Thick or Thin

John Singer Sargent, Violet Sargent, his youngest sister, 1881, Oil on Canvas

 27.5 x 22 in., Private Collection

John Singer Sargent, Rose-Marie Ormond, the artist's niece, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 31 ½ x 23 in., Private Collection

John Singer Sargent, Corner of the Church of San Stae, Venice, 1913, Oil on Canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John Singer Sargent, Trout Stream in the Tyrol, 1914, Oil on Canvas, 22 x 28 in., Museum of Fine Art, San Francisco

I’ve always thought there was something second rate about many realist oil painters who paint thinly.  You might as well paint with watercolors if you don’t care about the exciting physicality of the oil medium.  I think the reason why John Singer Sargent stands atop the list of bravura portrait painters is because he wasn’t afraid to paint with a “fully loaded brush.”  Of course, you have to draw as well as Sargent to really pull it off.  But we can dream, can’t we?   Sargent was such a wizard with the brush that even his watercolors have the full-bodied look of oils. 

Whenever I’m painting, some of Sargent’s words to a student pop into my head.  One time he said, “The thicker you paint, the more color flows.”  And he always tells me when I’m painting glassware that, “If you see a thing transparent, paint it transparent; don't get the effect by a thin stain showing the canvas through. That's a mere trick.”  

 

Hendrick Ter Brugghen (1588-1629), A Jovial Violinist Holding a Glass of Wine (circa 1627), Oil on Canvas, 41 ¾ by 33 7/8 in., Private Collection

And while I’m painting, that admonition sets me to thinking of all those paintings of glassware we’ve seen where the vessel is merely indicated over a dark background by strokes of lighter paint to indicate the rim and base, and a crisp window highlight.  You know it’s a drinking glass, but you don’t get the weight of the glass in space by doing it that way.  You have to observe and interpret the three-dimensional form of the glass and the volume of whatever liquid it contains, if any, by accurately representing the variety of tones that distinguish the object from the background color.

There are probably dozens of other considerations that go through my head as I push the paint back and forth between a drinking glass and the background to get the glass to seem as real as it actually is in the atmospheric space in front of me.  I dislike discussing lost and found edges.  They are such an obvious cliché for most realist painters.  So is the observation that there are no lines in nature.  Both are very important considerations, however, when attempting to achieve the illusion of reality on canvas.  But if they are exaggerated, or manufactured by the artist, it looks like a gimmick and the illusion of reality is lost.

Richard Schmid’s people do a lot of that lost and found kind of painting today.  They get some punchy, high-keyed, decorative paintings with that technique.  Collectors and many painters seem to love their work.  You don’t see any real truth to nature in that approach.   But I guess many artists and art lovers today think creating an alternate universe is more important than being true to nature.  I’d say, “to each his own,” but I don’t really believe that when it comes to contemporary realism.  There’s still enough beauty of form and color to be found in nature with your own eyes, without resorting to stylistic gimmicks that are eagerly passed around from painter to painter.   Impressionists and expressionists can do whatever they want, as far as I’m concerned, to make an exciting painting.  And I love a lot of different styles of representational art, just not obvious brush-handling gimmicks exploited by their creators for whatever their reasons might be.  I personally can’t fathom why one painter would want another painter to handle the paint just like he does -- in his own peculiar but effective way, that is.   But I guess you can’t write instruction books, create videos and lead workshops without selling a bit of your soul in the process.

When I started painting and saw Sargent's work for the first time,  I was bowled over by the way he handled his edges.  The background tones might have been almost identical to the foreground object, but the subtle separation was often obtained by a solid stroke of a slightly different tone, whether it was a sitter’s cheek or a Venetian column.  The effect from a distance was a palpable realism.

Today’s “lost and found” edge painters owe a great debt to Anders Zorn, a much earthier human being than Sargent, who creates the same palpable realism on canvas over a wider range of figurative subjects with a comparable bravura technique in both oils and watercolors, without using a lot of paint to get the job done.   Some of his incredibly well-modeled female nudes seem to be merely stained with gorgeous flesh color, but the modeling of the form is still perfection itself.

