There She Is

Painting Val in Central Park on a Perfect Day

We painted Val on a beautiful sunny morning on our little knoll in Central Park in August of 2004.  The weather couldn’t have been more perfect for painting a model in our plein air studio between the Boathouse Restaurant and the Conservatory Pond near Fifth Avenue and 72^nd Street.

Val was one of the 21 young women five of us old guys painted in the park over a period of seven summers, as I described in a previous post.  Some of the girls posed only once, others several times, for our once-a-week painting sessions, weather permitting.  This was Val’s second pose for us.  Like most of our other models, she worked part-time with me in the Visitor Services Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few blocks north of our painting site.

When we arrived at our "studio" on this occasion, Val slipped into a very pretty orange dress with a matching shawl she had recently purchased at one of those budget fashion stores, and deftly doffed her jeans, exposing her bare legs, about as racy as we ever got out there in the park with our models.

  

She instinctively climbed to the top of the biggest rock on the knoll and took a seated, back-lit pose with an elegant line that we all agreed was eminently paintable.  Being the nominal monitor of these affairs, and official timekeeper, I delivered my usual announcement, “Gentlemen, start your engines,” and we commenced our work.

Val, Oil on Linen, 24x20"

I was immediately having a very happy time painting Val in this urban wooded setting.  She held her elegant pose extremely well, and it was easy to capture its rhythm on my 24 by 20 inch stretched linen canvas in my initial lay-in with thinned-down color approximating the actual look of the “tout ensemble.”

During these Monday or Tuesday morning Central Park outings, we worked about 25 minutes at a time on the pose, with five minute breaks, beginning at 9 a.m. and going to about 12:30 p.m.  As the morning wore on I was making good progress on my painting and really enjoying myself, not something I’m accustomed to in the other world.  We weren’t bothered much on this particular day by visitors to Central Park stopping by to ogle, and I could see that my four painting companions were also having a good time painting Val.   Being only five in number, it wasn’t hard for each of us to get a pretty decent view of the model.  We always set up our easels without much fussing about placement, although I did regret on occasion not being constitutionally disposed to exercising the traditional monitor’s prerogative of choosing the first spot.

One of the main reasons I liked painting with these guys is we all had developed our own ways of working after many years and we never interfered with each other’s enjoyment of the process of painting.  We all had received academic training at some level.  The oldest painter, Albert Wasserman, then 83, has been a superior portrait painter all his life.  He began his art studies at the age of 13 and continues to work and teach at the age of 92.  Another painter, Kenneth Wilkinson, had been Frank Reilly’s illustration class monitor for four years, but swore off the photographic look years ago and now works in an exciting, paint-heavy style derived from his love of the Post-Impressionists.  We never gratuitously offered any of those annoying “helpful suggestions” that always destroy your concentration and put you in a foul mood for the rest of the day.  “Do you mind if I say something.”  “Oh no, go right ahead.” You’re doomed one way or the other.  The psychological damage has been done.  Leave us alone, already, to sink or swim to the best of our own abilities.

While I’m at it, it’s crazy to see so many earnest artists chasing after this or that painter’s technique year after year.  They watch hours of “how to” videos or attend expensive “vacation” workshops in the vain hope of becoming “as good a painter as so and so.”  If God had intended for you to paint like Sargent or Grandma Moses, he would have blessed you with the innate ability to do so.   If you want to be a fairly decent figurative painter, though, you do have to study painting for a few years to see how the job is done, there is no other way.  It can’t be learned by reading about it or even just looking at paintings.  You have to see how experienced painters mix paint and apply it to the canvas to achieve the effects that you consider to be inspirational.  But after a few years of getting used to washing your brushes every day, forget about the techniques of your contemporaries and paint as well as you can in a style that suits your personality.  You might not sell as many paintings as those who mimic the unique work of some other painter, but at least you can hold your head up high, knowing you aren’t just another one of many inferior clones of a more talented painter.  I must add that it was different in the old days, when figurative painting was a respected profession with high standards that had to be met or you were shown the door, a direction most of us today would no doubt have been headed for.

Now back to this particular Monday morning in the park with Val.  It was a happy time for all of us.  The August weather was perfect and our incomplete masterpieces were progressing nicely.

Then around noontime a group of a dozen or so identically dressed young girls from a private school in New Jersey came traipsing by on the path just below our little knoll.  They were a noisy, exuberant bunch and I heard one of them say, “We can’t leave New York without seeing a celebrity.”  I shouted out, “Well, there she is,” pointing to Val posing prettily at the top the rock.  The girls immediately clambered up the rock, surrounding Val, who instantly took to her new starring role as a celebrity, which she certainly was for us already.  She had a great time for a few minutes chatting with the girls and telling them, among other things, about the great buy she got on her dress.  It was so much fun to watch this sweet little impromptu scene being played out on such a gorgeous day for painting that we didn’t mind the brief interruption at all.

