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Today's blog entry is in the works and will be posted sometime later. I am back from Maine, and then I went to Cape Cod to move paintings around. I have three pieces in a show at the Shipyard gallery in Hingham, Mass. All of the travel and deadlines lately have made it harder to be consistent with getting the blog written. Sorry, when I have to choose between business stuff and blogging I have to put the business first. Gotta eat.

I think things are going to lighten up around here now, and I won't be running so hard, I have a lot of unfinished art in the studio and dealers tapping their little hooves at me wondering when they are going to get it. My paintings often take a lot of time and I need to hole up with this unfinished art and get it out the door.
You who want to paint full time as an occupation, should know that you will get plenty of time painting and at the business of art (which I do poorly). You will get nothing else sometimes.

More Rockport memories

Aldro Hibbard painting in the collection of the Rockport Art Association

Much of the Rockport art colony revolved around the RAA (Rockport Art Association). The Art association was founded in 1929 and acquired an old tavern building built in 1789 at the very center of Rockport, essentially the best located property in town. Founded by a group of artists to show their art and promote the visual arts the RAA has been in operation over 90 years. Making it one of the oldest operations of its kind in the country. One of its founding members and Rockports most famous artist Aldro Hibbard was not the first president, but did serve as president for many years somewhat later.

An enormous gallery with barnlike proportions was built shortly during the depression and is now named in Hibbards honor. Behind that the smaller Maddocks gallery is also from the late 1700's. Admission to the RAA is free and visitors can see the work of up to several hundred artist members on display. membership is juried (in fact I will serve on that jury next year).

When I arrived in Rockport with no money I secured a very part time position as the janitor there. Here is that story.

I arrived at the start of winter and found as room in an inn that was willing to rent me a room at a very low weekly rate rather than have that room sit empty all winter. I gave them nearly my last dollar for the weeks rent. The owner of the inn mentioned to me that the RAA was looking for employees. There had been some kind of meltdown there a week or two before and the new president John Manship ( son of great American sculptor Paul Manship who created the golden Prometheus unbound statue that flies across the back wall of the skating rink at Rockefeller center) had fired everyone on the staff. A new director Ann Fisk ( daughter of the artist Todd Lindenmuth) was in place and I went up the ancient red stairs to her office on the second floor of the old tavern building. I looked pretty rough, I had been on the road for a month and living in friends apartments in Boston. She gave me the old don't call us, we'll call you routine. I went back down those narrow stairs and as I opened the front door I noticed a fine coat of snow on the front walk, it might have been dry leaves, try as I can, I can't remember which, but I decided I would just go to work despite her ambivalent attitude toward my employment.

Reynolds Beal the grandson of American impressionist painter Reynolds Beal was already on the payroll and quickly figured out what I was up to. With a sly wink he opened the door to the janitors closet beneath those same stairs and reaching in, handed me the broom. We were instant friends.

I cleaned whatever the hell it was off the wide flagstone walk up to the front door and then began my unofficial janitorial duties. Ann Fisk didn't figure out I was on the job for an hour or two, and when she did she realized I solved at least a small part of he employee problem or maybe she saw the humor in my taking the job unbidden and let me continue.

In the position there as janitor for a couple of hours each morning over the course of that winter I quickly knew everyone that frequented the place, staff, and members artists. But I was still sort of invisible, a new janitor doesn't get a lot of attention. In retrospect I realize that it was an ideal situation, within a month I knew all of the players in the art gallery that had become my new home.

The RAA is a place where the histoiry seeps out of the walls at you. I quickly developed a great fondness for the pace. I liked getting to kn ow the rooms and walls that my hero Aldro Hibbard had known so well. I moved to Rockport because of my admiration for Aldro Hibbard and now I was immersed in the RaAA which was his legacy. The membership had a real high average age, but there was a critical mass of talented professional artists who either lived in Rockport or came every summer from around the nation to participate in the still vibrant art colony.

Rockport memories, Joe Rimini

One of the things I liked about Rockport was the selection of weird characters that were around., One such, was a guy named Joe Rimini. Joe had retired many years before from some real career and devoted himself to painting. He was one of the many sort of "in between" amateurs. He had some chops but never really rose to a professional level. There are a whole lot of people in that slot in many avocations. Evidently the golf courses are full of them. I meet a lot of them teaching workshops. Usually they started too late or were denied the best training, or went off on some weird tangent . However art colonies may need the hardened pros, the top guys, some of these wanna bees have a lot to give too. Often they know a lot, or know one aspect of painting that they can share. Often their enthusiasm and consistent work ethic makes them a valued contributor to the art scene.