Zorn’s female nudes are unmatched in the history of painting for their naturalistic, physical presence.  He seems to have done hundreds in his lifetime, the envy of all figurative painters, to be sure.  Some earlier painters, like Rubens, Boucher and Fragonard, for example, give him a good run for his money.  But we know that the charming nudes created by those earlier painters were a few steps removed from reality.  Not so with Zorn’s nudes -- front, back, sideways, horizontal, bending over, reclining or whatever.   Just between you and me, nobody ever painted more naturalistic, volumetric female derrieres than the great Swede.

Anders Zorn, One of his Swedish Sauna Paintings

While Zorn quite obviously delighted in painting the female form divine, I’m saddled with painting drinking glasses.  My mind races around with thoughts on painting as I continue slogging away, trying to get my drinking glass to seem every bit as real as a Zorn painting of a derriere.  “What a revoltin’ Development!”  When it’s all over, I forget everything until I paint another picture with a drinking glass in the setup.  And all I’ve painted is one damn drinking glass.  Now I’ve got all the other stuff in the still life setup to paint in order to bring them up to some degree of finish in harmony with that one glass.  In addition, I’m obliged to continue my incidental musings about all the encounters I’ve had with all the fascinating thoughts and daunting images from all the other great painters I admire.

A painter’s life isn’t easy, especially if you are hearing voices and following Sargent’s commandments!

William Orpen, The Studio, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 38 x 31.5 in.

Leeds Museums and Galleries, UK

But I have to let the great Irish master Sir William Orpen have the last word on thick or thin painting.  Like Sargent and other terrific painters in those days, Orpen didn’t seem to have much interest in talking about technique.  Those painters all learned a way to paint and that was that.   According to his devoted student Sean Keating, a wonderful Irish painter in his own right, “Orpen taught that sufficient paint to create the illusion of light and shade, of tone and color was enough.”  Keating said Orpen laughed at talk about “touch,” “impasto,” and other paint-handling techniques, calling it, “all that sort of tosh.”

When I came across that quote a couple of years ago, I was set free from the oppression of Sargent’s words.  Unfortunately, this freedom only lasts until I stand once more in front of a Sargent painting.  Then I start to dream again.

Rambling Around the Red Rose Girls

William A. Bouguereau and his Women's Class, late 1890s

Women's Life Class at the Chase School of Art, New York, 1896

What happened to all those women who studied art at the academies in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries? It seems that many just faded out of sight for one reason or another; their art legacies sealed in a trunk and stashed away in a relative’s attic for many years before finally being excavated.

Edith Lake Wilkinson

Edith Lake Wilkinson

Such was the case with Edith Lake Wilkinson, a gifted artist who was born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1868 and died in a mental hospital in 1957 at the age of 89, having spent the last 32 years of her life incarcerated for “depression.”  Seven years before she died, she was evaluated by one W.B. Rogers, M.D., in the following manner:  “Patient is quiet on the ward. Makes her own bed. Talks to herself and has numerous unusual ideas. In fact, everything she says is unusual. She is very talkative and imagines everything. Her physical condition is good but there is no improvement in her mental condition.”   That sounds an awful lot like me on one of my better days.  Back then, a little depression exhibited by women was cause for great alarm among family members, and often meant hospitalization and shock treatments that caused far more harm than good, as they did in my own sensitive mother’s case.

Edith Lake Wilkinson

Edith Lake Wilkinson

Edith Wilkinson studied with Kenyon Cox, J. Carroll Beckwith and William Merritt Chase at The Art Students League in the 1890s and returned later in the early 20th Century to study with Kenneth Hayes Miller at the League and Charles Webster Hawthorne in Provincetown, where she adopted elements of her mentor’s fresh, high-key style before she evidently stopped painting after landing in a mental institution for the rest of her life.  She clearly learned quite a bit about painting from all those great instructors.  Belying her presumed mental condition, her highly accomplished, modernist works are filled with light and life.  They are bright and cheerful across a wide range of genres -- figures, landscapes, townscapes and still lifes.

