manages to produce some solid paintings of apples.  It's also a good thing for a painter like Kulicke, who paints pictures of an agreeable pear or two over and over again while in a meditative state.

Cezanne,Still life with Apples,The Fitzwilliam Museum,Cambridge, England

Robert M. Kulicke,Still Life with Pear,1993

www.antiquesimagarchive.com,image courtesy of Pook & Pook

Cezanne was a prosperous banker’s son with a nice inheritance, whose clumsy attempts to reconfigure Mother Nature were either scorned or embraced by his contemporaries, as we all know. The dealer Ambrose Vollard (1866-1939) sensed he had a winner and bought hundreds of Cezanne’s paintings, ultimately leading to his own fortune in the resale of them.  Vollard said he sold his first Cezanne to a blind man, who liked it because the paint was so thick he could feel it.  Impoverished academic artists were soon tearing out their hair and imploring him to take their paintings because they were “much better” than Cézanne’s, but to no avail forever after.  Picture dealers had wrested control of art from the artists themselves.  No longer were the art academies with their annual Salons determining what paintings should look like.  Paintings would henceforth look like whatever the dealers could sell.  

The dealers and their cohorts, the art critics, love innovative artists who can speak and write words without end about their own work, as Cezanne certainly could.  Their words provide the foundation for flowery, hyperbolic sales pitches to wealthy collectors, who treat paintings like other investments, and this, in turn, convinces the generally ignorant public that the work of these artists must be great because, “look at all the important people who have bought it.”

  

Most of the outstanding realist painters of the late 19^th Century, like Sargent, Boldini, Sorolla, the Scandinavians, the Russians and all the Academics, said absolutely nothing interesting at all about their work, except to other artists who wanted to paint like them.  And the public didn’t need words to appreciate their work, it spoke for itself.  But there weren’t that many of these superstars, and there were a lot more painters who had studied alongside them at the academies who knew they couldn’t paint and draw as well, but thought of themselves as more “artistic.”   Like Cezanne, they abandoned realism to explore other ways of depicting nature, no doubt influenced by the growth of photography as a convenient record keeper of the visual world.  Along came Vollard, the Gimpels pere et fils, Roger Fry and Gertrude Stein, and the race was on.  The paternity of famous quotes in the field of art is highly suspect, but Matisse and Picasso are both said to have called Cezanne, “the father of us all.”  That’s the story of modern art in a nutshell.  All the rest is talk.  But be careful if you don’t get the official Cezanne narrative just right in art history academia.

The painter Abel G. Warshawsky (1883-1962), who studied at The Art Students League and painted in France during the early 20^th Century, wrote a long-neglected memoir about his early years through the mid 1930s that was edited and published in 1980 by the Kent State University Press in a book titled “Memories of an American Impressionist.”  For a couple of pages, Warshawsky rails against the hype surrounding the modern art movement.   He writes that one “self-made” critic “solemnly announced that an apple painted by Cezanne had more significance and art value than a canvas by Raphael.”  And he condemns the underhanded sales tactics he personally observed in Paris in the frenzy to promote all the second-rate followers of the Post Impressionists.

Of the movement itself, Warshawsky wrote, “for all its glaring faults and deformities, [Post Impressionism] had brought joy and color into a field of painting that had been degenerating into the cold, pompous and photographic.”  He continues, however, that:  “The tremendous sincerity of Cezanne, which in many cases overcomes his deficiencies of technique, found countless imitators who only copied the defects, without ever being able to acquire the virtues and simplicity which Cezanne aimed at.”  

  

Okay so far, but he goes on to state as fact that Cezanne “suffered from a form of astigmatism that made him see standing objects as if tipped towards him.”  This one is awarded the publisher’s asterisk.  Warshawsky had died 18 years before the book was published, so he couldn’t object to the following publisher’s footnote:  “Warshawsky should not be condemned too harshly for his misunderstanding of the distortions of form in Cezanne’s art.  J.K. Huymans and Emile Bernard were also convinced that Cezanne had faulty eyesight.  Erle Loran has shown, however, that Cezanne purposely distorted objects to accentuate their volumes or to add dynamic tensions to his designs. (‘Cezanne’s Composition’ (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1946)”

Now I should really get around to Kulicke, the other painter I mentioned up front.  While not well-known as a painter, Kulicke was famous for having been a very successful, innovative frame maker and jewelry designer.  But he also carved out an interesting little niche for himself by making paintings of one or two pears on small panels less than 12 inches in either direction.  He also painted peaches and oranges, and sweet little nosegays in glass vases, all in the same format – the objects, alone or in a small group, centered on a flat base with a flat background.  He must have made more paintings of pears than anyone, and maybe even more than the law allows.  I’ll bet he sold just about every one.  I saw plenty of them in photographs of apartments in the glossy shelter magazines in the 1980s and 90s.

