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

Including Veronika

Veronika, ca. 1988, Oil on Linen, 16 by 14 in., Collection of the Artist

My Home Studio en Deshabille

Many  artists fall in love with portraiture when they are studying traditional painting methods at the art academies.  But when their school days are behind them, they quickly learn how difficult it is to make a living painting portraits, unless they are ready, willing and able to copy photographs of CEO’s, a popular “how-to” subject curiously omitted from Robert Henri’s inspirational bible, “The Art Spirit.”

I have often wished I could eke out a living by painting head and shoulders portraits from life on a regular basis for a couple of hundred bucks apiece.  Alas, for my sake only, I’m no clever entrepreneur, and dreaming about this was as far as I ever got.  Along with a plethora of character faults I’m saddled with, I blame my ill-suited home studio for not realizing this dream.  

You really need a grand space to paint portraits on a regular basis, and the wealth of an Arabian sheik to acquire that space in Manhattan.  Your regal sitters should not have to walk through slipshod living quarters to get to a cramped, cluttered home studio that used to be a bedroom in a middle-class, pre-war New York City apartment, and which most certainly was not designed for creating portraits in the grand manner. 

One of the problems with painting portraits by natural light in my home studio is that I have to paint very close to the two adjacent, average-size windows in the room to get enough light on my sitters and my canvas.   The light is further reduced because I block those windows with shades about three-quarters of the way up to get at least a semblance of the 45-degree angle of light that we traditional painters prefer.  One of my dealers was amazed that I could paint with so little light.  Well, the reduced, concentrated natural light is acceptable for painting still lifes, but inadequate for portraiture.   In essence, my painting area isn’t big enough and the light isn’t strong enough to allow me to explore a variety of poses to get the most flattering light effect on my sitters.  The two windows are in the middle of the short wall of the 11 by 20 foot room.  That’s another major problem.  I’m not able to back up far enough alongside that short wall to compare the sitter and my painting on the same plane and in the same atmosphere.  With necessary storage at both ends of the short wall, it’s really only about 7 feet of usable space for the model stand and my easel.

There are many accounts of the great portrait painters like Sargent and Philip de Laszlo getting a lot of exercise walking long distances back and forth as they painted.  Both men set their canvases beside their sitters.  Describing the visual phenomena necessitating all this physical activity is not an easy task.  “I must go fairly far off to see the general effect of my subjects as a whole in all that rightness of relation upon which I insist so much,” de Laszlo said in “Painting a Portrait,” one of a series of  little “how-to” books published in the 1930s by The Studio Publications of London and New York.  “When I stand back I am recording mentally what I am going to put on my canvas when I walk up to it.”   Not many portrait painters are able to work that way today, but we can still judge the proper values and general effect much better at a distance than we can up close.

I know that many painters today like to work close to their sitters at all stages of the painting to get that photographic detail they can’t live without.  But in addition to needing room to back up, I need a few feet of psychological distance from the sitter to be comfortable while I paint and talk to the people I paint; that is, on the few occasions when I do paint them in my home studio.  I’ve never had much demand for my portrait work.  Must I add, “With good reason?”

I probably shouldn’t complain, however, even though I’m good at it and it’s what some friends claim I do best.  I’ve heard about far worse situations from quite a few apartment dwellers who are also serious painters.  An easel set up temporarily in the corner of a living room is often the only option, given the outrageously high rents for tiny studio spaces in New York City.  Some urban artists just continue to paint in the art schools because it’s impossible for them to paint at home.

My friend Albert Herr (1923-2008), an excellent painter who had been one of the top courtroom sketch artists for television news programs for 20 years, initially had a similar home studio setup, with the daylight coming from large terrace windows on the short wall of a very long room.  Al painted a lot of portraits of paid models in his home studio, as well as many portraits of an Eastern European man who just loved getting his portrait painted by Al.  That man wasn’t wealthy, as far as we could tell, but he bought some of Al’s paintings of the models and paid Al $500 each time he sat for the dozen or more portraits Al painted of him.  The man got into trouble with his landlord, I was told, because he was a first-class hoarder.  His apartment was apparently piled to the rafters with his “collectibles” -- and Al’s paintings.  Al passed away and I never heard the outcome of his patron’s apartment problem.  I always wondered why the man wanted so many portraits of himself and why Al kept painting them, even though he was getting paid each time.  I’m sure the money came in handy.  But “no mas” is my usual reaction after painting the same face just a couple of times.