Edith’s story is chronicled in fascinating detail by Jane Anderson, an Emmy award-winning writer and filmmaker, who created a website to honor her great-aunt:  http://www.edithlakewilkinson.com.  It was Anderson’s mother who had opened a couple of trunks in her brother-in-law’s attic in the 1960s to unearth their talented relative, whose last years seem to have been such a pathetic waste of a joyful, creative spirit. Anderson grew up with her great-aunt’s work on the walls and was inspired to make art herself.  Following Edith’s example, she took classes at the Art Students League and always carries a sketchbook with her on her travels.   Her sketches seem to have the spirit of her great-aunt’s sketches.

Like a lot of single women artists in those days, Edith Lake Wilkinson had a long relationship with another woman.  It’s often not clear whether all those relationships that women artists forged with other women were sexual in nature or just a result of the natural human desire for companionship to weather life’s ups and downs.  No doubt for some serious women artists, it was a way to stay on course without having men around to muck things up.

Elizabeth Shippen Green

Jessie Willcox Smith

Violet Oakley, Penn's Vision is part of the series of thirteen murals Oakley painted for the Governor's Reception Room in the Pennsylvania State Capitol.

Elizabeth Shippen Green, Violet Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith and Henrietta Cozens in their Chestnut Street studio, ca. 1901

Anderson speculates that Edith might have been acquainted with the most famous of the lot, the extraordinary Red Rose Girls, illustrators Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935) and Elizabeth Shippen Green (1871-1954), and muralist Violet Oakley (1874-1961).  In 1899, those three artists took over the Red Rose Inn, a picturesque old estate on Philadelphia's Main Line, and vowed to live together forever and never marry.  They created art on their own terms in an environment of mutual inspiration, until Elizabeth Shippen surprised her comrades by getting married in 1911.  But Smith and Oakley remained true to their original objective and all three women continued to create marvelous art throughout their careers. 

Historical data and the way things were back then tell us it was pretty tough for women to juggle both a painting career and the demands placed on them by society to be housewives and mothers.  In those days, you couldn’t just copy a photograph while sitting at a kitchen table, sell it on the Internet and call yourself an artist.  You had to undergo rigorous academic training first to be taken seriously as a professional artist.  It was hard sledding for those women who kept at it. 

Every state in the union probably had a handful of strong-willed women artists who returned home after their academic studies to persevere against all odds and take a vital role in shaping the cultural life of their communities.

Elsa Jemne, The Chinese Screen, ca. 1924

Daniel Garber (1880-1958), Portrait of Elsa Laubach, ca.1912, Charcoal on Paper, 21 1/2 x 15 ¼ in.

Elsa Laubach Jemne, for example, was one of eight newly celebrated women artists who blazed a trail for art and culture in their home state of Minnesota in the early 20th Century.  Only four of the artists married and only Jemne and the portrait artist Frances Cranmer Greenman (1890-1981) had children.  

 

Frances Cranmer Greenman and Mary Pickford in front of Greenman’s Portrait of the Actress, 1935, eBay, Hyee Auctions

All eight artists supported themselves, often with art-related jobs they hated, but which they stuck with out of necessity. While in art school, Elsa did commercial art, which she described in her diary as "stupid, uncongenial, & maddening in its monotony."  