I really like Kulicke's pear paintings, with their soft color harmonies, which I first saw at the Davis and Langdale Gallery, located in a brownstone on East 60^th Street. This unique gallery specializes in small works of 19^th and 20^th Century American and British painters, including those of the Bloomsbury crowd.  It was worth visiting occasionally, even though it was a bit too far east to be on my routine inspection tour of several Manhattan galleries along 57^th Street that I kept up for quite a few years.  I remember seeing a wonderful show there of works by the British painter Gwen John, the introverted sister of the extroverted painter Augustus John.   I was surprised to read later that she was obsessed with Rodin, her former lover, and would stand on a hill overlooking his studio to see what was going on inside. 

Gwen John,Nude Girl,1910,17 ½ x11”,Tate Britain,London

When I saw that exhibit of Kulicke’s pear paintings, I felt sure that one or two should have satisfied his creative impulse to paint them.  But he kept painting and selling them.  In a way, they are earlier and far more esthetically pleasing versions of the paintings sold today on the Internet by the “daily painters.”  I think I read somewhere that he painted some of them from out of focus photographs.  Quel horreur!

Now you and I could paint very similar charming little fruit and flower paintings, with a little practice, of course, and go completely unnoticed by the art world.  The big difference is that Kulicke was this world-renowned frame maker, who had his frame business in the basement of the gallery brownstone, and put his little gems in individually created, gorgeous, handmade frames, adding immensely to their attractiveness and marketability.

In a January 1990 interview with Bruce Gherman in "Picture Framing Magazine," Kulicke said, “I am an intimist, still life painter and for 34 years have devoted myself to painting fruits and flowers, often a single fruit. My painting stems from Zen philosophy and medieval art, which is why I have found that 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th century frames are the most sympathetic to some of my work. I decided to experiment making medieval frames as fairly authentic reproductions. To me, the frame is the ultimate presentation, the reward for painting the picture.  I get an enormous amount of enjoyment out of making them.”  I say amen to that.  Unfortunately, framing is the biggest curse of the low-income painter.  The cheap Internet mail-order frames you can afford are so abominable that they destroy the look of any halfway decent painting. 

Kulicke’s exquisite little paintings, with their softly muted, grayed-down colors, were just one of many creative endeavors undertaken successfully by this human whirlwind.  He revolutionized the frame making industry by designing thin, welded aluminum frames and Lucite “plexibox” frames for some famous modern artists and The Museum of Modern Art.  He also is credited with introducing the aluminum sectional frames you put together yourself.  And he crafted reproduction frames for some of the greatest paintings in the country, including Giotto’s “Epiphany” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Not satisfied, he also helped to revive the ancient cloisonné technique of granulation used in the design of gold jewelry, and established a school for jewelry making. Widely knowledgeable in art history, he often supported himself and his businesses by buying and selling medieval art and Coptic textiles.  His many accomplishments were noted in newspaper obituaries upon his passing.

Giorgio Morandi,Still Life,1953

Nonetheless, he reportedly considered himself first and foremost a painter, which he resumed with a passion in 1957 after he framed a number of Giorgio Morandi’s contemplative still life paintings of bunched together bottles, jars, boxes and other shapes, with no surface detail and in pale colors.  Being studio-challenged myself, I got a real kick out of learning that Morandi lived in a house in Bologna with his three sisters and had to walk through one of their bedrooms to get to his room, where he both worked and slept for most of his life.  Morandi (1890-1964) was influenced by Cezanne and Kulicke was influenced by Morandi. That’s the way it goes.
 
I still like the nonsense couplet I composed upon first seeing those precious little pear paintings, so beautifully framed, hanging on the walls of the gallery 25 years ago:  “Paintings are made by fools like me.  But only Kulicke can paint a pear.”