Joe Rimini who died in the year 2000 was that. He was a gawky thin geezer with a big nose and a ready if not slightly foolish grin. He was usually up and excited about his painting and his enthusiasm was contagious he was excited to be making art and now and then made some things that really were fascinating. Joe was into color theory. He painted a lot of nudes in the sketch groups at the Rockport Association and that is how I knew him. I spent a lot of Monday evenings drawing figures in that low ceiling, funky studio, often with some pretty talented old guys. Joe liked to pile on skeins of colored paint and I am sure that some of his thick paintings will curl up and crack like mud on a dried lake bed. Some passages in his paints had piled up paint over and inch thick. But there was interesting stuff going on in them. Bizarre combinations of color that would hold your attention for a good while.

Joe had an old station wagon that was his paint mobile. Now, I am messy with paint and often have paint all over my clothes. But Joe had been painting landscapes from this old wagon for years and evidently he just wiped his brushes on the dashboard there was an encrusted rime of wildly colored paint all over the dashboard of this poor station wagon. It was an inch or two thick.

Joe would come into my little gallery all cheerful and smiling and I was always glad to see him. When I first arrived in Rockport I knew no one. I always remembered those older painters who made a point of coming in and befriending me. Joe was one of those, who wanted me to be welcome in Rockport. And he gave me something important.

After leaving Ives Gammel I spent a while in Minnesota. During that time in the late seventies and the early eighties I painted mostly in earth colors. I was very fond ( and still am) of Dutch painting. But Rockport painters were colorists and I arrived knowing nothing about that. Joe had studied with or known some of the important painters of the generation that had made Rockport an art colony in its heyday. He sat at my easel and threw color ideas at me. He painted things exactly the wrong color first and threw the right color on top of that. He put in one color and threw near variations vibrating on top of that. He painted imposed artistic color schemes on his drawings that were based on premixed logical color skeins that were not derived from the appearance of the actual color in nature as it sat before him. He had all of these wild ideas, and he showed them all to me over a couple of appearances in my gallery.

A Joe Rimini painting from ask art


I made all of these painted rocks, I would use round cobbles from the beach and paint little lobster boats and seascapes on them. They paid for my groceries that year. I sold them for 10 to 15 dollars and I sold a lot of them. They gave me cash almost every day whether my paintings were selling or not. As pedestrian as their subjects were, their color was where the art was. I ran color studies and experiments on them. They were wildly colored and doing them I learned a whole lot about color. I learned about underpainting in one color and then throwing another down into it. I learned about broken or divisionist color and deliberately overstating my colors and then stepping on them to get them to where I really wanted them. Giving me a roiling reserve of color under the note that was not perceived at first glance. I painted with weird pigments and in bizarre combinations.

Those color experiments taught me a lot about the creative rather than the transcriptional sort of color. My color changed and got a lot more exciting over this period. I was aware that the Rockport art that I was admiring had color that was real different from anything I had been taught and Joe opened up a lot of possibilities by suggesting some avenues that I might explore. I don't think Joe will ever bring big money at auction or have a monograph written about him, but he sure helped me along. Another example of how the last thing I am is a self made man. So many people have put work into me that I am carrying on a little of them in my art.

More Rockport reminiscences

I arrived in Rockport broke. Well. I had 60 dollars. I had a sweater a jacket and a pair of pants and a handful of cotton shirts. My car, a Ford Escort wagon given to me for free by a friend, had died on the street. I really had all I needed except for a decent easel. I had this little steel thing called a Tric-Trac. It might have been a display easel. It was pretty bad, but its two greatest problems were its height ( not enough) and it had nowhere to hold the palette.

I had a dreadful corduroy hat, a sort of fedora that I bought at a roadside flea market. It had enough brim to keep the sun out of my eyes, but it was dumb looking. I also had very long hair. I suppose I looked pretty rough to the locals when I showed up and no one knew who I was.

I set the easel up on the bend of Bearskin Neck and made a sunset picture looking up the harbor . I think this was the first of my Rockport paintings. It was 1983, sometime just before Christmas.The wind was raw and I didn't really have enough clothes to keep warm, but I was driven. The alternative would be to starve.

There was a woman who met at the shop, a redhead named Bonnie who discovered that the new kid in town was actually a STARVING artist. She brought me some plates of food, although I hardly knew her. Later we became good friends. But again womankind intervened to save me from starvation.