Elsa Laubach Jemne at her Easel, 1922

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1888, Elsa studied out East with two of my favorite painters, the still life painter Soren Emil Carlson at The Art Students League and Daniel Garber at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she was enrolled from 1912 to 1915.  Said to be one of Garber’s favorite students, she was a recipient of the Academy’s Emlin T. Cresson Award, which enabled her to travel to Italy in 1914, where she chose to focus her studies on fresco painting. World War I erupted and she had to return to America.  She went on to a successful career as a portraitist, landscape painter, muralist and illustrator in her home state under her married name, Elsa Jemne.  She achieved her greatest recognition for her many New Deal murals, which were executed in places such as the Hutchinson Post Office, the Stearns County Courthouse, and the Minneapolis Armory.

Elsa Jemne, Iron-Ore Mines Mural, Tempera, Ely, MN Post Office

Elsa Jemne, Wilderness Mural, Tempera, Ely, MN Post Office

Rejecting commercial art work, Elsa toted her painting supplies on Greyhound buses all over the Iron Range of Northern Minnesota during the Great Depression to create murals depicting local or regional themes. Sometimes she had to wait for the plaster to dry on the wall before she could begin her murals in tempera. She occupied her down time painting watercolors of the wilderness surrounding the communities.   She loved creating those murals and took great pride in them.  And her work must have been a lifesaver for her family, as well, because her husband’s architecture practice had dried up during the 1930s.

As an important Minnesota artist, Elsa Jemne was an inspiration to other women, and helped found the St. Paul Women's City Club to promote women's rights. She died in St. Paul in 1974 at the age of 86.

There is a wonderful account of Jemne’s work on a mural for the Post Office in Ely, Minnesota in 1940 written by Irene Grahek for The Ely Echo weekly newspaper: http://bit.ly/190YiWJ.  Grahek’s niece is married to Jemne’s grandson, and they provided details for her story.  When the Post Office mural was finished and the scaffolding came down, Elsa finally saw what she had accomplished and said, “I think it is good.” 

Of all those unrecognized women art students in days gone by, the two who abducted this little ramble of mine, Elsa Laubach Jemne and Edith Lake Wilkinson, had nothing in common, it seems, other than very similar academic art backgrounds.  Elsa was determined to make a living as an artist, and she succeeded.  We’re not sure about Edith's motivation.  Some artists are just more interested in making art than selling it.  I think Edith was like that.  But if you don’t sell your art, what’s the point of making it? Thinking like that can be pretty depressing for any serious artist, let me tell you.

Twilight at the League for Saturday Models

Among my Saturday Models, photo by R. Nakaya

The Great Wall of 104 16x20s, composite photo by Yves Leroux

What’s wrong with the Administration, the Board of Control and most of the members of The Art Students League of New York?  Don’t they realize that the natural light entering the League’s north-light studios is worth far more to artists than any amount of money that can be offered by any fabulously wealthy, property-gobbling real estate developer?  Everybody else does.  All over Manhattan, skylight studios once rented by starving artists have been preserved and converted into designer apartments for mega-rich financiers and lawyers.

What should be of paramount concern for League artists who paint in those north-light studios during the day is the inevitable loss of natural light that will result from the impending construction next door of Extell Development Co.’s residential condominium skyscraper, which will include a hotel and a Nordstrom department store on the lower floors.  It will be the city’s tallest building and could rise anywhere from 1,423 to 1,550 feet.  That’s extremely bad news for the light at the League.  But Extell also wants one-third of its residential tower to cantilever high in the sky over part of the League building in order to give its billionaire condo investors a peek at Central Park around a 920-foot apartment tower that will be built right behind it by Vornado Realty Trust.  That skyscraper will block even more of the natural light entering our skylight studios.

I wrote about the imminent loss of natural light in the League studios in my previous post.  Our Board estimates that if Extell builds its skyscraper straight up it would block 20 percent of our light, and the cantilever would further reduce the light by up to nearly 5 percent.  I’m guessing that those are very low-ball estimates and that a minimum of one-third to one-half of our natural light will be gone forever when both skyscrapers are completed.  Good morning, Mr. Edison, and welcome to the League.