The point of introducing Al into my musings is that he gave up painting by natural light in his home studio at the suggestion of his friend Hananiah Harari (1912-2000), a well-known painter and popular teacher.  I once watched Harari paint a demonstration portrait at the Art Students League and was very impressed by how casually he went about capturing an excellent likeness of the model with a simple palette and a  direct painting method, with absolutely no gimmicks or drama involved.  Harari’s unusual name, by the way, was invented by his step-father, who thought it would be better suited for an “important artist” than his birth name, Richard Falk Goldman, according to a Wikipedia account that says a citation is needed for this tidbit.  

Harari told Al to forego painting by natural light and turn his setup around to paint by artificial light so he could back up more.  Al needed a lot of light to paint by in his later years, so he mounted eight of those long daylight fluorescent tubes vertically on a board, which he attached high up on a stand with wheels to easily adjust the angle of light.

I’ve also painted portraits under artificial light a few times in my home studio, using the original three-light fixture on the ceiling in the center of the room to light both the model and my canvas, and it worked out just fine, in fact far better than when I have tried to devise some other artificial light setup. With the sitter’s back to the darkened windows on the short wall, there is plenty of space behind me to back up to see what I’m doing.  I don’t know why I didn’t just give up painting people by natural light like Al did and use this overhead lighting all the time.  I guess it’s because of that plethora of character faults of mine that I alluded to above.

I painted Veronika under this light more than 20 years ago in two evening sessions of about two hours each, if I remember correctly.  What a wonderful and beautiful creature she was.  And she had such a perfect complexion.  I asked her to wear her leather jacket, which she accessorized with that lovely floral scarf tied neatly around her swan-like neck.  She was an excellent model and knew how to put together a very paintable ensemble.  Veronika was from Germany and an artist herself.  She had a husband living somewhere in Spain.  Or was he an ex-husband?  I don’t remember.  We chatted amiably while I painted.  I can’t remember what we talked about so long ago, but I remember how much fun it was to paint her and how nice it was to receive her flattering comment about the finished product.

I found Veronika when she was modeling in the late 1980s at Joe Catuccio's beloved basement drawing center on Greene Street in Soho, which was called “The Project of Living Artists.”  The setting was an immense live/work space that never received the light of day.  Joe slept behind a screen in a back corner and created his mural-size, boldly expressionist paintings in the huge workspace, where the drawing sessions were held evenings and weekends for 26 years, from 1971 to 1997.  The place was reeking with bohemian-artist atmosphere, not to mention sometimes as many as 12 cats roaming around foraging for food in the artists’ belongings they had placed on the floor beside their chairs while they were drawing the models.  Everybody in New York who was into life drawing back then probably has fond memories of Joe’s place, although I have met some spoilsports who said they couldn’t draw there because of the cats.  

I drew at the “Project” on Saturdays and some evenings every summer during the 1980s, a period when my usual drawing venue, the Art Students League, did not have open classes for members on weekends.  I loved drawing at Joe’s place.  I loved the casual, carefree, counter-culture tone that Joe had established through his art, his lifestyle, and his burly, soft-spoken presence.  He was always broke, but he scraped by somehow, doing odd jobs, like working for a moving company when necessary.  I contributed a little extra to the cause by always purchasing a cup of his fairly decent percolator coffee and a stale piece of coffeecake served up from his little kitchenette during the breaks. 

The models that posed at Joe’s place often seemed more interesting to me than the standard art school models I was accustomed to drawing.  Some of the “Project” models posed for a lark, like one famous woman writer I chatted with briefly, or because they were penniless at the time, like a female pop icon.  Robert Speller, an ex-dancer, booked all the models for Joe and some of the downtown art schools and independent drawing groups around the city for many years.  When a model didn’t show up, he would often substitute.  Speller played a very important role in keeping all those drawing venues supplied with models.  He was a true professional in a job that is too often left to disconnected amateurs at the full-time art schools.  And he was an excellent model himself. 