The average age was pretty high in Rockport and there weren't a lot of us in the 40 and under bracket. Out in the neighborhoods and suburbs there were lots of married couples in that age bracket, but on the neck and in the art community a more average age was probably mid-sixties. It had become too expensive to move to Rockport for a young artist and the place was thought of as geriatric. I didn't know that. I moved there from Minnesota and I had never seen it before.

AS I explored Rockport it all seemed so strangely familiar. I kept thinking "I know this place" It took me awhile to figure out that I knew it from children's books and some how to n
water color books I read in grade school. Lots of illustrators and writers had made Rockport their home over the wears. But the major culprit was Virginia Lee Burton who wrote Mike Mulligan and the Steamshovel. The town where Mike and Mary Ann his elderly steam shovel built the new town hall was Rockport. The other source was Ted Kautzsky. who wrote a series of how to watercolor books that I studidied intently in grade school. Many of the pictures in the book were of Rockport street scenes.

More tomorrow. I have traveled far and must sleep. Tomorrow I teach a workshop.

More Rockport reminiscences

Rockport from Front Beach. Bearskin neck is the spit of land on the left. Notice the red granite in the foreground. Rockport was aquarying town in the 19th and early 20th century and this hard red granite was exported all over for building bridgges monuments and office buildings.
There is another Encyclopedia of Dumb Design Ideas post ready for tomorrow or the next day. but it seems like I am on a theme here. I will talk a little about the art colony as it was in the early eighties. THis may read a little like a laundry list, and you may not know many of the names here. But it is useful that they get written down.I don't know that anyone has written anything about Rockport during this era. Rockport was past its heyday but there was still a a lot going on there.
Here are some of the artists who had galleries at the time.

• Paul Strisik ( National Academy)
  
• Tom Nicolas (National AScademy) -T.M. Nicholas
• David and Line Tutwieler and Charles Vickery
  
• John Caggianno (opened a year before me)
• Bruce Turner
• Lou Burnett and Martha Moore
  
• Dorothy Ramsey and Mike Stoffa
• Al Ruben
• Ferdinand Petrie
• Wayne Morell
• Joe Santoro (on Railroad ave) also National Academician.
  
• Shumacher (deceased but still showing seascapes)
• Charlie Stepule
• Nathalie Nordstrand
• Betty Lou Schlemm
  
• Mildred Jones (on a side street, later ran over her close friend Marian Williams Steele in the parking lot of ther Rockport National Bank, almost killing her.
  
• Allenbrook a portrait painter, I never knew him.
  
• Domenic Demari
• Don Mosher, Christine Mosher
  
• Stilson
• Dorothy Robbins
• Sven Orville Carlson
• John Terelak and Martin Ahearn
• Rudy Colao, Pam Fox and Fred MacNeil
• Peter Vincent
• Al Czerepak
• Helen Van Wyck home and teaching studio
• Charles Gordon Marston
• Jack Callahan was around but I think had given up his gallery.
  

There were as many more in Gloucester a couple miles away. Artists like Charles Movalli, Dale Radcliff, Ken Gore and Bertnie Gerstner, Ward Man and more I have forgotten. There was also Roger Curtis painting seascape and Cheslie D'Andrea painting fishing boats and marines. Bernard Corey was member of the Art Association so I saw him around some. There were other galleries, I have forgotten some I am sure, and there were even more artists who didn't keep galleries. I knew all of these artists well, except for Stilson and Allenbrook. There was a lot of community and we knew one another through the Art Association and the grocery store. The artists spent a lot of time standing around on the street in front of their shops and if you walked around town you would stop to talk.Openings and artists demonstrations drew crowds at the Rockport Association on summer nights. After dark the streets were full of strolling locals mixed into the tourist trade. There was a lot of interaction. Again, we were all SMIMMING in people most of the time. I always walked in the street because the tourists on the sidewalks stumbled along in a daze.

Ellens Harborside restaurant was a good affordable place to have a seafood dinner and I often saw artists there. Alan Davidson and Lucien Geraci were always there together. In the summer Charles Vickery came to town and occasionally sat down at my easel and painted seascape demos for me. Joe Santoro used to come in and put his arm around me, very Italian. He was a watercolorist and a member of the Guild and a National Academician. Walker Hancock another Academician was still making sculpture in nearby Lanesville I was invited to draw the figure in his studio with a small group several times a few years later.

There were a lot of soms and daughters of artists from the previous generations still around. There were Elaine Hibbard, Aldro's daughter, John Manship who was Pauls Manships son. And The Beals, Ren, Bill and Telka. Ren was the grandson of Renolds Beal and the nephew of Gifford Beal. I believe he was related to Stow Wengenroth too. Richard Kuehne the son of Max Kuehne the American impressionist and gilder.