I suppose I’m one of those cranky artists that Michael Kimmelman mentioned in a Dec. 23 article in The New York Times under the headline, “Seeing a Need for Oversight of New York’s Lordly Towers.”  At the end of his article, Kimmelman writes, “Members of the Art Students League haven’t yet voted whether to approve the sale of their air rights to Extell for the Nordstrom Tower. While the league stands to gain millions, cranky artists might still succeed where Landmarks failed, and shelve the cantilever. Here’s hoping they do.”  

In the late 1970s, I spent a little over two years studying figure painting at the League in Studios 6 and 7 on the fourth floor.  I came to appreciate the exquisite beauty of flesh color as revealed under the unparalleled light of day streaming through the skylights in those studios. I’m hopeless at describing visual effects, but suffice it to say that artificial light is simply crap by comparison when it comes to painting flesh.

Under artificial light, colors are delineated very clearly by value and hue, but they have absolutely no sensual appeal.  All subtle tones are lost, along with the delicate blue/gray atmosphere that embraces everything under indirect daylight from the north and can cause you to swoon at the first sight of an onion bathed in such atmospheric light.  Artists drive themselves crazy searching in vain for a passable studio lighting system to substitute for nature’s light from the distant sun.

In the following 30-plus years, I have faithfully attended a Saturday morning painting class for members in one or the other of the five north-light studios on the top two floors of the League.  We never turn on the lights, no matter how overcast the sky. Those sessions with League models are often the highlight of my week.  I receive such emotional pleasure from these alla prima painting sessions that I can’t bear to paint over my portrait sketches, although I have destroyed some I considered miserable failures.  I have saved more than 400 of these sketches, mostly 16 by 20s.  

A couple of years ago, Chashama, a nonprofit arts organization, allowed me to have a show of more than 300 of these portraits in one of their temporary gallery spaces in the city.   My "Saturday Models" exhibit ran from March 22 to April 8, 2012 at Chashama 461 Gallery, 461 W. 126th St.  I honestly didn’t care if I sold any paintings.  I just wanted to pay homage to all the unsung League models who posed for me and my friends.  And I wanted to give my sketches a little fresh air.  As I wrote in my text accompanying the exhibit, “This exhibit fortuitously answers my prayer of deliverance for all these former easel companions of mine.  They remained stalwart throughout the usual stages of triumph and despair as I struggled to bring them to life, but soon after they were consigned to that burgeoning graveyard of superfluous paintings familiar to us all.”

You might have skipped the frosting in writing that yourself, but I’m pretty sentimental and pretty irrational about a lot of things.  In fact, I didn’t even publicize the show at the League, figuring the models have been painted so often they wouldn’t be interested in seeing the show themselves, and the artists who have painted the same models would probably all be chorusing, “My paintings of the same models were a lot better!”  

So it went unheralded at the League, and in the public arena, as well.  That was fine by me, but a few friends and a few strangers did buy some of the head sketches for $100 apiece.  I threw in one or two for free to people who said nice things about my work.  And a very sweet elderly woman I forgot to get the name of walked out with two of my paintings under her arm without paying me on the spot, although several months later she did send me a check for them.  I had a swell time sitting in the huge warehouse/gallery, mostly all alone, listening to cassette tapes on my really great $20 flea-market boom box, the first one I’ve ever owned.  The paintings and I were on holiday for a couple of weeks, that’s all, and most of them came back home with me to reestablish their superfluousness in perpetuity.

I love the League and was horrified when one of the paintings on a web album I created for the exhibit ended up as the first item in a Google Image search for The Art Students League.  I almost passed out from anxiety.  My insignificant image should not be sullying the grand tradition of the League, where just about every famous American artist you can think of spent some time studying or teaching.  I panicked and deleted the image and the album, which resulted in the deletion of all the images from my hard drive, leaving me with only a few shaky, hand-held images of the exhibit that I hadn’t uploaded to the album. 

