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  All the good pizza parlors have been replaced by ritzy sushi bars, trattorias and patisseries.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

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Baby, It's Cold Outside, Oil on Linen, 20 by 16 in., Private Collection

Blue and White Lilacs, Oil on Canvas, 20 by 24 in., https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobertHoldenFineArt

Childhood Friends, Oil on Linen, 20 by 24 in., Private Collection

I got to thinking about teddy bears again the other day when a still life painting of lilacs I put up for sale on my Etsy shop was added to the “Etsy Treasury” of a woman living in the Ukraine who sells handmade teddy bears and other stuffed animals on her “Bears Land” shop.  The miniature stuffed animals are handmade by her and her husband and are really adorable: https://www.etsy.com/shop/manina1507

I think most people love teddy bears, having been introduced at an early age to one or more of these loyal and selfless companions, who can comfort you in a way no human can when you are feeling down and out and very much unloved.  I’ve painted pictures of a couple of them over the years, including the one shown above.   This teddy lives in the Long Island home of the retired supervisor of the phone room at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I worked on Thursdays during my 15 years of part-time enjoyment with the museum’s Visitor Services Department.  The phone room is the Met’s first line of defense against the multitude of commoners who aren’t tuned in to the world of fine art and discover “undoubted Rembrandts” when cleaning out their attics or want to have a show of their paintings at the Museum and demand to speak with a curator.  

The phone room supervisor, Peggy B., had a collection of teddy bears, and offered to loan me this favorite of hers so I could make a painting of it for my own pleasure.  So one day, maybe a dozen or more years ago, she brought the teddy in with her on the LIRR and let me hang onto it for a few days.  I decided this teddy girl would make a nice portrait study, so I gave her a good bit of attention for a couple of sittings while trying my best to replicate her essential fuzziness on canvas.  She’s seated on a scrap of cardboard and the background is a paint-smeared, 24x30 in. piece of Masonite that I still use as a base for still lifes on occasion.   I turned the board around a bit until I liked the paint shapes, which seemed to resemble a snowy woodland setting, at least in my mind’s eye.  A little while later I sent the finished painting off to the Connecticut gallery that was handling my still life paintings at the time.  To my surprise, I was told that a teddy bear collector bought her right away.  I think it was the fastest sale of any painting I showed at the gallery.

Now the right thing to do would have been to split the proceeds with Peggy, I suppose.  Isn’t that what all painters do when they borrow expensive collectibles from their friends or antique dealers and sell the resulting paintings for a fortune?  I’m not in that class of art profiteers myself, however, and Peggy seemed to be satisfied with the teddy bear image on the Christmas card I sent out that year.

When I was getting started in this painting business some 30 years ago, I did several commissions for a collector who is a native of a small town in a mountainous region of northern Italy, where the family still maintains a commercial apple orchard.  He is a lover of very traditional oil paintings, and a toy collector as well.  He commissioned me to paint portraits of some family members and pictures of some of the toys he had collected.  One time in the early 1980s he asked me to do a group portrait of four stuffed animals that had been crafted by his mother when he was a child.  I don’t think I got the best composition for this group portrait, but it was a lot of fun to work on, and something of a privilege to paint this assemblage of quaintly amusing stuffed animals, which obviously had great sentimental value for the collector.

“Mr. Holden, you should paint toys,” he used to say to me.  But alas, I had no toys of my own to paint and it was a lot easier to arrange an assemblage of fruits or vegetables from the grocery store across the street.  You can’t spend a lot of time trying to put together things you know will sell when the morning daylight’s a-wasting.  That’s a far more precious commodity in New York City than any Ming vase you might see in the window of a schmancy neighborhood antiques store.

Springtime on Ibiza

Rigoberto Perez Soler (1896-1968), Springtime, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 39 ½ by 35 ½ in., Private Collection

Rigoberto Soler, View of Santa Eularia, 1943, Oil on Canvas

Rigoberto Soler, Oil on Canvas

Rigoberto Soler, Scene Playing the Flute, Oil on Canvas

The notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory, whose colorful life was chronicled in “Fake,” a 1969 book written by Clifford Irving, a well-known hoaxer himself, was not the only visual artist associated with the enchanted island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Spain.    

