At the end of the day

Progress report

HERE ARE TWO PAINTINGS I started some time ago, paintings on which I just resumed work. The little rowboat is was spotted catching sunlight in late May from between the planks of the dock at Islesford on Little Cranberry Island, Maine.

The young lady is another imaginary beach queen wearing a paper crown. James McElhinney with whom I've worked for several years at the Art Students League in New York refers to this kind of pose as "one of the mud-flap girls."

Exhibiting at the Salmagundi Club

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, the Salmagundi Club is a grand old artists' organization on Fifth Avenue just below 12th Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. It's a couple of blocks north of Washington Square.

The above oil painting of my wife is there in a juried portraiture show along with works by other notable artist members.

Plein Air at the Vanderbilt Museum, Centerport

I HAD A GREAT TIME yesterday afternoon and evening painting on the grounds of the Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium. Heavy clouds and predictions of thunderstorms threatened our afternoon but by 4 o'clock or so it was clear that blue sky was taking over and we'd have a nice evening.

It was fun painting in the good comapny of accomplished painters like Anthony Davis, Jane McGraw-Teubner, Esther Marie Chagaris and David Monteiro.

At 6 pm the grounds opened up for the annual Northport Rotary Club's "Wine in the Courtyard" celebration and 700 paying guests surveyed our efforts for the day. The two images shown here 14 x 11 and 11 x 14 inches respectively were what I had to show for a day spent admiring the view across Centerport Harbor from the bluff behind the mansion, looking off toward Asharokan and farther still toward the Connecticut shore.

Gary Erbe's trompe l'oeil painted collages

I went into NYC Saturday to drop off a couple of paintings for two upcoming shows at the Salmagundi Club. If you don't know this grand old place, you should stop in for a visit. It's one of the oldest art organizations in the country. The club occupies a townhouse built in the 1850s on lower fifth avenue just a few blocks north of Washington Square. The building has been used in a number of movies, most recently the club library was used in "The Good Shepherd." But I'll save all that for another posting.

Saturday was the last day of a wonderful retrospective exhibit by Gary Erbe, an artist one might describe as a hyper realist, in the tradition of William Harnett and John Peto. But unlike those 19th century masters Erbe often works quite large. You can see a great many of his works on his website but there's nothing quite like seeing them in person. Some are very large indeed.

One theme that fascinated me was a series of paintings of abstract collages. The textures of papers overlapping each other are minutely examined and delineated in paint. But what makes these works unique is Erbe's reverence for the abstract, perhaps a rather unusual quality for one who works so hyper real.

I was fortunate enough that when I saw this exhibit that Erbe himself was there and we chatted for a few moments. I told him that I was flattered to see two newspaper front pages done long ago at Newsday (where I was director of design) were included in one of his largest paintings ("Subway Series"). I assumed that he had included the Newsday front pages because he lives on Long Island where the paper circulates.

"No," he said. "I live in Hoboken."

He had simply included those newspaper front pages because he thought they were particularly graphic. And so I was flattered all over again. Erbe may be as charming as he is talented.

Erbe's website: http://www.garyerbe.com/

Finished... Again

This little yard-side scene was up the road from where we stayed on Little Cranberry Island in Maine at the end of May. The top image is a reference photo I took for this painting. The finished painting is 24 by 30 inches, oil on canvas.

Although I signed this painting and considered it finished more than a week ago, I just went back into it and added a bicycle to the porch. It's an illustrative detail that may not add anything aesthetic, although I like the way reds and greens play off each other in this painting, along with the complimentary relationship between the maroon and the yellow. But I liked the addition of the bike for some sort of story-telling quality that the detail adds.

And as you can see from the reference photo, I chose to change the color of the shed in the background and lose the bush in the center.

Movies about artists... waiting to be made into films

Here, again in no particular order, is a list of artists about whom interesting movies could be made. In one or two cases, it's really surprising that we don't have movies given the colorful details surrounding some of these artists.