We Paint What We Can

Pieter Claesz,Still Life With Turkey Pie,1627,Rijksmuseum,Amsterdam

Very few artists start out wanting to become landscape painters or still life painters.  Those decisions are made for us by necessity, the mother of all dashed hopes and dreams.   When we wake up that fateful morning and proclaim, “I’m gonna go to art school and learn how to paint,” we don’t mean we’re going to study the painting of pastures and pears.  No, we’re going to study figure painting.  Since the dawn of painting, that’s been the hierarchy – people first in assorted genres and everything else a notch or two below, with the lowly still life at the very bottom.

So we all have some great fun for a few years, staring at a human being posing on a model stand in a crowded classroom and trying our darndest to paint like Sargent or Bouguereau.  But there comes a time, some 30 years ago, when you can’t keep doing that if you want to think of yourself as a serious artist.   You have to get out there on your own.  And then the trouble begins.

You don’t have any money and artist’s models don’t work for free.  Your friends and acquaintances won’t sit for you because they don’t think it’s worth their time, knowing it won’t enhance their reputations to be painted by an amusing dabbler such as yourself.  You’re not married so you don’t have a wife who will agree to sit for you, although wedded bliss is no guarantee either.  You’ve known a few painters whose wives simply refused to sit for them. 

Frank Weston Benson,Eleanor,1907,Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Not being married and not running an orphanage generally means you also don’t have access to children who will sit for you, unless you have a lot of friends and relatives with children, can afford to hire models to pose for you, and live in the 19^th Century.  Such was the case for Mary Cassatt, that exceptional painter of mothers and children, who devoted her entire long life to art, and once opined, “There's only one thing in life for a woman; it's to be a mother.”  For some reason, by the way, almost all of the best paintings done of children have been of girls, although Robert Henri made quite a few good portrait sketches of rowdy boys in his fast and loose bravura style.  The Boston Impressionist Frank Benson, for example, painted his son maybe once or twice, but painted his three lovely daughters on numerous occasions, creating several absolute masterpieces of fine art in the process.

A portion of the Studio of Sir Gerald Kelly, R.A. (1879-1972)
Print of Russell Westwood’s Photograph in the collection of

 the National Portrait Gallery, London

A Smaller Studio

You would love to be a real portrait painter, working only from life in a grand manner, but your home studio is the size of a closet.  You pine for a 30x40 foot room with huge windows and high ceilings in which to paint full-length figure paintings and commissioned portraits, the proper studio size for such work, according to the painter Richard Goetz, whose loud pronouncements to his class at The Art Students League were often a source of information or amusement when you were drawing in the free members’ sketch class across the hall.

But you do have room for a bean pot and a couple of pears.  You turn the bedroom of your apartment into a home studio.  First you put the bed in the living room.  Then you try to figure out where to put those pears to get the best possible natural light on them from the two small, adjacent windows facing west/northwest.  That’s not an easy task for indecisive you.  Madeline T., a painter friend, saw it right away.  Then you block the windows about three-quarters of the way up with dark curtains to get at least a little downward angled light on your subjects, instead of a less attractive side lighting effect.  You squeeze in a model stand against the north wall at a right angle to the windows for the occasional portrait sketch, and figure out some wacky, makeshift ways to elevate your still life setups at varying heights on the model stand for perspective variety. 

You lug a heavy old mirror you found on the Lower East Side all the way to the Upper West Side and put it on the opposite wall to check your work from a distance, lay down a couple of beat up old oriental runners on the floor, attach a couple of extension speakers near the ceiling and you’re ready to roll.  

After a couple of years, you get in touch with an apprentice carpenter to custom-build an easel with a base and wheels that is just six inches short of the 9-foot ceiling.  The easel, featuring strong, double mortise and tenon joints for the base,  looks in profile a bit like the easel shown in a photograph of Sargent’s studio in Paris.  It’s been your stalwart pride and joy for nearly 30 years.  Finished paintings and fresh canvases are crammed into wooden racks, sectional metal shelving and closets.  The room shrinks with each mismatched storage addition. 