Val, LichtBlick Gallery owner Claudia Bousraou and Me

Shortly after the girls had clambered down off the rock and headed merrily on their way, we were paid an unannounced visit by the two women who were planning an exhibition of our Central Park paintings at LichtBlick Gallery on Long Island.  The gallery owner, Claudia Bousraou,  took a great picture of all of us as we continued painting Val for a few more minutes.  And we later had a productive chat with Claudia and the curator, Pam Koehler, about our upcoming show, with the noonday sun continuing to spread its hazy, warm glow over our favorite painting spot.  I left the park beside myself with happiness.  Nothing in life was better than this, at least for me.  I had come to the end of a perfect day.

Chao-Min Liu's Photo of his Painting and Val in Jeans

The enchantment was too great to last forever, of course.  Val was one of the few models we painted twice in the same pose.  So we reassembled at the same spot the following Monday morning to resume work on our paintings.  Almost everything about the scene was different.  It was still a bright day and the rock hadn’t wandered off, but it was so cold that one of our boys painted with gloves on, and Val had to wear her jeans under her gown to keep from freezing her legs off.  The background of green-leafed trees now seemed to be a fractured, illusionary autumnal orange.  I made some adjustments to the background of my painting, but spoiled the look I had achieved in the first sitting.  And I was unable to successfully make some subtle changes in my painting of Val that I had been counting on.  It’s like Renoir said, you go to nature armed with theories and nature throws them back in your face.  In other words, curses, foiled again.

But the memory of that first glorious day of painting our lovely Val lingers on.  I came away marveling that once in awhile even I get close to knowing the feeling of complete contentment.

Luigi Lucioni

"Clouds Over Equinox,"1935,Oil on Canvas,26x47",Gerald Peters Gallery

One of my favorite 20^th Century painters is Luigi Lucioni, who created meticulous still lifes, landscapes and portraits in a highly personal manner that he likened to classical realism derived from his study and worship of the early Italian Renaissance masters.  Lucioni also produced masterful etchings and watercolors that brilliantly showcase his affinity for precise line work.

“Resting Athlete,1938,Oil on Canvas,43 ½ x 48",Gerald Peters Gallery

One goofy reason I like this wonderful painter is because it’s easy to remember his dates.  Born in 1900 in Malante, Italy, moved with his parents to America in 1910 and died in New York City in 1988.  Painters love to check the dates on other painters to see how they measure up with their own creative progress.  He did that one before he was 30?  Holy Cow!  I’m 100 years old and I’ve accomplished nothing!  When a painter’s career straddles the start of a century, you have to “do the math” in a serious way to figure out their career landmarks.

I also like the fact that Lucioni had absolutely no interest at all in photography, even though his work was often described unknowingly as “photographic.”  I like the fact that his painstaking style was consistent in all the work he produced.  I like the fact that he loved opera, which in his case led him to hobnobbing with a lot of celebrities, including Henry Fonda, who received some painting instruction from him.  I didn’t like learning, though, that Lucioni came to dislike Rubens and other brush stroke painters, even though his first painting teacher was William Starkweather, who had studied with Joaquin Sorolla.

“Pattern of Trees,”1943,Watercolor,13x20 ½",www.antiques.com

But most sincerely, I am in awe of Lucioni’s superb draftsmanship, and fascinated by his highly personal choices regarding color, subject matter and design, the latter under the early influence of the skewed perspectives of Cezanne, whom he considered a great artist.   But he loved most the early Italians, especially Piero della Francesca, for their purity of line and form.

I’ve never seen another still life painter use such distinctive, harmonious color combinations to such impressive effect on objects that are so perfectly rendered from nature.  He loved browns, ochres, lemon and dusty yellows, olive and deep greens and mauves, and obviously gave careful consideration to the color scheme in planning his extremely realistic works.  No brown sauce or commonplace color for him.

“Harmony in Minor Key,c. 1974,Oil on Canvas,22x26",www.godelfineart.com

His tabletop still lifes feature ordinary, often unusual household objects and superbly painted draperies with a multitude of folds in them.  Folds are very hard to paint convincingly, and most of us eliminate them whenever possible.  That’s one reason you see so many flat backgrounds in works done by today’s painters.  “Keep it simple” could be construed to be the mantra of the lazy painter.  I’ve been advised on several occasions to put more draperies in my own still lifes, but I paint them only once in a great while because of the difficulty in getting the folds to look right.  Lucioni obviously embraced the challenge of painting folds, a common task for the early Italians.

"Dominant Colors,"1956,Oil on Canvas,20x28",www.antiques.com

In Lucioni’s work, a single lemon or a small grouping of fruit placed judiciously often serve as significant color accents in the prevailing tonal theme.   He didn’t paint the ordinary very often.  For example, he frequently painted the devil out of a bouquet of dried dieffenbachia leaves in an earthenware jug or a potted, green dieffenbachia in the midst of cascading drapery, finding beauty in the overall color scheme he selected.  He liked to paint oddly shaped pots or bottles and place things on their side for design purposes. 