Whistler was such a flamboyant character and his famous lawsuit for slander would make for fun cinema as well as his notorious painting of Madame X (in which he portrayed her with the strap of her dress fallen down her shoulder only to repaint it with the strap up after enormous public pressure.) Wouldn't all this have made for a great film? Where are Merchant and Ivory when we need them?

Salvador Dali. I mean, really, the old boy must be squirming in his grave knowing that after all his publicity stunts, his weird behavior, bizarre relationships and influential art, mugging thousands of times for photographers with that ridiculous mustache, nobody has bothered to make a movie out of his life. It's not like there's a shortage of material here.

Joseph Cornell. If you've ever read Deborah Solomon's wonderful and cleverly named 1997 biography, "Utopia Parkway," you'll know that the weird banality of this man who lived with his mother and his sickly brother might make a movie very different from the kind we wish for from Dali's life. Cornell's surreal (some would say creepy) boxes, tacked together in his Queens basement, were part of a very different life punctuated with visits from other, younger adoring artists or chauffeur-driven visits from people like actor and collector Tony Curtis who enjoyed taking Cornell out for rides in the limo. Think Grey Gardens focused on a hapless but successful artist.

Andrew Wyeth and the Helga paintings. The secret paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Was this a great marketing ploy played out to gain enormous publicity? The almost reclusive Wyeth found himself on the covers of Time and Newsweek the summer this body of work was revealed. But if, as Wyeth himself declared, the paintings were about "love" and the whole decade-long depiction of Helga in these images had been a secret kept from Betsy Wyeth, then how is it that Helga was retained as part of Betsy's staff for so long after the revelation of this work? (Betsy Wyeth oversaw the licensing and archiving side of the Wyeth image empire.) Was the secret aspect of these paintings a case of marketing hype or was this a case of one woman who knew that you keep your friends close and your enemies closer?

Robert Henri. An artist with a made-up name he acquired because his father had shot a man out west, fled to the east coast and gave everyone in the family a different alias to protect them from the scandal should he ever be caught. Henri was THE influential teacher of so many beloved American painters and yet his own art was only of moderate commercial success. His little sayings and quips in the art schools were collected by Margery Ryerson, one of his students, and have never been out of print even though Henri died 80 years ago. He loved painting portraits but did not have that many commissions. That left him free to do things like paint portraits of Irish urchins that charm us to no end today. A list of his students and followers reads like a Who's Who of American Art: Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Stuart Davis, Bellows, Prendergast, Lawson, Davies...

If you've read this far, you're probably the sort of person who has his or her own list of candidates for bio-pics.

Movies about artists

I took a summer course in July, here at Hofstra University where I also teach. The course, was taught by Professor Alexander Naymark and met four days a week for 2 hours ten minutes each afternoon. The curriculum examined how artists' biographies are portrayed in the movies. For 16 days we watched a lot of movies about artists. Most were made for entertainment, not as documentaries.

Some, like The Girl with the Pearl Earring, are largely fiction because in the case of Vermeer, for example, we don't know much about the artist and we know even less about his family and life. So when the film imagines him with a shrewish wife and a controlling mother-in-law, we are left to wonder how likely that really was. We do know that his Catholic family had eleven children. It wasn't easy being an artist, even in Holland's so-called Golden Age.

In other cases we have a great deal of information about the artist portrayed, particularly artists of more recent history. Basquiat is a wonderful film made by another artist (Julian Schnabel) who knew and exhibited with Basquiat in some of the same galleries, at more or less the same time.

Here is a list (in no particular order) of some of my favorite movies about artists:

Rembrandt (1936) Charles Laughton in the title role and Elsa Lancester as Hendrickje Stoffels. Laughton seems to have had a great time with this role and, judging from recent Rembrandt bios and research, his portrayal may not have been far off the mark.

Basquiat (1996) Jeffrey Wright in the title role and a youthful Benicio del Toro as his close friend, David Bowie as Warhol, also Willem Dafoe in a cameo of sorts, Christopher Walken, Courtney Love and Tatum O'Neal

Goya's Ghosts (2006) Milos Forman's movie was around for about ten minutes when it was released in 2006. Like Girl with a Pearl Earring, it is a piece of fiction using some historical figures. Stellan Skarsgard is endearing as Goya. Randy Quaid is a delight as the oafish Spanish King Carlos IV. Natalie Portman is the beautiful young woman tortured by the Inquisition. Javier Bardem is the evil and powerful cleric of the Inquisition.