This setup leaves many things to be desired, due mostly to the fact that you are extremely impractical and mechanically disinclined, but it serves its purpose quite well if you paint fairly small – 24x30 inches tops.  It’s your sanctuary.  You put it all together in haphazard fashion by your inept lonesome self.  And it’s just wonderful. 

For most of us, it takes a couple of years after art school to really get a feel for painting groceries and pots and pans, after such a heady experience of painting the human form divine.  The art schools in the big cities today are able to stay in business in part because they are loaded with students who only want to paint the figure and can’t afford the expense of private models.  And many perpetual students, even those who can afford model fees and a proper studio, stay in the classroom because they aren’t able to handle the one-on-one interaction necessary to work privately with a model or portrait client.  

Luigi Lucioni(1900-1988),Bread and Fruit,1940,14x18"

www.christies.com,private collection

Peonies,18x16",Private Collection

I’ve always admired former League students who have had the guts to pull up stakes and head for the hills to paint landscapes, the next best thing to painting the figure.  It isn’t as easy to transition emotionally to still life painting in order to establish a career as an artist.  But I have found that it can be almost as satisfying as any other genre, once you finally understand that “sacrifice” is the low-income painter's middle name and “painting” is the name of the game.

Learning to be a Painter

I didn't learn too much about painting from Frank Mason, but I learned everything I needed to know about becoming a painter in the one year I attended his classes at The Art Students League 35 years ago.  I often saw him at the League through the years and am sorry I never told him what an inspiring role model he had been for me.

Frank Mason, Margaree River Valley,Nova Scotia,1999,24x30",www.frankmason.org

Frank Vincent Dumond,Margaree River Valley,Nova Scotia (n.d.),24x30",www.christies.com

Mason, who died in 2009 at the age of 88, was one of the most revered and influential instructors of painting in America.  He taught painting for 57 years at the League, beginning in 1951 upon the death of his mentor, Frank Vincent Dumond (1865–1951), an even more revered and influential instructor of painting, who taught at the League for 59 years.  What a glorious marathon of tradition they provided for so many career-minded students of painting.

When I began to study painting for good in 1978, I was told there were only three painters in the world that were worth studying with if you wanted to learn “the old ways.”  They were R.H. Ives Gammell (1893-1981) in Boston, Pietro Annigoni (1910-1988) in Florence, Italy, and Frank Mason. In retrospect, the Cold War was still on and we didn’t know much about all the followers of the great Ilya Repin in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Beijing and Shanghai.  And there were some regional favorites out there as well, like Henry Hensche (1899-1992), who was carrying on the tradition of Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, MA.

Gammell promoted the refined, accurate drawing and Impressionist color of the Boston School of painters, as passed on to him by his mentor, William McGregor Paxton.  Annigoni, a world-famous artist in his own right, emphasized Renaissance precision in drawing and taught the ancient ways of oil tempera and fresco painting, all within a muted color scheme.

But I was poor in New York City and already enrolled at the League, so Mason was an obvious choice for me.

Mason had quite a different approach than Gammell and Annigoni.  A big bear of a man at 6 ft. 3 in. tall, Mason was all theatrical Baroque romanticism in his personal mannerisms and in his approach to painting.  He abandoned Dumond’s more naturalistic, “tonal impressionist” style for a Rubens-like grandiose manner of painting, in practice and theory, while preserving his mentor’s lucid studies on color relationships and atmospheric perspective.  An entry in one League catalog states, “Mr. Mason is concerned with the illusion of subject matter in space and atmosphere, revealed through light.”  In short, it was chiaroscuro that interested him.  Getting a photo-like copy of the model on canvas was the last thing on his mind.

He loved to relate the stories Dumond had told of socializing with artists in Europe, including Whistler and Sargent.  A funny thing about those stories.  I was washing my brushes in a sink outside the studio one afternoon alongside a woman from the class, who was probably in her late 60s.  I said to her, “Boy, Mason really tells some good stories.”  The woman replied, “Yes, but Dumond told them better.”  Ah, well.  Dumond’s students included Charles Hawthorne, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, John Carlson, Andrew Loomis, Norman Rockwell, Frank J. Reilly, Paul Strisik, and, of course, Frank Mason.