Many second-rate artists like to flippantly respond “a lifetime,” when innocently asked how long it takes them to finish a painting.  But we are told that Lucioni worked nearly a month on each still life.  He was obsessed with the beauty of accurate line and form, and he had the patience to study and render in exacting detail all the essential facts from nature that would bring life to his paintings. 

Rendering crockery, fruit and other objects with well-defined contours, as Lucioni did, can sometimes result in a “cut-out” look, an opinion of some of my painter friends about his work.  But I think his sharp contours are perfectly in keeping with his reverence for the line work of the early Italians, and all the objects he paints sit comfortably in their artfully staged environments.

Lucioni never tried to fool himself or the viewer with tricks to overcome drawing difficulties, like smudging form into form, or employing the much-abused concept of lost and found edges so fashionable with many of today’s realists, who misinterpret their occasional use by the older painters.  He tackled the most difficult passages, such as where shadows and cast shadows of juxtaposed objects come together, and succeeded in keeping separate the firm contours of each object, just the way close observation with the human eye would reveal.  

“Village of Stowe, Vt.,”1931,Oil on Canvas,23 ½x33 ½",Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Lucioni’s attractive, airy Vermont landscapes, with their precisely outlined birch trees and barns and distant hilltops, stand apart from those executed by most other landscape painters, who adopt a broader, less focused manner of painting the great outdoors.   His landscape etchings and watercolors most clearly exhibit his love of the precise line.

Lucioni spent summers in Vermont and the rest of the year in New York City, painting seven days a week, holidays included, with opera music playing in the background.  By his own account, Lucioni painted every day from 9 a.m until noon and from 1 p.m until 4.  “I enjoy painting, so for me painting is not work,” he once said.  When he wasn’t working at his art, he enjoyed the city’s rich musical life and the companionship of his beloved Scottish terrier, the two other great loves of his life.

“Two Silos,”Etching,1942,Indianapolis Museum of Art

Not many people are familiar with Lucioni’s art these days.  A woman who moved to Vermont after art school didn’t know he painted still lifes.  And I didn’t know he painted landscapes until I saw a show of his work at the Richard York Gallery in 1991.   His etchings and watercolors were a complete surprise to me until a few years ago.  Part of the reason may be that he kept to himself during his long career as an artist, working right up until the very end.  He had few artist friends, preferring the company of musicians, and had long given up on entering juried competitions.  “I find artists get along better if they are separate rather than together,” he once said.  “There's always a kind of jealousy and all that sort of thing you know.”

The story was quite different early in his career.  During the Great Depression, when other artists were working for the WPA to get by, Lucioni was selling every one of his carefully crafted paintings.  He had his first solo exhibition in 1927 at the Ferargil Gallery in New York City.  And in 1932, he became the youngest contemporary painter to have a work purchased by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a still life titled “Pears with Pewter.”

During an oral history interview conducted by Robert Brown on July 6, 1971 for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, Lucioni had some interesting things to say about Realist painting and photography.

Lucioni said he tried to find “the thing that makes it real without copying all the little trivial things.  People say I paint every leaf on the tree. I don't…I paint what I think is there.  I mean I try to make it look as though it belonged there, but very often when people look at my landscapes and look at the painting I am doing, ‘Oh, you changed this, you changed that,’ they don't realize that…you can't cope with nature, as you know, and therefore you can't put in all the little things that nature can do so easily and you can't. So you have to get the essentials of these things and that is my idea of realism…for me nature is the greatest artist that ever lived, you know, and all the great artists have tried to follow nature, well, [nature] can do so many things that a brush can't do, I mean, for instance, how can you paint, well to begin with you can't paint sunsets, you can't paint sunrises, you paint a blue sky, but if you paint it blue it looks absolutely opaque where nature can have it transparent. Nature is a great, great inspirer, but also a terrible tease for an artist, but you do the best you can.”

 "Steeple Through the Birches,”1977-79,Oil on Canvas,23x19",www.artfact.com

He said his realism is “not a copy of nature, although lots of people think so. But let them think so, it's alright. But the realism is something else. First of all, you have to know what a thing looks like, what a thing is made of…I studied the things that I painted, I studied the trees, I'd go and look at them up close and then when I would go back I'd try to simplify by a line or two. It doesn't always come off.  But you try awfully hard to make a thing look as though it was casual.  But I don't think there is anything casual in art.”

He said the goal of his carefully planned still life paintings is to make the objects within “as absolutely alive as possible…even more alive than they really do look like to you when you are looking at them.”