Joe moved his “Project” drawing center to Williamsburg in Brooklyn in 1997 when he was finally forced out of his basement rental space in Soho as a consequence of the booming real estate market in Manhattan.   The New York Times wrote an article about Joe and his “Project” in 1994.   You can find that article and information about Joe’s drawing center online.  And here is a link to his artwork: http://www.newyorkartworld.com/gallery/catuccio2.html.  The New York Times also wrote about Robert Speller’s art modeling career a couple of times and you can read those articles online as well.  I think I’ll write a separate blog post about my friend Al Herr at some point.  I never saw Veronika again after she posed so sweetly for that portrait.  I wonder how she got on with her life and art.   

With the passing years, I’m often awash in hazy, melancholic memories, and don’t even know how I got on with my own life and art.  But I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a plan.

Albert Herr, Courtroom Sketch

Drawings of Robert Speller, late 1980s

Z is for Zinnias

Zinnias and Onions, Oil on Canvas, 20 by 24 in.

Zinnia Painting described below, Oil on Canvas, 20 by 16 in.

I’ve gotten into a habit of painting pictures of locally grown flowers in the summer, and right now zinnias are in season and being sold at the farmers’ markets near my home studio on Manhattan’s fashionable Upper West Side, a painter’s paradise in The Year of Our Lord 2014, and home to throngs of artists who congregate in the local sushi bars to share trade secrets every evening after an invigorating day painting the urban landscape en plein air.

Two Saturdays ago, around 8:30 a.m., I walked 10 blocks south to the popular Greenmarket that sets up on Thursdays and Saturdays opposite Lincoln Center in Richard Tucker Square, which is actually a small triangular traffic island on Broadway, to see what flowers were available to paint that day.  What follows is a tedious account of a trivial pursuit that occurs with regularity in my humdrum existence.  It’s easier to write a thousand words than to paint a picture. 

Zinnias were being sold by two farms with stalls next to each other.  One of the farms had a dozen or more big plastic buckets jam-packed with large bouquets of zinnias for $6 each, but the zinnias appeared a little bedraggled.  They looked much fresher when I passed by the market on Thursday afternoon on my usual trek down Broadway to the Art Students League on West 57th Street to draw in the late afternoon life sketch class.  I spent about 20 minutes mulling over the selection, getting very little inspiration from the combinations of yellow, orange, red, and light and dark shades of violet in each bouquet.  One large bunch was comprised of a dozen bright yellow zinnias.  I gave that one quite a bit of attention, but decided it would be tough to assemble an attractive still life composition with all that yellow.  There is a lot of truth to something Degas once said, “What a horrible thing yellow is.”  There weren’t enough off-white zinnias in the bouquets to suit my taste either.

At the market stall next door, a young woman creates smaller bouquets on the spot for $5 apiece, so I “impulsively” bought one that looked promising, even though the fresh-looking zinnias were accompanied by stalks of snapdragons in complementary colors.  I have trouble painting the small, amorphous forms of snapdragons.  And it’s difficult to get the flower maven to custom-make an arrangement for me – she has her own way of doing things.  Besides, what do I expect for just five bucks? 

With the flowers now in hand, I wanted to hop on the M104 Broadway bus, which lets me off right in front of my apartment building.  But I didn’t see one coming, so I walked back to my apartment, greatly concerned, as always, that I was shortening the life of these fragile cut flowers by not getting them back in water right away. 

When I got home I cut the stems a bit and put the zinnias in a water-filled glass vase until I decided that this bouquet might look good in my recently acquired and somewhat unusual Japanese coffeepot with a quaintly decorated, flared base.  This turned out to be a big mistake.  But these flowers aren’t going to last long and you have to make decisions quickly.  I threw in some ice cubes in the pot and moved from the kitchen sink to my west/northwest natural light studio in the former bedroom of my apartment.  I plunked the vase down on the ledge of my upturned model stand, which I had draped with a gray cloth that kind of went with the gray background cloth I chose to pin on the wall behind the arrangement.