Mason’s best students spent up to 12 years with him, as he had with Dumond, and became excellent painters by following his approach to painting the truth of nature – the light and atmospheric effects.  He also emphasized seeing objects as simplified masses first, with weight and dimension.  You had to consider the back of the head as well as the front, before zeroing in on the contour lines and the details within.  But I wanted to paint portraits with “speaking likenesses” right off the bat, so it was “one and done” for me. 

I studied with a couple of other excellent painters at the League and ended up evaluating nature’s effects purely by close observation, with no specific theories in my enfeebled brain and no real clue about “the old ways of painting.” 

A big hurdle to overcome in following the Mason way was mastering the Dumond palette, with its highly organized and seemingly useful pre-mixed values and hues.  Such an orderly approach didn’t suit my impatient nature.  Many of the master painters from the past that I admired used a limited palette, and that was more to my liking.  As Sargent once said, “There are lots of ways to paint.”

But it was inspirational to observe the progress of work being created in the manner of the Old Masters by the most committed “Masonites” when I was in the class that one year.

I remember one painter, who had already been with Mason for about 8 years, dragging out a ratty old stuffed pheasant every once in awhile to make a very beautiful and marketable painting on a long horizontal panel in no time at all.  That painter was Thomas Torak, who has succeeded his mentor, so the tradition lives on. I was told recently that the ratty old pheasant still inhabits one of the studios at the League.

And I remain in awe of a big job created in five afternoons by one of the Sulkowski brothers, tall identical twins from Pittsburgh who were co-monitors of the class and seemed to communicate with each other in some kind of silent, secret code.  This one twin stood at his easel in the back of the largest fourth-floor skylight studio, where Dumond had begun teaching in 1892, and painted a full view of the studio on a large canvas.  First he painted the studio itself, showing the angled skylight with its glowing north light shining through.  Then he painted the model stand and the model.  Then the first row of students, with Tony seated hunched over on a stool at his easel closest to the model.  He worked his way back into the room toward his easel position until, at the very end, he painted a portrait of his twin brother standing facing him.  It was for me a remarkable demonstration of how the Old Masters might have achieved such palpable atmospheric depth in their work.

I remember that Mason loved painting in the late afternoon as the daylight was fading into twilight, a time when most artists would have already cleaned their palettes and washed their brushes.  It was at this twilight hour, given up to children and painters, that the model’s flesh would positively glow in the surround of the skylit studio’s dusky light.  Mason often kept the afternoon class running late to demonstrate this beautiful light effect on a student’s canvas. 

A number of Mason’s devoted students drew from the model in his private studio in Little Italy on Tuesday evenings and received critiques from him.  For 40 years, the Mason faithful descended upon Stowe, Vt. in the month of June to attend the popular landscape painting workshops he led with great enthusiasm.  To my regret, I could never scrape together the cash to attend any of those workshops.   Dumond had conducted similar summer landscape workshops in Old Lyme, CT, and Torak, the current instructor, is continuing to hold them in Vermont.

Mason was well connected to the traditional art sector of the outside art world through campaigns he led to save Old Master paintings from the ravaging effects of over-cleaning by restorers and museum conservators.  He took his students to the barricades at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1970s when “Juan de Pareja,” a Velazquez masterpiece, was first stripped of its golden glow.  Further such efforts included railing unsuccessfully against the cleaning of Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

He had other significant connections as well.  He was once married to the late landscape painter Phyllis Harriman Mason, whose father was a financier, whose uncle was Averell Harriman, a former Governor of New York and whose paternal grandfather was a railroad baron in the late 19^th Century.  Their one child, Arden, was named after the magnificent estate built by the grandfather outside Harriman, NY.  The second-floor gallery at The Art Students League is named in her memory.  And one afternoon in the studio I heard someone say “Hi, Mary,” to a long-time Mason student seated on the floor.  I turned to see who had spoken and it was the writer Tom Wolfe, in his patented white suit.  Wolfe was a staunch supporter of Mason’s traditional views on art and probably spoke with him while writing his 1975 book “The Painted Word,” which attacks some powerful critics who were quite obviously shaping the direction of modern art with their theories.

But his many adoring students and admirers like me truthfully didn’t care much about all that other stuff.  It was Mason’s fervent love of Old Master painting and his charismatic ability to express that love in word and deed that inspired scores of students to flock to his sold-out classes each year.