Harry Ballinger was still around and I met him on painting jury for the art association I think he was about a hundred. His seascape painting book is still a classic. Marshall Joyce still sent watercolors to the shows at the Association. There were also some good retired illustrators around at the time, like John Wentworth and some GI combat artists. My head is spinning, there were so many artists there at that time,Not all were great, but just the energy of so many people painting in such a small town was exciting . Painting was the industry of Rockport. Most or all of these names may mean nothing to you but they are who was around in Rockport at that time. Aldro Hibbard, Anthony Cirino and Lester Stevens, and Carl Peters were more or less recently deceased when I arrived.

There was also an army of retire commercial artists making art in their retirement and top flight amateurs trying to ramp themselves up to professional. Every summer also brought visiting artists from around the country, come to see what Rockport was like. I met a number of artists from around the nation while sitting in my shop.

I started going on painting trips to Vermont with some of the older guys, Tom Nicholas, John Terelak and Don Mosher I think this might have been a little later. I did paint landscapes a lot with Bruce Turner.

With a few exceptions everyone on the above list is dead. If in 1983 I had made a list of the established Rockport artists I could have listed thirty or more. Today, all but a handful are gone. I guess I should have thought about that coming, then, but I didn't. Many of them could tell stories of painting with Frank Dumnond or studying with Soyer or Brachman at the Art Students League before the second World War. A few knew Gruppe and Hibbard. A few old women had studied with William Merrit Chase. Genevieve Wilhelms, who I hardly knew, hung out with John Sloan and Edward Hopper, I think. Many could describe the art colony during the fifties when it was really full of artists and many of that great first generation were still alive. I should probably write down more of this stuff as it will be lost and forgotten soon.

Stephanie

The Old Harbor, Rockport. Thanks to a reader for the photo. The shop was in the blue building at the center of the shot. At its lower right hand corner were the granite stairs that went down to the harbor. This is low tide of course, and at high tide the water washed against the seawall that is the foundation of the building. In the foreground is Lumber Wharf, were coastal schooners were loaded. The cylindrical stone pillars are bollards, posts to tie a ship up at the wharf.

The comments had several requests to tell more about Stephanie and her advice to me. It has been so long, but I will see what I can remember. Steph had done a lot of outdoor fairs and had an idea of how a shop should be run. I had no idea. Stephanie told me that people are scared. You had to be non frighting. She said that customers don't want to enter a shop unless they can see inside and check that it is not dangerous. She insisted on no dark corners. We positioned spot lights to make sure that the corners were well lit. The shop was painted in gay colors,her part was a garish pink, mine a more restrained yellow. She always wanted the door open, she said people aren't likely to open a door, even a screen door.
When visitors would walk in Stephanie would always ask "are you visiting Rockport today? I always thought that was a dumb question, when I pointed that out, Steph said "that's the idea". It was a harmless question, one she knew the customer could answer. I gradually adopted it and used that for years. I felt dumb saying it, but people responded well to the simple question
A piece of glass or a painting would sometimes get "hot". That is, all day long people would admire it or contemplate buying it. We made a point of noticing trends in which items they were and where in our tiny shop the piece was located . Often a sale would result, after many people had focused on the same piece.

Stephanie told me a story about a bead shop a friend of hers had owned. It was in a tent, so it could be set up at outdoor art fairs. Those were big in the 60's and 70's. This tent-shop was a long rectangle with a long table down the center, and tables around the walls. You could walk in the door and make a circumference of the shop with that center table as an island in the middle of the space. On each of the tables were dozens of muffin tins, the aluminum ones. Each tin's little cups were filled with beads. There were thousands of them. That's all the business sold, beads for stringing. They had every kind of bead there ever was. Customers would walk in the door and around the tables then stop and pick up a tiny bead to examine it. They would replace it and go on their way. In a few minutes another customer would enter and pause, and then pick up that same bead! With thousands of beads to choose from, they would pick up the same bead! All day long that same little bead would get picked up, until finally it sold.

We had long discussions on why this might happen. Stephanie thought it was karma or that the bead was sending out a signal to be picked up. I didn't. What was obvious though, was that the same thing happened in our shop too. There seemed to be something about the location, And we quickly figured out where pieces would sell first. I learned that every gallery has a sales wall. You put the new and coolest piece there and it was most likely to sell.