Moulin Rouge (1952) If you can get past the corny device of having Jose Ferrer simultaneously play both Toulouse-Lautrec and his disapproving father, the count, and if you can get past a lip-syncing Zsa-Zsa Gabor as the chanteuse, Jane Avril, then this is a fun recreation of the time and place. The causes and details of Toulouse-Lautrec's early demise are conveyed in a simplified Reader's Digest style.

Surviving Picasso (1996) This was Merchant-Ivory at their best and although I don't think Anthony Hopkins was the obvious first choice to play Picasso, he does a terrific job. (Who else could credibly portray figures as disparate as Picasso and Nixon in one acting career?) Based on Arianna Huffington's book, the movie focuses on Francoise Gilot's ten years as one in a parade of wives and mistresses who had to live with this monster and creative genius.

Modigliani (2004) I'm not sure this film, which was written and directed by Mick Davis, got much exposure here in the U.S. when it was released but Andy Garcia does a great job of capturing the essence of the tragically creative figure. His no-less-tragic lover, Jeanne Hebuterne is played by Elsa Zylberstein. A beautifully sad story, well told.

Frida (2002) Julie Taymor does a pretty good job of capturing the essence and key points of Kahlo's art, career, personality and struggles, physical and otherwise. Selma Hayek and Alfred Molina as Kahlo and Rivera. After seeing this film again recently I went to an early 1980s edition of Encyclopedia Brittannica to see what it had to say about Kahlo. Nada. The artist did not exist for art historians until the mid 80s. In part, we have collectors like Madonna to thank for that.

Artemesia (1997) That would be Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), daughter of the more famous Orazio Gentileschi. French film with screenplay and direction by Agnes Merlet. With a lithe and tanned Valentina Cervi (photo, above) in the title role. This is a sexed-up version of a story only partly understood by historians. Artemsia studied with her father and then apprenticed with his rival, Tassi, who later finds himself charged with her rape. All the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller. Well done but not without some significant distortions to what facts we do know.

I've left Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy off my list of favorites. It's subjective, I know, but I find those two a little heavy-handed in that mid-20th century Hollywood kind of way.

Tomorrow: Artists whose biographies would make great movies.

My favorite art books

A number of artists I know collect how-to-draw books and books on anatomy for artists. When asked by other students at the Art Students League, I am happy to recommend the books by Joseph Sheppard, an American painter and sculptor who now lives and works in Italy.

If I am not mistaken, Sheppard was a student of Reginald Marsh. (I believe Sheppard is about 79 years old now.) You can see that there is a liveliness to Sheppard's rendering that seems to have derived from Marsh. But although Marsh taught anatomy and figure drawingand painting, he is not remembered today as a great anatomist. In fact, one instructor at the Art Students League recently recalled that Marsh was fond of saying to his struggling students, "When in doubt, add more muscles." That may be apocryphal but it seems like something Marsh might have said.

Sheppard's figures are much more convincing and accurately rendered. In the 1970s he realized that the anatomy that artists need to learn has very little in common with what doctors and biologists need to learn. Sheppard created a number of books on drawing the figure and, in them, he sometimes uses the term "surface anatomy," meaning the visible clues to anatomy that will be most valuable to an artist.

His drawings, some in pen and ink and others in white and dark chalk on toned paper are works of art that are as enjoyable as art as they are informative and demonstrative.

Yet another book by Sheppard deals with the painting techniques of the old masters. In this large format paperback, Sheppard takes his readers step-by-step through the techniques of Durer, Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio, Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer. It's fascinating to see how, in each case, the demo painting ends up looking somewhat like the work of the master being examined while nonetheless showing Sheppard's irrepressible animated style as well.

Most of these books are still in print. They are far and away the resource books I value most as a painter.