Rigoberto Perez Soler (1896-1968), a wonderful Spanish painter with a soft, Impressionist’s touch, made quite a name for himself among the locals during the 30-some years he lived on the picturesque island, a popular tourist haven and refuge for celebrities.  From 1924, when he first arrived on Ibiza, until 1956, when he left for good for Barcelona and his teaching job,  Soler painted countless pictures of the Island’s residents, as well as village scenes, seascapes and anything else that caught his eye. 

Every day was sunny springtime for this painter.  I doubt if he ever painted a picture on a gray day, probably reserving those rare occasions for creating his drawings and lithographs.  In addition to landscapes and genre paintings, Soler executed many commissioned portraits.  Most of his work is in private hands, and not many people know about him today, although his paintings do surface at auctions from time to time.  Three years ago, his niece, Maria Jesus Soler, who is also a painter, wrote a biography, in Spanish, of her uncle as a means to rescue him from what she rightly characterizes as his undeserved obscurity. 

Rigoberto Soler was born in Alcoy, a city in the Spanish province of Alicante.  He became an artist against the wishes of his father, a city administrator, who wanted him to become a banker.   Soler studied painting in Valencia and won a number of prizes early on.

When Rigoberto first left the mainland for Ibiza, he was 28 years old and impoverished, but very eager to paint.  He put up a shack he had transported from Valencia on a quiet little beach off the beaten track in the village of Santa Eularia des Riu, painted it blue and called it “Blue Nest.”  He lived there with Pilar, his beautiful Spanish girlfriend and model, whom he featured in many of his early paintings on the island.  The little beach is named “Platja des Niu Blau” in homage to the painter’s dwelling.

Soler is said to have been a much-loved character around the village, constantly painting his friends and neighbors and the sun-filled environment around Santa Eularia.  Maria Jesus Soler was surprised at the “indelible impression” her uncle had made on his neighbors when she visited to gather material for her biography. 

You would know about Soler if you have read Elliot Paul’s 1937 book, “Life and Death of a Spanish Town.”  The book tells of Paul’s experiences living in the village during the Spanish Civil War.  The author records the lives of the natives and expatriates, mentioning Soler many times, according to a Wikipedia entry on the painter.  The book sounds fascinating, but I’m not much of a reader, so I’ll probably never get around to reading it myself.

When Soler won a Silver medal in a Madrid exhibition, he used the prize money, together with money from his mainland patrons, to build a proper house and studio on a hill above the village.  Pilar had left him and moved back to the mainland by then.  But in 1933, he met a German woman named Clare Sinderman, who was staying at a hotel on the Island, and they got married two years later.  Soler’s niece credits Sinderman with putting some order in his Bohemian lifestyle. 

 In 1943, the painter was given a professorship at the School of Arts and Crafts in Barcelona, and he and wife moved to the city.  But Soler and members of his family returned often to the house on Ibiza until he reluctantly sold it in 1956.  He remained teaching at the school until his retirement in 1964.  He died four years later in Valencia.

Notwithstanding the turmoil caused by the three-year Spanish Civil War, Ibiza must have been a paradise for this painter of sunlight. His niece says the number of works her uncle created on the island between 1924 and 1956 is “incalculable” because the fate of so many of them is simply not known.  Images of Soler’s paintings that are available on the Internet indicate that he must have been influenced by the work of his older countryman from the same region of Spain, the great Joaquin Sorolla, a native of Valencia.  Soler’s approach to painting similar subjects is much more restrained and ultimately far less impressive, however.  Unfortunately for this time-sensitive blog post of mine, there aren’t enough high-quality images of Soler’s paintings online to properly assess his body of work

But I was captivated by one painting I came across in an old Sotheby’s auction catalog that reveals Soler to be a painter of the very first rank.  The painting is called Springtime.  It was painted in 1934, a year after he met Clare Sinderman.  I’m sure she is the gorgeous blonde Brunhilde smelling the apple blossoms in the painting. This one painting by Soler is a masterpiece.  There’s no doubt about it.  I’ve never seen a more beautiful painting of a similar subject.