Stephanie also taught me never to talk about the piece in the front window. If you brought that up, the customer would go out the door to look at it and then wander off. She used to say"we're always open" and insist on leaving the open sign up all the time. I have no idea why. But the sign always said open, even if we were not. Her favorite expression was "they lost all sense a perspective, man" This could be applied to any situation, and I heard it frequently even though often I couldn't figure out how it fit.

Stephanie wore red lipstick and had long thick hair, the kind that the Victorians used to fill sofa cushions with. She would tie her breasts up in those bandanna's and fire up her torch. She enjoyed working with the glass and made all of the little pieces that a lamp worker is supposed to have. There were little cats and various animals. But the biggest, and fanciest piece was the piano. Made out of loops and myriad little ropey swirls of glass, the tiny grand piano seemed to be the demonstration piece to prove you could practice this art. Stephanie and Michael, her partner, also made a fine line of unusual little glass pipes that they occasionally sold.

Stephanie has been dead many years now. I think of her as a creature of the sixties-seventies. I can't imagine her in the world of today. The gypsy, on the road, counterculture, traveling artisan thing was big then and I don't know if it really exists much any more. I guess as times changed, she might have evolved into something else. But I remember her as an example of the free spirited hippie, who cheerfully made her little place in the world entertaining people by fashioning tiny glass figures in front of crowds. She taught all of the neighborhood girls to do it too. Often there was some young girl at that hot torch learning to make a cat or elephant. It used to scare me to see their fingers near that roaring blow torch, but I don't remember any of them getting burned. She would lean over them and show them the right way to allow gravity and centrifugal force to flow the molten glass just where it needed to go. The young girls always left happily with the little figures that they had made.

Glass doesn't rot or evaporate, so except for those that are dropped or played with by cats, there must be thousands of Stephanie's little glass animals out in the world. They aren't signed in any way, so I guess I will always wonder when I see one,"did Stephanie make that?"

Rockport shop recollections

Everybody over in the comments seems to like hearing about the Rockport years, so I will go on merrily with that.

When summer came, having the gallery seemed like entertaining. I waded in people on the streets and talked to them in the shop all day long. In the summer Bearskin Neck had a population density like Hong Kong. There were T-shirt shops and even schlock art. You know what schlock art is, don't you, that mass produced dreck from Asia somewhere (probably the Chi-Coms again). The retailers buy it from catalogs in bundles of hundreds of unstretched nearly identical paintings. All of the paintings had a funny oriental look to them. Their Cape Cod light houses had a subtle pagoda aftertaste, and there were lots of trees made with a fan blender that looked like feather dusters, and bad seascapes with grass covered dunes impaled with red wooden snow fences. The foam in these monstrosities was white paint swirled into S patterns with their fan blender again, horrible. Done using decorative painting techniques they appealed to the most budget minded collector. THEY ARE IN THE WORST IMAGINABLE TASTE

Of course, with a 24 by 36 for fifty dollars in a frame, they were selling a lot of "art". The customers would enter their shop and there were hundreds of paintings stacked on the floor in piles three feet wide. The walls were covered in schlock art, it was all the color of the literature the Hari-Krisnas used to hand out. Sunsets, way too many of those. The customer would linger over a painting and the crafty salesman would show them the painting in a different frame. The frames came in colors too, not just gold but green, orange and citron. All of the customers would be trading paintings in and out of the frames and conferring with their loved ones as the salesman moved each canvas into each new frame, using schlock-o-clamps. That's what I call the little U-shaped pieces of toothed spring steel that will hold a canvas instantly into its frame. The pictures would dance through the lurid frames until the customer liked one best, and then they bought it. Fifty bucks, no big deal, hon.

Then the salesman would send them out the door with their painting in a Hefty bag. All day long people walked back down the neck with those big plastic garbage bags. I saw millions of them. All the artists joked about the art in the garbage bags. But it was a little dispiriting sometimes when you weren't selling your art.

Our shop didn't have a bathroom There were four shops in the same big old building, the other shops did have a door to the single bathroom. To go there you walked through the shop next door. The shop next door sold schlock art. The new schlock art gallery next door (actually a second feeder location for the larger schlock art store on the Neck) was managed by a young guy from New Jersey. He turned out to be a nice enough guy, not an art lover, but he was OK and we were all around each other a lot. I would sometimes get bored and go next door to his shop to chat. When the town was really busy, he stuck his head in my door and said "Stape, will you watch the shop for me? I am going to go pick up some fried clams". So I sat in his schlock art shop happily greeting the tourists. I don't remember ever selling a painting, but I did this favor for him a number of times. Since I had partners, I could come and go if I wanted to.