Asked how his work compares to photography, Lucioni replied:

“I don't think it compares with photography at all. People say, ‘Oh you can take a photograph and make it look as good.’ You just can't, to begin with. I don't think realism and photography have anything in common, for my point of view, I may be wrong. In fact, I am really not a good photographer. I can't take good snapshots or anything, and I never. . .People say, ‘oh we can do that from a photograph.’ I never work from photographs. I couldn't possibly work from a photograph…I cannot imagine a tree. I have to study, I have to be in front of it in order to get it. See, that's one of my limitations…you can't imagine something that you just don't know. I mean, you have to know about it. But there are a lot of people who do work from memory, but I am no good at that, I can't do that. I mean, it's as I say, it's my limitation, but it's me and there's nothing I can do about it. I am too old now to change, and I don't know if I would want to change or not.”

I understand completely this immensely gifted artist’s sincere, fumbling attempts to describe the nearly indescribable act of painting from nature, which stirs up so much emotion.  And I’m extremely happy to know that we share many of the same feelings about the work.  Like Lucioni, all I want to do is make the things I paint look real on canvas.  And I, too, am trying to do the best I can.

Sorolla's Last Stand

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, “The Tuna Catch,” (Ayamonte), 1919

about 12x15 feet, The Hispanic Society of America

Painters don’t exit the No. 1 subway train at 157^th Street and Broadway to dine on cuchifritos or have their eyebrows threaded.  They are there to visit the Holy Grail for lovers of Bravura painting at The Hispanic Society of America at 155^th Street and Broadway.  Soon they will stand in awe before the 14 mural-size canvases depicting the provinces of Spain that Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida executed on commission for the railroad heir Archer Milton Huntington.  Sorolla’s paintings, each ranging from about 12 to 14 feet in height and totaling 227 feet in length, cover the walls in a room specially constructed to house them in Huntington’s palatial edifice devoted to the culture of Spain.

Sorolla’s “Vision of Spain,” which he began in 1913 and completed in 1919, represents one of the major achievements in the history of painting, if only for its scale alone.  Rubens and Tintoretto would be green with envy if they saw what Sorolla had accomplished.  These were no mere Renaissance formula figures on canvas, with Seraphim and Cherubim cavorting in the heavens.  There were no able studio assistants standing at the ready to fill in the blanks around the Master’s central figures.  Sorolla’s canvases are filled with real people painted life-size and from life by one man in possession of prodigious skills and the enormous energy necessary to complete this mind-boggling project.

Painters know what effort it takes to make even a semi-decent life-size bust portrait come to life on a 24 by 20 inch canvas when painted alla prima.  After a couple of hours work you’re exhausted and longing for a nap and someone to wash your brushes for you.  Sorolla painted multiple figures on canvas in that manner throughout his career, all in natural poses and brimming with the impression of life itself. 

Drawing the entire human figure dead-on accurately in a direct attack on canvas with a fully loaded brush is nearly impossible, as those who have tried it soon discover.  Even excellent painters like Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase fell short of the mark nine times out of ten in one aspect or another – proportions and gestures among them.  And hands must be in pockets or held behind the back, of course, if you are going to succeed. Then you have to master color and chiaroscuro to breathe life into just one figure, much less a multitude.  Sorolla was one of the very few artists who had all the tools for such work.

For a period of only 50 years or so in the long history of art, Sorolla and a few contemporaries, Zorn and Sargent among them, painted one figurative masterpiece after another entirely from life, and then, like dinosaurs and other giants of the past, their like just disappeared from the face of the earth.  But none of those contemporaries came close to matching Sorolla’s heroic last stand on display at the Hispanic Society of America.  To top it off, Sorolla was no kid when he took on this work.  He was already 48 years old.

Despite the immense size of the canvases, Sorolla painted all but one of then en plein air.  He worked in a studio on his first painting.  All the other massive paintings were completed on location, painting models from life posing in the costumes of their respective regions.  That first painting, a conjoined panoramic view of two regions, Castile and Leon, featuring hilltop towns and a bread festival, was painted in a specially constructed studio outside Madrid from March until September of 1913.  It is the largest painting in the series at 45 feet long, and with more than 100 life-size figures.  This studio effort, for me, is the least interesting of the lot, although a colossal undertaking to be sure.  The composition is uninteresting and the figures static, unlike the vivacious figures and excellent compositions of the plein air paintings. 

I suspect Sorolla was warming up to the assignment and used a few photographs to get this initial mural out of the way so he could get to his first love, and his strength – painting figures from life in the great sunlit outdoors, a routine that was observed and recounted by many of his contemporaries.  And he painted fast.  "I could not paint at all if I had to paint slowly,” Sorolla once said.  “Every effect is so transient, it must be rapidly painted.”

But the commission took its toll on the mortal man.  By 1917 Sorolla admitted to being exhausted.  In 1919 he began work on the final painting, “The Tuna Catch” (Ayamonte), on May 10 and completed it on June 28.  This is one of my favorite paintings of all time.   The color harmony, the shimmering light effect on the water, the entire composition – it’s just a beautiful work of art.  The three lounging sailors in their brilliantly white suits, so perfectly realized in attitude, provide a joyous contrast to the hard-working laborers, rendered so convincingly on an opposing diagonal in the canopied fishery at Ayamonte.  It’s another day filled with the joy of life that this great artist loved to depict on canvas.