The ledge of that upturned model stand has lately been the primary staging area for my still life setups.  The sheetrock wall about 18 inches behind the stand is a good surface for accepting push pins to try out different-colored background draperies.  I’m a little depressed about this new use for my model stand, which I built because I love painting faces and thought I might get a little portrait business going when I sacrificed my life to painting years ago. That didn’t materialize.  And the older I get, the less inclined I am to wheedle and cajole people into posing for me.  That never worked for me, anyway.  As it often happened, the only people who wanted to be painted by me were people I didn’t necessarily want to paint.  But sometimes that resulted in a very good painting, so what do I know.  And I simply could not afford to pay for private models on a regular basis.  I’m reminded of Winslow Homer’s comment upon fleeing urban society for the desolate Maine coast when he got older.  “Leave rocks for your old age – they’re easy,” he told a student artist in 1907.  I’ll bet Homer didn’t waste his time painting zinnias.

The gray background cloth I chose for my zinnia painting gradually shifts from cool to warm gray without my permission as the sun heads west.  The important thing is getting the cut flowers down on canvas quickly while they are as fresh as possible, considering how far they have to travel in an urban environment.  If you are lucky, you can always harmonize any background color through trial and error with admixtures of the various flower colors, painting into and around the bouquet while the paint is still wet.

I did two paintings from this bouquet.  I got going on the first one at 10:30 that Saturday morning, about an hour after buying them at the market.  That’s really too late to complete the work in one three- or four-hour session under the same light conditions.  The natural light in my studio is pretty constant from about 8 or 9 a.m. until about 1 or 2 p.m.  But the afternoon sun gives my still life setup a much warmer look, with dark, crisp shadows, which looks great, but I don’t have the energy to start another canvas.  That’s why painters who work alla prima love true north light studios.  They can paint for longer periods without worrying about the colors and values changing dramatically.   I have read that some terrific painters like Sorolla and one of his students, Aldro T. Hibbard, were known to paint for hours outdoors on the same scene and then summon all their creative energy to complete their paintings with dramatic late afternoon light effects.  “Now, Estevenson, now is the time to paint,” a student named Stevenson recalled Sorolla exclaiming at the hour of reckoning.  That’s one painting “demonstration” I would love to have witnessed.

Cut flowers can last a long time unless you intend to paint them.  Then they start wilting and taking on different shapes immediately just to spite you, so you have to paint rapidly.  I’m familiar with a lot of different approaches to painting flowers from life.  Some artists paint the vase and surroundings first and add the flowers later, or vice versa.   As I’ve written before, Fantin-Latour painted the flowers against a background color he prepared the night before, and then painted like blazes on the flowers he had just cut moments before from his backyard garden, finishing them mostly in one session.  He then could complete the vase and touch up the flowers a bit at a comfortable pace the next day.   Some artists do a careful drawing of the design and paint one flower at a time.  Some take a flower and turn it several different ways to fill out the arrangement.  Some write books on how to paint flowers their way.  Some artists stoop to painting silk flowers.  Some even copy photographs of flowers, I’m told, as Cezanne’s dealer Vollard said was done by “the father of modern painting.”   And take note of what one of my teachers said about photographs of paintings when you look at the images of my zinnia paintings displayed with this blog post:  "A bad painting photographs better and a good painting photographs worse," said the late Frank Mason.  I don't think he was talking about just plain bad photography, though.  

Lots of determined realist painters avoid painting flowers from life altogether because they are restless models that can’t hold a pose.  It’s quite a challenge to figure out how to avoid a real disaster when painting flowers alla prima. 

I learned to paint directly from nature by working pretty much over the whole canvas without a preliminary drawing on paintings up to 24 by 30 inches or so.  This approach suits my impatient personality.  With turpentine-thinned oil paint, I indicate the approximate boundaries of the entire setup on the canvas.  The color of the paint I sketch with doesn’t matter much to me,  although it is usually raw or burnt umber.  I then move from flower to flower to estimate their relative positions by holding a brush handle at the proper angle.  When the rhythm of the design takes shape, I start washing in a thin local color for each of the flowers in their approximate shape before building up the paint.  I like to work from light to dark colors, hoping I can get by with using fewer brushes that way.   After that, I tend to forget what comes next.  I’m too busy painting to conjure up any real-time analysis. 

I sometimes wish I could be as analytical as other painters, but the act of painting for me is more of a spontaneous emotional experience than a meditation, and I can’t remember what I did from one painting to the next. 