I heard stories that one of the "other" schlock art dealers would tell tourists that these paintings were by "local artists" who didn't have swollen heads and priced their worked reasonably, unlike the artists they saw in the galleries, who had big egos. The paintings often had folksy American sounding names signed on them, half of which had the surname Frank.

In my own shop I would routinely have people ask me why my paintings were so expensive? I wanted more for an 8 by 10 than the gallery down the street wanted for an over the sofa sized oil! They already knew which they were going to buy, and I tried to avoid telling people they were wrong. I learned a few things about running a gallery in those days and one was,

DON'T TELL PEOPLE THEY ARE WRONG!

Even if they are, you can't win. They don't want to hear it, and if you get a win by "setting them straight" the sale is over.

Stephanie the large breasted glassblower who was my business partner, had grown up with parents in the jewelry trade and she had spent years doing outdoor shows. She was a hippie girl and a part of the great craft and pottery diaspora that once wandered the nation during the decade after the summer of love. She gave me a number of gems of wisdom she had picked up on the road.

She would secure those same breasts with two red bandannas knotted up around her neck somehow. She would then stop traffic on her roller skates with her long raven hair blowing behind her and those bandannas on. I believe she had a three legged dog named Egypt. I don't remember ever meeting Egypt though. A few years later she died rather young and tragically. I still have her skate key.

The demand surge and buy switch phenomenon

Bearskin Neck. Thanks to Renee Lammers for the photo.
I received a lot of comments and people seemed to be interested in hearing about when I was running my first gallery in Rockport, Massachusetts. I have written a little about this before, but I will elaborate a little upon my previous writings.
The window at the far left is my old shop. I began that business in 1983. I had no money, I was working a very part time job, as a janitor at the Rockport Art Association. So I went into business with no capital. I was able to afford a few gallons of paint and luckily the shop had tracklights.

The small shop had at its backdoor, the Old Harbor. This was Rockports first harbor, with its early 19th century seawalls made of enormous blocks of granite. There were stone steps from behind the gallery onto the mud flats of the partially silted in harbor. In those few steps, you could leave behind the thousands of tourists and enter another part of Rockport, the tourists didn't know. The backs of the buildings on the harbor were on stilts or huge granite seawalls. On foggy days you could hear the fog horns and groaner buoys out on the water. Bearskin neck is the last thing before England, and the Atlantic washed the back of the shop. It was enclosed in stone seawalls, but in the storms of winter the surf was high and the neck seemed like a narrow stone ship at sea.

When the tourists walked into a gallery in Rockport they expected to meet the artist running their gallery. That was an old tradition in the town. Anywhere else, the visitors wondered, who is this guy and is this a real gallery? But in Rockport they didn't That was a big advantage. My operation was threadbare and rinky-dink, but that was perceived as charming and just what the crowds expected. A REAL artist!

My apartment was next door and my whole life was about the shop. I seldom strayed more than a few yards from it, except to go the the grocery. I was there seven days a week, Sunday mornings the blue laws kept us closed. But at noon on Sunday we opened to the largest crowds we saw all week. It was crazy sometimes, there were wall to wall people on the Neck. But on Sunday, they didn't ever buy anything. We saw ten times as many people and sold nothing, every Sunday. I was learning that it wasn't a numbers game, it was not who you saw but if they were buying. Monday mornings could be good though, travelers had checked out of their inn rooms and sometimes bought a painting before they left town.

Some weeks we would sell nothing and then the next week I would be selling an oil painting every day. Sometimes I would sell more. BUT sometimes in the fall something very strange happened. I had noticed that it seemed like people had an invisible switch somewhere on them. If that switch wasn't set to "BUY" You couldn't sell them art, no matter what. They wouldn't buy the Mona Lisa for a ten-spot. That was the default setting and most of the time people came in set to "not buy".

You have probably looked down from he edge of a dock and seen a whole school of little fish suddenly reverse direction all at once as if cued by a director. The tourists were like that. On any given day there was a mood, a tenor, to the crowd. The crowd was an organism. One day they would all be goobers from the hayfields of Silesia, and the next day befuddled moonbats from Cambridge. The crowd had a group personality. like a coral reef or a school of fish. One day everybody was on crutches or in a leg cast. People were missing arms and walking on artificial limbs. All day I didn't see a whole man. I thought I did once, but when he turned to go I noticed he was missing an ear.

Every once in a while demand went from zero to some heightened surge that would suck all of my inventory out the door. If I had ten paintings hung, I might sell seven. If I had been able to produce a hundred paintings, I would have sold seventy, or maybe all of them. There were demand spikes. It was easy to sell art to these people, their switches were set to on. They had come to Rockport to buy art and it was only a matter of which artist they found appealing. The artists would meet up on the street after the crowds had died back and we would all be selling art.