Now Extell and my beloved League are poised to dim the natural light in the studios and spoil my Saturday fun.  Like Ralph Rackstraw, the lowly seaman in HMS Pinafore, this Extell affair has plunged me into a “Cimmerian darkness of tangible despair.”  I’ll ask this one more time, “Why me, Lord, why me?”

Twilight at the League

The Art Students League of New York, 4th Floor Skylight Studio

4th Floor Skylight Studio

I wonder if anybody really cares anymore about painting indoors by daylight alone.  The reason I’m wondering is that The Art Students League of New York, my social club and workout facility for drawing and painting, will soon have none of it left in its historic north-light studios, at least not enough to paint by.

Maybe natural light is not so important for artists anymore.  But the north-light studios on our two uppermost floors have been the pride of the League since we moved into our current home, The American Fine Arts Society building on West 57th Street, way back in 1892.  That same year, Frank Vincent Dumond began teaching his principles of painting under the glorious and nonpareil light of day, or, more precisely, cool, indirect north light, which transforms the humblest of objects into the rarest of gems.  Dumond famously held court for 59 years in Studio 7, the biggest and best studio on the fourth floor, until his death in 1951.  His long-time student Frank Mason took over the class for another 57 years, until his death in 2009.  And Mason’s long-time student Thomas Torak continues to hold forth to this day in that very same studio. 

Double check my math, but that’s 121 years worth of unbroken tradition at this 138-year-old independent art school, which has been run by artists for artists since its founding in 1875.

Allyn Cox Drawing Class, Natural Light, 1st Floor, Glass Roof, 1940

Clay Sculpture Studio in Basement. Best Natural Light in the Building

Keith Gunderson, Morning Light, Clay Sculpture Studio, Oil on Canvas

There seems to be no huge outcry from the many students and instructors who frequent the five north-light studios on the fourth and fifth floors, the etching studios on the third floor, the drawing studio where Robert Beverly Hale taught anatomy for many years on the 2nd floor and the clay sculpture studios in the basement, so perhaps the answer to my question is “no” everywhere in the world today, with maybe a slight sigh of resignation from a few old-timers.  It seems like the best realist painters in America are dispensing with daylight entirely in their studios and are shining very bright artificial light on their subjects so they can paint them photographically.  Besides, artificial light is far more constant than even the best north light.  It provides fixed patterns of light and shade and makes rank amateurs happy painters.

Here at the League, two massive skyscrapers that will be erected next door and behind us over the next five or six years will probably snuff out most of the remaining natural light entering our studios.  Our light is already greatly compromised because of the construction of taller buildings to the north over the years, including a boarding school for the St. Thomas Episcopal Church boy’s choir.  That building reflects a noxious orange light into the north-light studios at certain times of the day.

Early Photo of the League Building on West 57th Street

Recent View of the League Building

Renderings of Extell's Skyscraper next to the League

Extell Development Co. will be erecting the tallest building in New York City right next door, an 88-floor behemoth that could rise to 1,550 feet if Extell decides to go ahead with its original proposal.  Final plans have not been divulged by the developer, but a height of 1,423 feet is the current projection.  The top 74 floors of the skyscraper will be a residential condominium tower, with a department store and hotel on the lower floors. 

A majority of The Art Students League members stupidly voted in 2005 to sell most of the League’s air rights to Extell for $23.1 million so the developer could build “higher.”  We just didn’t know how high at the time.  We thought maybe 40 floors or so.  Many of us voted "no" because we were sure the deal spelled trouble for the League down the road.

Former George W. Vanderbilt Gallery, about 1920. Currently divided into six studio classrooms

Our Board planned to use part of the “windfall” to recreate an exhibition gallery in the rear half of the first floor, a double-height, one-story structure with a glass roof that stretches north to West 58th Street.  That space was once the magnificent George W. Vanderbilt Gallery, which was completed in 1893.  The League converted that space many years ago into drawing and painting studios.  We also had plans to create two additional floors of natural light studios over that part of the League building.  Neither plan was carried forward.