Mason had no time for abstract expressionism.  I remember him once saying something to the effect that “the students come in here eager to learn figure painting until they find out that’s pretty hard.  Then they try landscape painting and find that’s pretty hard, too.  Then they try still life painting, and even that’s pretty hard.  The next thing you know they are in the abstract class!”

I didn’t stay with Mason long enough to learn any of the secrets of the Old Masters, one of them being the use of maroger, a lead-based medium boiled on the kitchen stove that was concocted by Jacques Maroger, a former conservator at the Louvre.   I heard that Mason himself eventually gave up the medium after getting a lead-poisoning scare. 

But the spiritual, reverent way he spoke about painting was exactly what I needed to hear.  In that regard, he had fulfilled a number of important commissions on religious themes, including a cycle on the life of St. Anthony of Padua, which has hung in the Church of San Giovanni di Malta in Venice since its completion in the early 1960s.  For that job he was awarded the Order of Malta’s Cross of Merit, the first painter to receive the honor since Caravaggio.  

Frank Mason,Little Italy,72x108",1977,www.frankmason.org

When I went with friends and visitors to Little Italy, I used to show them paintings by Mason that were hanging in two establishments on Mulberry Street, the Caffe Roma pastry shop and the Mare Chiaro tavern, which was established in 1908 and is now called the Mulberry Street Bar.  Mason’s 6x9 foot painting of the tavern interior, with notable bar patrons among the 22 figures depicted, was on display in the tavern for more than 30 years.  The painting is now in the collection of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, a gift of Mason’s estate that came about as a result of his far-reaching campaigns against the over-cleaning of Old Master paintings.

  

For myself, I recall only a few brief comments from the master during his critiques at my easel. On one occasion, Mason loomed over me, looked at my painting and boomed, “Do you like music?”  “Sure,” I said (thinking to myself, hey, I’m no kid, you know).   A trained pianist himself, he then proceeded to liken a painting to the progression of a symphony, starting off slow and leading to a crescendo.  I liked that analogy but wasn’t sure how it applied to my own painting.  But I later learned to see a beautiful symphony of light passing down and across a figure posed in that fourth-floor studio of ours, with its high ceilings, big north light skylight and grayish atmosphere.  No other kind of indoor lighting arrangement for painting can create such a beautiful light effect.

Mason once told the class he kicked out a prospective buyer from his studio in Little Italy, out of utter frustration, after showing the guy painting after painting after painting and getting tepid responses each time.  I think a few experiences like that, which I am all too familiar with myself, led him to say once that the public couldn’t care less about your paintings, but just go on painting them anyway, implying that painting was its own reward.  That kind of thinking from a well-regarded painter and a great teacher of painting, while it may seem insignificant, was all l needed to hear to keep me happily swimming at the bottom of the pond all these years.

And for some unknown reason, I feel that with his passing, I finally gained his permission to solve a riddle he left me with so long ago.  While examining my painting and my palette one afternoon, he asked, in his commanding way, “When are you going to learn to use the medium?”  After more than 30 years of painting, I still cannot answer him.  “But I’m working on it, Mr. Mason, I really am!”

More Easy Money

In the 1980s in New York City in the Borough of Manhattan, generally considered the art capital of the known universe, landlords were throwing easy money at artists to entice them to vacate their live-work spaces to make way for more productive members of society, like lawyers, bankers and kids with rich parents.  Many struggling artists took the bait, leading to short-term gains for them and long-term disaster for the housing market for artists.

Manhattan has been a no-fly zone for the creative community ever since, with affordable live-work spaces for aspiring artists nonexistent, and the few remaining work-only studio spaces going for exorbitant monthly rents. 

A Carnegie Hall Studio

Hovsep Pushman,Symphony of Life,Private Collection

http://taotothetruth.blogspot.com

Wayman Adams (1883-1959), Alexander Ernestinoff, 1914
Oil on Canvas, 42 3/4 x 36 in., Indianapolis Museum of Art

And a couple of years ago, Carnegie Hall kicked out all the tenants from the more than 100 studios above the historic concert hall that had been occupied by painters, dancers, musicians and other creative types for over a century.  Many of these studios featured either skylights or huge windows offering north light views of Central Park.  Painters of the past included the noted portraitist Wayman Adams and the Armenian-born painter of exquisite, mystical still lifes, Hovsep Pushman, who was the most successful artist in America for many years in the mid-20^th Century.  His work strongly influenced David Leffel, one of my teachers at The Art Students League and a very successful still life painter himself.