The town sort of lit up, like the proverbial pinball machine. I would have upper class mom and dad visiting New England to visit their children in expensive private colleges, lined up at the door to my tiny shop. That tended to happen in the fall, on crisp perfect days, I made as much across the span of a few fall weekends as I did the rest of the year. When I went home at night, I would get phone calls from people wanting to buy the painting in the front window. I had a little card there with my number on it.

It was an inventory test. In the winter and early spring I was sitting in the shop working every day and selling nothing. An older artist already many years in the gallery business there told me "keep painting em, when the summer comes you are going to need art, and there won't be time to make new ones when you are selling". I had feverishly followed his advice, hoping what he said was true. When the feeding frenzy would start it would decimate my little collection of painting and I always wished I had more. I would make three or four paintings to be ready for the next weekend and those would sell too. I would start each week with inventory problems. In the late summer and fall I was shoveling paintings out the door. They were cheap, but it added up. I had more money than I had ever had before. Not that it was very much in comparison to a very average working stiffs income, but I had lived real poor for many years. I thought I was rich.

When my art was cheap

Blue Motif, Rockport, Massachusetts.

I think I will reminisce a little tonight. Hopefully it will be informative. I was speaking to a woman tonight who is selling lots of very inexpensive paintings. Her business model is to make small pictures and keep her costs low enough that everybody can afford to buy her art, and everybody does. I used to do that, I said. I don't think she knew that.

In 1983 I opened my first tiny art gallery in Rockport. Rockport was an old art colony on the water north of Boston. There were many artist owned galleries there and had been for many years. I would suppose their were about thirty then, and many more artists lived in town but didn't have commercial galleries. I split the rent on a tiny shop with a glassblower and her boyfriend. They made those little glass animals, what they did was actually called lampworking.
Laura in the play "The Glass Menagerie" collected them. My partners had done years of traveling from outdoor show to outdoor show in a big van and were hippie-gypsy's. When they turned on that big oxygen fed torch it made a lot of noise and lots of people came to watch and buy.

That meant traffic flow. we were on a very busy tourist street, about 10,000 people a day were visiting Bearskin Neck on a summer weekend. We saw a whole lot of em. I had the back half of the tiny shop. I painted it and built myself a little workbench-artists station into a nook in the wall. My whole operation was perhaps six feet square. I had a couple of sets of track lights and a stool to sit on. I could open my French easel up in my little work area and sit and paint all day as the people came and went. Often I would paint outside in the morning and watch the shop from after lunch till ten or eleven at night. As long as there were people on the street we were open, sometimes after midnight.

I made nothing but 8 by10's. I bought boxes of these little mass produced frames with horrid little linen liners chopped at the corners. About a quarter of the frames were damaged right out of the box, but they were so cheap it seemed worth it. I think one of my favorites was an 11 dollar unit. There were no mass produced closed corner frames then. I could hang quite a few on the walls of my tiny space.

I sold my paintings for 85 to 125 dollars a piece. Money bought a little more then, but that is still really, really cheap. I sold them like crazy. I think I sold about 130 that year. I didn't make very much compared to what most folks expect to live on, but I lived real cheap. I had a 300 dollar a month apartment next to the shop and I fixed my shoes with duct tape. I had no car, and could walk to the grocery store or hardware store.

The gallery was set up using the glassblowers tax number and she signed the lease naming us Earth and Fire galleries. I guess she thought that was appropriate for a business that used a torch on sand. I thought it was tacky, but since we didn't have a sign, it wasn't well known that that was our name. It was dated even then.

There was a payphone in the gallery, hanging on the wall. I guess the landlord had had problems with tenants running up phone bills and leaving. We seldom used it, and if someone wanted to buy a painting with a credit card, we had a grinder affair that impressed the information from their credit card onto a little stack of carbon paper and duplicate receipts. Once I had that done, I would run to a friends shop down the street and use their phone to call in the sale and get an approval number from the nice folks at MasterCard. I took the receipts to the bank myself, it wasn't till years later that the electronic gizmos that batch out your sales automatically to the bank appeared.

I remember sweating out whether I should charge 95 dollars or 115 dollars for a painting, and then changing the price tag the next day, afraid I was asking too much. People wanted them cheaper still of course. They would make lowball offers and always want a better deal. Usually I went for the cash. I always needed groceries or paint.