I was deeply moved when reading about the eyewitness account of a young student of Sorolla’s, Santiago Martinez Martin, who observed the completion of this final masterpiece of alla prima painting.   Martinez Martin's recollections are detailed in an essay in a catalogue for a traveling Sorolla exhibition that I viewed several times at the IBM Gallery in 1989.   Worn out from his work on this commisson,  Sorolla "had to caution himself against the heightened emotionalism he experienced while painting, for, ‘after a few hours…I’m undone, exhausted.’” 

Martinez Martin "witnessed how Sorolla, often using yard-long brushes, in one morning painted a catch of tuna as it was delivered from ship to pier, covering almost 10 [feet] by more than 3 feet of the vital foreground of the Ayamonte panel in a single session.”  When the younger painter approached, Sorolla was slumped in exhaustion before the large canvas and was "regarding it with feverish eyes."  And in a visceral way, we are transported to the scene.  We understand, we know.

On July 20, 1919, Sorolla wrote, “Now, with God’s help and after considerable suffering…I have given the final brush-stroke to the commission.  The panel I painted in Ayamonte, in its background the coast of Portugal which I had before me, is splendidly satisfying [and] I believe the finest of all.”

You come to realize that Sorolla literally worked and worried himself to death on this commission, for which he received a payment of $150,000 from Huntington.  I’m sure that was big money then, but Sorolla was doing very well without it.  Just before accepting the commission, he had pulled in $80,000 from sales and commissions during a five-month exhibition of his work in Chicago and St. Louis in 1911, his second highly successful trip to America. 
 
The painter had anticipated spending five years on the project for the Hispanic Society, but it took him seven years of single-handed effort to complete his “Vision of Spain,” and he never lived to see its installation.  The very next year he suffered a stroke while painting a woman’s portrait in his garden in Madrid.  Paralyzed for over three years, Sorolla died at the age of 60 in 1923.  The room housing the Provinces at the Hispanic Society opened to the public in 1926.

A couple of years ago, the Sorolla room was renovated and his mural paintings were restored.   Both are looking much finer than when I last saw them 15 years ago.  At that time, the wide swaths of turpentine washes that Sorolla had used to cover huge background expanses were showing signs of erosion. 
 

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, “The Fish” (Catalonia), 1915

 about 12x15 feet, Hispanic Society of America

A glass-topped, counter-height cabinet that was in the center of the room has been removed, and now the sight lines are much better for the paintings, which have been lowered to almost eye level.  That cabinet housed Sorolla memorabilia, including faded photographs of some of the costumed models, whom Sorolla had most certainly painted directly from life.  As I was studying his magnificent murals, three middle-aged ladies were examining the photographs in the cabinet.  I heard one of them exclaim to her friends, “That’s what they really looked like!”  End of Story.  Not even the great Sorolla could win them over!

Lord, Didn't It Rain

Painting in Central Park, 2004, photo by Claudia Bousraou

Landscape painters have many amusing anecdotes to tell about all kinds of bad weather ruining their fun.  Indoor painters in the Northeastern states, on the other hand, complain about endless days of lousy natural light when it is too dark to paint, but wind and rain don’t usually alter our painting plans.  And if you don’t care how much more beautiful things look under natural light, with the dusty air surrounding them, or your studio is in a windowless basement, you can always put in some “daylight” bulbs and paint 24-7 to your heart’s content. 

So when indoor painters go outdoors to paint on occasion, Mother Nature has some special treats in store for them.  Indeed she does.

Over the course of seven summers, four of my old painting buddies and I trekked into Central Park one day a week to paint attractive young girls posing on a rock in our plein air studio near Fifth Avenue and East 72^nd Street.   I was the nominal leader of the group because I booked the models.  I wanted to paint two or three days in a row on each model to get more than just another quick sketch, which we were all doing as regulars at the Saturday morning members painting class at The Art Students League.  I wanted to make a really important outdoor painting with a model, just like Frank Weston Benson did so many times with his beautiful young daughters!  You’d think the other old painters would love to do that.  We’re all old guys.  With the exception of one of the guys who was still working full-time, we had nothing better to do than paint whenever we wanted.  But no, no, no!  “I’ve got to do this tomorrow.  I’ve got to do that tomorrow.  The wife wants to do blah, blah, blah,” and on and on.  

Painting more than one day a week would obviously have exceeded our ability to get organized.  And I wasn’t confident enough to paint from the model by myself in the tourist-congested park.  So it was settled.  We would paint just one morning a week.  And it absolutely had to be in the morning early in the week.  For one thing, the afternoon rush hour traffic would be rough for three of the old boys lugging their painting equipment and wet paintings on a crowded bus, subway and commuter train back home to Queens, Long Island and New Jersey.  And we knew there would be fewer people in the park to ogle us and our fully clad models than there would be on the weekend.  So it was finally settled.  We would paint from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on a Monday or a Tuesday, the exact same schedule we all were used to at the League on Saturdays!  Of course this resulted in ending at high noon when the lovely morning light we began with was now the scorching hot overhead light of the sun, completely altering the light effect on the model at a time when we were just about to put the finishing touches on our masterpieces.  The shadows that began on one side of the model were now on the other, and so on.  What a catastrophe!  But what fun we and our girls had!