A lot of artists moved to the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island as a result, establishing new visual arts enclaves, but affordable housing is getting harder to find in the outer boroughs as well.  Oh, there is some public money available for housing third-rate arts organizations in Manhattan that are good at groveling and grant writing.  But that’s a drop in the bucket and means nothing for artists who aren’t “joiners.”

In the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, dozens of buildings catering to the visual arts community were erected in Manhattan.  Some of them are still standing, including the League’s historic 1892 building at 215 West 57^th Street.  An old painter friend remembers artists being able to sublet huge north light studios for peanuts in the 1940s and 50s whenever they had important portrait commissions to complete.  Now a closet-sized studio in Manhattan, illuminated only by artificial light, can rent for $1,000 a month or more, if you can find one.

North light studios with 20-foot-high ceilings, angled skylights or tall, duplex windows were the prime components of these structures.  Who wouldn’t want to inhabit those magnificent spaces?   Today only the very wealthy can, including a few lucky artists like the 84-year-old Alex Katz, who still lives and works in the Soho loft he moved into in 1968.

Adequate live-work spaces for artists were still plentiful in New York City’s frontier environment of the late 1960s into the early 80s, and I’ve kicked myself for 30 years for not latching onto one of them.  But when so many artists took their buyout money and ran to Vermont or New Mexico, the game was over for affordable housing for artists.  I think the usual buy-out accepted was $50,000, a lot of money for a struggling artist back then.  A friend of mine, who was painting movie posters at the age of 14 in his native Bolivia, got enough money to start his own billboard company.  He learned the treacherous scaffolding business of necessity, and for 20 years or so he and his crew painted billboards in Times Square and elsewhere until the industry began pasting pre-printed posters on high and his sign-painting techniques were no longer in demand.

Another artist I knew really hit the jackpot.  But he had to earn it the hard way.  He was a good-looking, skinny guy from California who modeled a bit at the League to help pay the rent.   In the winter he wore expensive cashmere coats two or three sizes too large that some say he picked out of the trash bins behind The Plaza Hotel.  A bit of a charming hustler, I believe he liked to hang around in the evening at spots frequented by Andy Warhol and other members of Manhattan’s “in crowd” at the time.  He was occupying a studio in a building near the League that the landlord wanted to tear down to put up a luxury apartment building.  All the tenants vacated the building except him.  He stayed on despite being physically attacked at one point by the landlord’s goons, who were making his stay more and more miserable.  But he persevered and won a stunning settlement of $500,000.  The landlord died the day after the award was granted.  The artist wed a girl from the League, gave her a nice chunk of money to end the brief marriage, had a show of his artwork at a New York gallery and then moved back to California to stay.  

Considering all the stories about those "lucky" lottery winners who come to no good end, and the poor saps who get sucked into get-rich-quick investment schemes, it's easy to conclude that money is never really easy for anybody and causes a heap of trouble.   A long time ago, in a book nobody reads much anymore, somebody said it a lot better.

Easy Money

Kenneth Harris,Mattie and Maynard's Grocery,1951,Chrysler Museum of Art,Norfolk,VA

I have a book published in 1954 titled “How to Make a Living as a Painter,” written by Kenneth Harris, a former advertising man who was well into his second successful career, that of a watercolor painter.  The basic premise of his book is that if you work your butt off and put low prices on your paintings, you will sell everything you create and eventually succeed in your goal.  It made sense, but was not very encouraging.  For one thing, Harris suggests doing something like he did when he moved to Galveston, Texas in the early-1940s.  He lived primitively in a shack on the beach, priced everything he painted at $2 to $5 and sold everything he painted.  He soon got enough dough together to escape the beach and he never looked back.  No longer a shack dweller, he repeated this basic scenario in five other regional cities, upping his prices at each stop, and in 12 years time he could write that he was comfortably raising a family, a wife and two children, on his painting income alone.

Avoid the dream of holding out for a one-person show in a New York gallery, Harris sagely advised, and don't put unreasonably high prices on your work.   His 1954 rationale was, “There are very few people who can pay $1,000 for a painting, no matter how much they want it, but there are millions who will pay $50 to $250 for a painting that appeals to them.”