Rendering of a Ground Level View of Extell's Cantilever

Now Extell wants to suspend one third of its residential tower as a cantilever over that part of our building to avoid having views of Central Park blocked by another skyscraper to be built right behind it on West 58th Street.  At least that’s one theory for why Extell wants its egregious cantilever over our building.

The League’s students and instructors don’t seem to terribly mind having this monstrosity hanging over the fully occupied studio classrooms located directly under the glass roof, which is now covered by ½-inch thick sheets of plywood and bitumen roof paper to keep the rain out.  In fact, 63 League instructors have even signed a petition in support of our Board’s recommendation to accept $25.8 million from Extell for our permission and more of our air rights so it can build its cantilever tower.  The League’s membership must ultimately approve or reject the sale and will vote on it later this month.

During the five-year construction phase of Extell’s skyscraper, I can imagine that protective netting and sheds and whatnot will obstruct the light entering through the League’s skylights and studio windows.  But we don’t yet know the extent of the protections, or how much natural light, if any, will enter the studios during construction.

Painters like me who prefer painting by natural light know that technical studies of reflected light and shadows, along with educated guesses, won’t give us the answer to the future of natural light at the League.  We know from experience with the church boarding school behind us that we won’t find out until the completion several years from now of Extell’s skyscraper and that other skyscraper behind it on West 58th Street, a 920-foot giant just north and a little to the west of the League. 

The League for many years has been the owner and sole occupant of the American Fine Arts Society building at 215 West 57th Street, which has been designated a city landmark.  In order to build its cantilever over our landmarked building, Extell had to win approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Extell says it will commence its tower about 30 floors above the roof of our five-story building.  It will be like having permanent space-station pieds-à-terre in the sky above us for billionaire investors from the Middle East and Far East.

Extell Excavation Site with one of the League's 4th floor skylights in the lower left-hand corner, recent photo by Andrew McKeon for YIMBY website

The Landmarks Commission did not examine numerous safety issues regarding the excavation and construction phases of Extell’s skyscraper right next to our historic art school, which is open seven days and five evenings a week for art classes and workshops.  Being unaware of the Commission’s seeming lack of empathy, I even went to its hearing on Extell’s cantilever proposal to prattle on nervously about a “Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads” and the like, before being cut off just short of my brilliant summation, having exceeded my allotted three minutes.

Many other opponents of the cantilever also testified about safety, loss of light, shadows on Central Park, outsize scale, community input, inadequate compensation, etc.  After the testimony, both pro and con, the Commission Chair said, “Thank you very much,” and the Commission immediately took a vote to approve Extell’s cantilever 6 to 1.

All the Commission was tasked to consider, we learned, was whether a guy 6 ft. 4 in. tall would look directly across the street at the League and see the cantilever.  The Commission knows that in New York City nobody ever looks up for fear of stepping in something in their path.  Oh, and lest I forget, Extell, the Commission, and the Art Students League’s governing Board of Control, which is pushing for the sale, all confidently predict that the cantilever will have minimal effect on the light entering the League Studios.  Yeah, right!

It looks like Extell’s cantilever is a done deal, thanks to our foolishness for selling the developer our air rights in the first place back in 2005.

We don’t have to lose heart just yet, however.  Here is an online exchange between two readers of a New York Times article about past and future development on West 57th Street:  “But don't the studios in the Art Students' League need light?”   “$20M buys a ton of fancy bulbs.”

Well, we all know you can’t count on anything being around forever.  Not even daylight.

Art is a Business

William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), The Painter’s Triumph, 1838, Oil on Panel, 19.5 by 23.6 in., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Painters don’t necessarily subscribe to a trade magazine for the arts because they like its content.  Some just enjoy being tortured emotionally from a distance.  How else can I explain renewing for a second year my subscription to The Artist’s Magazine?  Almost nothing in its current issue was of genuine interest to me and almost all of it annoyed me.