Our biggest concern was the unpredictable summer weather.   Every morning at 6 a.m. or so on the Day of Atonement, we all began looking out our windows at the sky to see what Mother Nature had in store for us.  And every day when the sky was clear it rained, and every day it looked like it would rain it didn’t, or so it seemed.  None of us were into computers or the new texting thing, so we were on the phone to each other around 7 a.m. when it seriously looked like rain for the morning.  But not being potato farmers, it was impossible to tell by intuition alone.  So we usually chanced it and were rewarded more often than not with passable weather for painting.  One day our scheduled model was sure it was going to rain, so she rolled over in bed and went back to sleep.  We had to "call 911" to get her out to the park in time for an abbreviated morning painting session, which resulted in one of my favorite sketches.

Courtney F., with our Underpass Shelter in Background,2006

One summer we tried working on the same painting of our models on two successive Mondays.  But the conditions were so different from week to week that it was like painting two separate paintings anyway.  I ruined my best painting because the background foliage had completely changed from one week to the next in late August and it was so cold on that second day that we were all freezing, especially the model and Ken W.  The problems with this arrangement were not all weather related.  For example, my other best painting was ruined on the second day when Courtney F., who had taken an attractive standing pose that I had painted almost to the point of perfection, immediately grew dizzy and fell to the ground, nearly hitting her head on a rock.  I only had the one canvas with me, so when she recovered and resumed in a seated pose, I was forced to continue to work on the background of my original painting while the other boys painted Courtney in her new pose.  I was not amused.   Other models also reported feeling slightly dizzy while posing still as a rock in the heady outdoor atmosphere.  The next year we went back to our usual routine of painting a different pose each week.

Gena Posing in the Rain, 2006

It seemed like we were playing Russian roulette with the weather once a week for seven summers.  We called off our painting beforehand a number of times and had a couple of washouts while painting.  During one of these unanticipated rainy days, the model Gena unfurled her umbrella and continued her pose for a while longer before we all got soaked and called it a day.

Near the end of our seventh summer, we took a chance on another 50-50 weather day.  We set up our easels on the same little knoll we favored most often, a beautiful spot with a couple of big rocks facing each other that we usually posed our seated models on to get either front or back lighting.  This no-name knoll is halfway between the popular Boathouse Restaurant and the Conservatory Pond, where kids sail their model boats and where the famous statues of Hans Christian Andersen and Alice in Wonderland are located.  It was a very convenient spot for us, because the nearby restaurant has public restrooms and the pond has a snack bar with outdoor seating, where we relaxed and ate lunch after painting. 

This little knoll was truly a glorious outdoor painting studio, particularly on a bright sunny day.  When we set up our easels at the beginning of each session, I often said out loud, “upon this rock I will build my church.”  At the end of our morning sessions, I would always look up at the marvelous light streaming through the canopy of trees.  It was a heavenly place on earth for painting our girls. 

Another advantage to this spot was its elevated location.  Tourists walking on the path between the boat lake and the pond wouldn’t see us if they didn’t look up.  If they did, they swarmed over us with their still and video cameras to regale, I presume, their friends back home with the antics of these old painters at their easels, and especially their lovely models posing so attentively.  The young women were not professional models.  They either worked alongside me at my part time job in Visitor Services at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or were friends or family of other staff members.  All were so wonderful that we made sure they were paid well for their trouble.

On this particular morning near the end of our seventh summer, though, the elevated location proved to be our undoing, because we never had a Plan B to escape the rain that eventually came, unwittingly choosing instead the nearest shelter, which proved to be a big mistake.

I felt that I had gotten a terrific start on my painting of Lauren R., who was particularly inspiring in a simple standing pose, leaning against a rock, which seemed to capture her nature so completely.  Al W., a well-seasoned portrait painter, suggested the perfect position for one of her hands and it made the pose work.  I knew this painting was going to be great, maybe my best one of the 40 or so paintings we managed to squeeze out of those seven weather-beaten summers.

Lauren R. Painted Just Before the Flood, 2008

During the first rest break, a few rain drops started to fall.  We thought we could get at least one more 25-minute session in, but it was not to be.  It started to rain heavily, so we all ran for the nearest cover, which was an underpass at the bottom of the knoll, leaving our paintings and all our painting gear to fend for themselves.  The rain turned into one of those impressive summer cloudbursts.  We were huddling in the tunnel with a few others, including a small group of rock musicians from Europe, joking and getting acquainted and hoping to wait out the storm in dry comfort.  But then a torrent of water began pouring off a neighboring knoll, heading straight for the low-lying tunnel.  In the blink of an eye the water was ankle deep.  The downpour was relentless, so we were trapped in the tunnel, with no nearby shelter on higher ground to run to.  The surging water kept rising.  When the rain let up a bit I rushed out of the tunnel and headed up the knoll to see what damage had been done to my painting.  Some of the others decided to wait a little while longer before leaving.  The water kept pouring into the tunnel until our sweet model was standing nearly waist deep in it. 