On that score, many artists often have no idea how they produced a successful painting.  I can thank the eminently quotable Degas again for supporting that observation. "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things," said Degas.  I’ve known a few artists who find it extremely difficult to copy their own work when necessary because they can’t remember how they painted it.  A portrait painter friend was asked to recreate a woman’s portrait he had painted many years ago so the second of the woman’s two daughters could also have this wonderful portrait of their late mother. He said it was a most difficult assignment.

The first painting I did of these zinnias is just a formal arrangement, front and center, without any serious design effort, other than initially shuffling the flowers until the arrangement looked balanced and harmonious, at least to me.  As when painting all my subjects, I try my best to get the flowers to appear to exist in the same atmospheric space they occupy in my studio.  In my moderately impressionistic way of painting, I suggest the most obvious details, rather than try to render all the petals perfectly, which is really a tedious operation and beyond my patience and skill level.  There’s not much to say about this process.  It’s all just pushing the paint around to make the flowers on canvas look and feel right in the atmosphere that surrounds them.  I painted the zinnias pretty completely in the first three-hour session, but I had some trouble with the snapdragons.  I was pretty sure their plump little bell-like shapes wouldn’t change much in 24 hours, so I left them unfinished for the second painting.  But the next day, they had veered out of position in such a way that I was forced to invent a larger shape for the snapdragon stalk on the right to balance the composition.

Flower painting is hard enough, but painting that fancy coffeepot really drove me crazy.  The frieze at the top and bottom of the vase is a delicate floral design that is indistinct from my vantage point a couple of feet away.  I worked very hard to keep it as restrained as possible so it wouldn’t dominate the composition.  And I repositioned and repainted the body of the pot to have it straight on rather than at a slight angle as it was initially, which I hadn’t noticed until the second day.  It just didn’t look right probably because I was painting it as if I were viewing it head-on.  The bluish-white body of the coffeepot was giving off a beautiful glow and it was exciting to lay in the color with a big brush fully loaded with paint.  It looked fantastic until I had to subtly indicate the bulbous segments of the porcelain façade.  I threw in a snappy highlight and signed the painting, feeling pretty good about my effort.  But I then noticed that the symmetry was way off on the right side of the flared base.  As Sargent said, most of us have a bias to one side and painters should always have a plumb line handy to deal with symmetries.  I think a lot of us just paint some junk to camouflage one difficult side of a symmetrical object to avoid grappling endlessly to get it to seem right to our “biased” eyes.  Some artists like to draw such things perfectly before beginning to paint, but painting around a careful drawing is a technique I’m not much interested in.

After quite a number of tries to improve the symmetry, I was ready to give it up and come back for a fourth session -- way too much time for me to spend on a simple still life.  I was getting very agitated.  But about an hour before I headed off to draw at the League again in the late afternoon, I became frantically obsessed with this problem.  I had to find a solution.  I took my paints out of the freezer again and threw down the flower at the center right of the bouquet to hide the right side of the flared base of the pot so I could sleep that night.  

The paint was still pretty wet, but there was no way I was going to wait for it to dry in a couple of days to calmly add another flower over the dried surface or come up with another solution to my problem in the clear light of day.  So I really juiced up the cold paint with my trusty half-oil medium of stand oil and turps so the flower would stand up without becoming like Dali’s painting of watches, The Persistence of Memory. After 30 minutes of panicked hard labor I was finally through with this one.  I had said all I wanted to, and to be honest, all I could say.  What a relief!   Now my sun was shining again.  And later that afternoon I had one of my best life drawing sessions of the summer at the League.

The next day I took another newly acquired pot, put a few of the surviving zinnias in it, added an onion that’s been lurking at the end of the ledge for about two months now, and painted this small still life basically in one session.

Today at the farmer’s market on Columbus Avenue at West 77th Street it was cosmos from one vendor and two sunflowers from another.  I must be crazy to keep torturing myself this way.  Point me in the direction of those Maine rocks.  Oh, Lord, I'm on my way!

The Second Painting, Oil on Canvas, 14 by 12 in.

Oil on Canvas, 18 by 15 in.

Oil on Canvas, 24 by 18 in.