Take the cover of its current issue, for instance.  It celebrates as “breathtaking” an oil portrait made to look like a photograph, but without the seamless unity of same.  The result is something that almost resembles a human face, but not quite, when given more than a momentary glance.  All the little changes in color and value are carefully executed and fused.  But they are slightly out of sync and distracting from the whole, resulting in that “humanoid” look all photographic oil portraits convey when examined more closely than is warranted.  A flat facial plane showing no sign of the creator’s involvement in the process via exciting brushwork or beautiful flesh color are the main characteristics of such work.  In this portrait, for example, the nose is lying flat against the cheek, with no sense of the inch or more of air space that separates the two.  All the areas where discrete accents would bring life and dimension to the face are mushed together indecisively.  The flesh color is bland and generic.  A blow-by-blow examination of this portrait would be tedious in the extreme, so just give it more than a momentary glance yourself and you will see what I mean.  But why bother, would naturally be your response to my suggestion.  Should be good advice for me, as well, but I hate effusive praise of the objectively unworthy with a passion.

The American Impressionist Robert Philipp, one of my teachers at The Art Students League, used to bluntly admonish his students when painting from the model that “you gotta make ‘em look human.”   That’s all.  You can’t get your portrait to look human by painting from a photograph or painting photographically from life.  You have to will the portrait to come alive on your canvas as you observe, and feel empathy for, the living, breathing characteristics of the sitter posing in front of you, for as long or as short a time as it takes to reach your goal of a lifelike portrait.  A quick head sketch executed from life, even if it borders on caricature, often has far more human qualities than a polished portrait that took many days to accomplish, with or without the sitter in place.  That point was made in the only article in the current issue of the magazine that interested me.  One 18^th Century British portrait painter used to put down his brushes as soon as he heard an on-site witness utter, “that looks just like her.”   

No oil portrait created in the last 75 years or so can honestly be characterized as “breathtaking.”  Sargent, Zorn, Sorolla, et al are long gone, and the art world is a much different place now.  Painters today either can’t paint as well as the aforementioned, or wouldn’t have the slightest interest in doing so.  But critical judgment is cast aside when you have to fill the pages of a periodical with articles on substandard art in order to give your faithful readers the confidence that they also can create substandard art. 

The situation is worse than ever now, since American Artist magazine was taken over and eliminated by the publishers of The Artist’s Magazine.  So this is the last industry magazine of its kind, other than that Professional Artist magazine, which used to hawk outdoor art shows and juried competitions under a former name and is now gearing up for prime time.

When I read these magazines to recharge my annoyance battery, I tend to forget that art is a business like any other and the passion painters felt in former times to chronicle their world is no longer of paramount importance. 

A good case in point is an article in the current issue of The Artist’s Magazine that celebrates paintings of isolated houses and barren interior rooms that look just like snapshots taken by a photographer who couldn’t seem to find any worthwhile center of interest through his viewfinder.  The rather large paintings have no intrinsic visual interest in color, form, brushwork or subject matter, at least in reproduction, and apparently exist merely to prove that the artist can copy all the straight lines of a clapboard wall or all the segments of an old cast-iron radiator under a window.  How exciting is that!  Repeat after me, “Just take a photograph.”  Apparently the only passion evoked in these trivial exercises was in the artist’s yeoman struggles with the elements as he lashed his easel to the ground to tepidly copy some of his subjects en plein air.  It’s hard to believe that while standing on terra firma in the great outdoors, surrounded by the beauty of the natural world, he was inspired to paint photographically.  The artist accompanies his paintings with a turgid essay on “fertile metaphors” and the like in an attempt to obfuscate the intrinsic visual blandness of the work itself. 

What can I say?  It’s an art world I never made.  But it’s just like the sage advice given for all bad things foisted on the great unwashed by mercenaries.  “If you don’t like it, just ignore it.”  That certainly narrows the field for me.