The rain finally stopped, and my buddies and Lauren went back up the knoll to survey the damage.  Al W. was working in watercolors and his painting was erased completely.  The rest of us had been working with oils, so our unfinished paintings survived pretty much as we left them, but the umbrellas had been knocked over and everything else got a thorough soaking – French easels, rolls of paper towels, equipment bags and ourselves.  The park was a soggy disaster scene.  We paid our courageous, waterlogged model and sat on a couple of wet benches for awhile to discuss the meaning of life, before taking our thoroughly soaked selves out of the park to head homeward. 

After painting one more model in the park that summer, we decided to call it quits.  One of our little band of painters, who was like a cheerleader for these outings, had recently died at the age of 86.  And I got tired of all the weather watching and model scheduling concerns.  But I have never had as much fun in my life as when I was up there on that hallowed knoll painting one of our lovely, considerate girls on a balmy summer day with my old buddies. 

I sang jauntily to myself while rolling my painting gear all the way from my apartment on Broadway and West 75th Street to the bench in the park at Fifth Avenue and East 72nd Street, where we and our models congregated before heading for the knoll.  For seven summers on my way through the park, I enjoyed seeing the same hard-working gardener watering Strawberry Fields, the lawn dedicated to John Lennon's memory just off Central Park West and 72nd Street.  While painting I was positively giddy with delight.   I was no stranger in paradise.  That was where I belonged.

At Our Gallery Exhibition in 2004.  From the left:  Chao-Min Liu, Research Chemist and Painter; Albert H. Wasserman, Portrait Painter; Al Herr, Courtroom Sketch Artist and Painter; Kenneth Wilkinson, Painter, and Me

Quiet, Model Posing

 

Alan Beeton, Artist’s Model Marguerite Kelsey, 1936, Private Collection

Not all artists’ models are created equal.  Those who work at art schools and sketch groups don’t need any prior modeling experience to get a job.  They just have to be willing to disrobe and hold a pose, without moving, for up to 25 minutes at a time in front of a group of rapt artists who consider sketching from the live model an enjoyable and necessary part of their work routine.

The perfect-body police are not allowed in the inner sanctum to muddy the waters for applicants.  Come one, come all, fat or thin, short or tall, beautiful or plain, handsome or ugly, perfectly proportioned or not even a bit--it doesn’t matter to us one whit.  Just be able to inspire us with your posing attributes and you will be accepted gratefully into this slightly offbeat, truly egalitarian alliance of models and artists.  That alone is something to shout about in this culture of ours, which is so insanely obsessed with physical appearance.

Holding a pose for extended periods of time, though, is not easy by any means.  Nor is the ability to maneuver one’s body into artistic poses.  Because of their own disciplined training, dancers and actors tend to make very good models.  Student artists, who know what poses artists like to draw, are generally good at modeling, as well.  Some neophyte models are naturals, and it’s wonderful to see a shy, awkward, novice become an inspiring model in just a few short months.

Other models never inspire artists with their poses no matter how many years they get paid to do it.  The inner radiance of a human soul emanating from the best artists’ models is inexplicably missing.  But the art schools have charitable hearts for the lifeblood of their existence, so they keep booking some of these models, who are dependable and often find it hard to get other work to help pay their bills.

I often speculate that there are deeper issues beyond the modest paycheck that motivate certain people to pose nude for artists.  Some models seem extremely shy about their work, while others are just the opposite.  I’ve drawn and painted quite a number of models, male and female, who are very comfortable “in their own skin,” unlike, I might add, many of the artists who depend on them.  Some male models probably take to the posing stand because they enjoy showing off their muscular physiques.  I’ve also drawn models who take on the work for a few sessions just for the unique experience, including one well-known woman author, who was an excellent model, as a matter of fact.  Whatever the reasons may be, artists who want to continue the ancient tradition of drawing and painting the “human form divine” are forever in debt to our models, without whom we would be forced to copy photographs or concentrate solely on still life and landscape painting.

Today’s artists’ models usually do this work for only a few years to help pay for their college tuition or the rent while they pursue their own passion, be it in dance, theater or some other career.   Modeling jobs are available seven days a week, morning, noon and night, offering plenty of opportunities for models to continue to audition, rehearse, perform and attend college classes.  And popular models are able to get quite a bit of private modeling work from artists who can afford their hourly fees of $20 and up for the many hours it takes to complete a painting or sculpture from life.