 I wonder how many other great paintings were created by Soler and remain hidden away in private collections on Ibiza and the mainland.   I’m not a beach person at all, but wouldn’t it be nice to hang out for a few years on the island in a little shack painted blue to research the matter, and maybe paint a few sunny day pictures, too?

.    

An Irish Portrait

Sir William Orpen, Count John McCormack (1884-1945), 1923, Oil on Canvas, 40.9 by 34 in., National Gallery of Ireland

Once upon a time, in the summer of 1923, to be a little more precise, the greatest Irish tenor sat for a portrait painted by the greatest Irish portrait painter.  This collaboration of artistic titans resulted in perhaps the finest male portrait of the “modern” era, although I confess to having only seen it in reproduction.

The tenor was John McCormack (1884-1945); the painter was William Orpen (1878-1931).

It is a remarkable portrait.  The relaxed, casual informality of McCormack’s pose is totally convincing.  It’s as if the great tenor had just plunked down in that chair to rest after a game of tennis, still dressed in his rumpled tennis “togs.”  McCormack had, in fact, been playing tennis on a day Orpen was paying a visit to continue his search for the right outfit for McCormack to wear for the portrait.  Orpen was immediately inspired to have McCormack sit for his portrait in his tennis attire, against the wishes of some family members who thought a more formal approach was called for, given the singer’s international fame.  But Orpen held his ground.  At last he had found the appropriate motif for the informal portrait he envisioned.

In a preliminary note to McCormack discussing the proposed portrait, Orpen wrote: “…evening clothes would also be excellent, but it would have to be a soft shirt. Is this possible with the order of St Gregory? A stiff white shirt is almost impossible unless the picture is full length, and I do not think that either you or I would like that. I would like to get you all "hunched up" with a soft white shirt and a large black tie.

"I may be all wrong, but that's in my mind at present. I want to make the head the main thing and big (as yours)! ... I'll be in London from the 24th till the 30th. If you happen to be there between those dates we might lunch or meet and talk things over a glass (large or small)…”

And boy, did he ever make that head “the main thing.” It’s an understated tour de force of painting -- one of the most truly lifelike portraits ever painted.  In one respect it has no equal among all the countless portrait heads I’ve studied -- he left nothing out and you don’t notice it.  There is no bravura bombast in Orpen’s work, just a precise, accurate recording of every inch of the man’s face for the entire world to see.  He put in every conceivable surface and tonal variation and yet there is absolutely no evidence of struggle or crudity or conscious intent to prove he could do so with facile brushwork.  The drawing of the nose, lips and eyes is super refined; the expression extraordinarily human, sparking a viewer’s thoughts about the sitter’s mood as he sat for his portrait.  It’s everything a great portrait should be.  And the paint handling seems as relaxed as the sitter must have been feeling after his game of tennis.  Painting was Orpen’s game, and he rarely lost a set!

Lily McCormack, John’s widow, tells about the making of this portrait masterpiece in her 1949 biography of her late husband, I hear You Calling Me.   Orpen was called “Billy Orps” by his many friends and acquaintances, and Lily writes, “Billy decided he wanted John in some unusual attire. They tried evening dress with decorations, but that was ruled out. An elaborate dressing gown was tried and thought too informal; and then one day at tea time, John came in from the tennis court, picked up a piece of music and went to the piano, saying to Laurie Kennedy, the cellist, who was there, 'I've been keeping this for you'. Orpen decided then and there it would be tennis togs and a piece of music in his hand. When Gwen [one of their two children] saw the finished portrait she said, 'I don't like it. It's too cross. He looks as if he were going to spank me, and Pop never did that'. I am inclined to agree with her, but I admit that it does show John as I saw him, sitting for Orpen talking politics.”

The portrait had been in the family’s possession until it was put up for auction at Christie’s in London on May 8, 2009.  The National Gallery of Ireland submitted the winning bid of $542,959.  Those lucky Irish!

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