I couldn’t agree more with that point of view.  I know a couple of painters from Connecticut who live simply in a small town and make a living as full-time painters in like manner.  Each year they produce tons of excellent landscapes, still lifes and figurative paintings on pre-stretched cotton canvases or Masonite panels.  They put inexpensive frames on their paintings and sell them at low prices at home shows and several outdoor art fairs in the region, including the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit in Greenwich Village.  The two of them have been doing this for up to 50 years.  They fully subscribe to the philosophy of their late mentor, a superb landscape painter who believed that fine art should be reasonably priced and accessible to the general public, and that seeking to get rich through the gallery labyrinth is not the true path of the painter. 

Tintoretto,Paradise,after 1588,74x30 feet,Palazzo Ducale, Venice

Of course the book by Harris was written decades before Internet con games caused everybody in America to foam at the mouth at the prospect of becoming that absurd being known today as a “Daily Painter.”  Tintoretto was a daily painter, too, but he was furiously knocking out mural-size paintings, not decorating 6x6 inch drink coasters with photographic images of cute puppy dogs.

As for me, I was working as a journalist when I moved to New York City from St. Louis in 1970.  I sold my car and settled into a nice old rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment in a pre-war building on Broadway in the now-fashionable Upper West Side of Manhattan.   I wasn’t concerned at the time that my apartment had normal apartment-size windows and often poor west-northwest light in the morning when I do my painting, without any enhancement from artificial light, which I don’t like working under.  At least the natural light is unobstructed across the "broad way.”   And I tend to believe that if a painting is true to the light it is painted in, be it lousy or good, it will be appreciated by a few sensitive viewers.

The city’s favorable rent laws still cover almost one million apartments; some occupied by low-income painters like me who would love to find more appropriate lodging, but can’t afford to move.  I’m too old to live on the beach in Galveston now – never was a beach person anyway.  And I can’t think of another city in the world with a place like The Art Students League where, as a member, I can sketch from the live model five late afternoons a week for free and paint from the model at low cost on Saturdays. 

And while I am in complete agreement with Mr. Harris and the two Connecticut painters with regard to selling paintings at low prices, my unfortunate, therapy immune lack of self-esteem makes asking for anything, money for my paintings included, an incredibly difficult task.  I have been more than happy to let the few galleries I’ve had over the years price my work.  My paintings are certainly not masterpieces, and my gut feeling is they are worth something, but not a heck of a lot in the grand scheme of things.

How many times have I heard the admonition, “Don’t sell yourself short.”  Let’s see how I perform when I have been cornered by a collector or a new acquaintance into selling one of my paintings privately, rather than through a gallery:

The potential buyer who “loves my work,” will ask, “What do you want for it?”  Well, the buyer is in my own home/studio and I can’t be rude or presumptuous, so I might say, “Oh. give me $200.”  And this for a beautiful 20x24 inch still life that I have a $200 frame for in my inventory and that I might have sold for $2,000 if it was in one of my old galleries.  “How about if I give you $150 and you throw in the frame,” the buyer will respond.  “Oh, alright,” I’ll say, forcing a smile, all the while in mental anguish and seething inwardly.  

The buyer seems pleased as he trips out of my apartment with the framed painting tucked under his arm.  The painting has been backed with foam board, wired for hanging and stuffed in a big plastic garbage bag to protect it from the elements.  I’m so angry with myself that I vow for the umpteenth time never to sell privately again, and remain in a snit for days.  I would rather give the paintings away than sell privately, and so I have on occasion.  “Here, take another one with you, kind sir.  And have another as well for good measure; they are just piling up here anyway.”  How bitter is the painter’s cup.

I once attended a lecture on this topic of making a living as a painter that was being given by Artist’s Equity at The Art Students League.  At the time, the bouncer stationed at the League’s front door was a big, strong black man named Washington, who was famously known for keeping out riff-raff of even lower reputation than those who were welcomed in for having paid their tuition or for having become members of this hallowed institution.  “Wash” caught me stealing away from the worthless evening lecture in the second floor gallery, and until his death years later, he always greeted me with, “Hey, Money, how’s it going?”

Money has never been easy for me.