Not many artists’ models view the work as a lifelong pursuit, but some ex-dancers, under-employed actors and others take up modeling again later in life as a way to earn extra income. 

 

John Everett Millais, “Ophelia,” Artist’s Model Elizabeth Siddal, 1851

Tate Britain, London

Things were a bit different for the profession in former days.  Artists’ models were divided into two classes – those who worked at the art schools and those who worked only privately for successful society and academic artists, who often shared their favorite models with their fellow artists. The Pre-Raphaelites immediately come to mind.  Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1829-1862), for example, was a red-haired model, poet and artist who was painted and drawn extensively by the Brotherhood and became something of a celebrity herself, like a number of other models favored by famous artists throughout history.

In her book titled “Painted Ladies,” Muriel Segal gives a witty but irreverent account of famous models for famous artists, beginning with Phryne, the model for many Venuses in 4^th Century B.C. Athens, and ending with Kiki, the once famous “Venus of Montparnasse,” who died in squalor in 1953 at the age of 51.  An interesting first-person account of modeling for artists appears in “The Naked Civil Servant,” the autobiography of Quentin Crisp, who worked for three decades as an artist’s model in England before gaining fame as a writer, actor and raconteur.

One possible explanation for this caste system in 19^th and mid-20^th Century England and France is there were a lot of famous portrait and figurative painters and sculptors whose lives were considered so interesting that the newspapers wrote stories about them and, sometimes, the models they favored.  The newspapers no longer write about figurative artists, other than Lucien Freud, who died two years ago at the age of 88.

By the way, we all know that there is quite a gender gap in this business of modeling for artists.  The model as muse is a woman.  There are a lot of drawn, painted and sculpted images of men, but they have patiently flexed their muscles for artists in relative obscurity, the self-promoting Quentin Crisp notwithstanding.  It has been my observation that 99 percent of the artists who attend the sketch groups, both men and women, prefer drawing female models.  It’s a bit strange, because the male nude is the centerpiece of many of the Old Master paintings we all revere.  A retired illustrator I knew would walk out of one sketch room at The Art Students League to try his luck in another as soon as a male model walked in.  “I never sold a drawing of a male nude,” Sol would explain defensively.  His drawings always made me laugh, because whether the model was fat or thin, she ended up on his sketch pad looking like an amply proportioned Barbie Doll.

Meredith Frampton, Artist’s Model Marguerite Kelsey, 1928, Tate Modern

One of the very last of the red-hot muses was Marguerite Kelsey (1909-1995), who was very much in demand in London during the 1920s and 1930s.  She would be booked months in advance before the important art shows at the Royal Academy and the Royal Portrait Society.  A former dancer, she could apparently hold her pose for up to four hours at a stretch!  “We’re going to make you tops,” Sargent reportedly said upon first meeting her, telling his friends at his club later that day, “I’ve just met a famous model.”  She became a celebrity model due to her “gracious form,” as one artist said.

Kelsey first began posing at the age of 15, and her enthusiasm for the bohemian art world she was so much a part of remained undiminished throughout her long life, according to those who knew her.  Richard Ormond, Sargent’s biographer, wrote that: “Kelsey's life as a model was a demanding one, requiring her to pose for hours on end in chilly studios, in return for a pittance, but the art world had been her life and she would do anything for those artists for whom she had given her devotion. She was a romantic, a woman of rare warmth and simplicity, who even in old age retained that immutable quality of beauty and radiance which had inspired (Meredith) Frampton and (Alan) Beeton,” both of whom created gorgeous paintings of Kelsey.

Kelsey preferred working with older male artists like Frampton and Beeton.  “She was a friend and confidante of these older painters, with whom she conducted intense, but platonic relationships,” Ormond wrote in the London newspaper, “The Independent.”  But she did eventually marry one of the many artists who painted her.  It was well-known that there were numerous liaisons between successful older male artists and their young models in years gone by.

Kelsey was once quoted as saying: “Alan Beeton was my god.  I was the only model he ever really used – he painted me for ten years, and educated me at the same time.  He taught me how to read and write, took me through the classics, showed me how to use a knife and fork in restaurants.  I owe him everything.”

She continued to attract artists as a model in old age, posing for a seated, full length painting by Peter Edwards that won a top prize in 1994 at the National Portrait Gallery competition in London. 
 
The abbreviated information about her modeling career is gleaned from Ormond’s newspaper obituary and a fascinating exhibition catalogue titled, “The Artist’s Model, from Etty to Spencer,” co-written by Martin Postle and William Vaughn, which traces the profession in England from the early 19^th Century to the late 1930s.

The late Aviva, a Popular NYC Artist's Model
for Many Years

Vaughn writes that models like Kelsey “had a strong sense of their own status.  Kelsey took pains to stress the difference between such stars as herself” and what she referred to as “the art school model.”  That distinction no longer exists.  And generally speaking, artists’ models of today, like the artists who paint them, are well off the radar of public opinion, for better or for worse.