We had as boom box playing old Dylan most of the time and being in a beach town all summer was great. I talked to about a zillion people a week and that was interesting too. The little business actually worked, I sold enough painting to live very simply and I was living by my art. I had already done that for a few years then, but this was the first time I had a steady cash flow and and knew I had found a way to make a living painting. I was about 30 at this time and had been painting full time about ten years. I had atelier training behind me, which was scarce in those days, so I had some chops, and that helped a lot. I was well enough skilled to do paintings of a quality that people would buy.

I did almost none of the paintings from photographs, I started stuff outside and finished inside, or I made up seascapes, ( I did lots of those) and I worked in both an old timey Dutch style and impressionism. It really was a great training experience to actually paint to earn my supper. If I didn't sell, I didn't eat. That makes you very earnest in your painting, you want to make them as well as you can and get food!

Useless tonight

Every night as I write the blog, I ask myself " have I given my readers something to learn?" Tonight I am lazy, You will learn nothing. But you might enjoy a laugh at my expense.
I went to my 40th high school reunion last month, and a woman I saw there e-mailed me some photos taken on a canoe trip 41 years ago, in 1969. This was when I was a junior in high school. Here are some pictures from when I was still young and pretty. Today I look like a statue of this young man, made out of beef jerky. I have the same haircut and glasses 41 years later, that's consistency. I no longer wear that silly bandanna though, who does? It was the 60's after all. I miss the 60's, if you can figure out a way to send me back, I am willing to go, immediately. I will leave a note for my wife and kids.
"Gone back to the 60's.......Stape"

Below is the photo I wanted to show you. I am drawing, or writing on this lovely young woman's abdomen in Mercurochrome. I present this as an early demonstration of my interest in painting. I have no idea what I was writing, or where that abdomen is now.

I will try to be informative again tomorrow. Please read the entry below this one advertising a new workshop in Acadia, on Mt. Desert in Maine.

Posters I did in the early 80's

Tonight I thought I would show you a couple of posters I made in the late 1970's. Those were my starvation days and I did some posters for friends and even a little architectural rendering from blueprints. Above is a poster for a friend who did a bassoon recital. He titled the recital "A complete feast of the bassoon". I used to do whimsical pen drawings like this when I was in high school and I resurrected the style for these posters. It was held at the Children's Theater in Minneapolis where I lived at the time. I came up with this picture of a kid eating the bassoon, which drew some flack from the Children's Theater as they thought it had sexual overtones and the bassoon looked like a , well you know. I thought that was pretty weird as I had no such intention and that they had to have some proclivities of their own to imagine that. My thoughts were confirmed when their director was imprisoned for allegedly having sexual relations with the children in their program. It looked like a bassoon to me, but ........................... The lettering on this was done with the old Letraset rub on letters that were available in art supply stores in those days. I always loved that typeface (Armenian) ever since I saw it on the first Quicksilver Messenger Service album. The psychedelic poster guys used it a lot.


In the late seventies, or was it the early eighties I lived in an old residence hotel apartment building in Minneapolis called the Oak Grove. I called it the Open Grave. A national repertory company, the Tyrone Guthrie theater was a block or so up the street. They brought most of their actors in from New York, who would stay for a half a year or so at the Oak Grove. I knew many of them during that time and some of them very well. I was given comps or free tickets to most of their performances and enjoyed seeing a lot of excellent theater during that era of my life.


One of the actors I hung out with the most was the late John Spencer, who later starred in West Wing. I always boarded his Siamese cats when he went on the road. They were nice cats, but rough on the furniture. John studied my studio mannerisms to play an artist in a movie, some B picture that I never saw, I think it was a horror flick.
Some of the actors decided to do a project on their own, presenting a play written by an Irish playwright and they asked me to do a poster for it. I think I got a hundred dollars for the job. I made the poster above. When I ran into it in a portfolio in my studio the other day I noticed that Kelsey Grammer was in the play. I must have known him then, but I don't remember him. As I never watch TV ( I don't own one) I have never seen whatever show he is in, but I know he is a big star now. A number of people I knew from that theater went on to larger careers. I wonder if any of them remember me? Somehow I doubt it.

Shattuck memories

I know most of you come here for art instruction, however I have done a fair amount of personal history on this blog too. If you look in the archives under chronological history you can see some of that. I am a visiting artist at Shattuck this week, where I went to high school. It is an interesting chapter in my life and a fairly unusual experience.

I was given the opportunity, not forced, to attend a military academy about an hour away from my home, in Faribault, Minnesota. I jumped at the chance and enjoyed my years there. The endurance I learned from that tough program served me well when I had to deal with the Ives Gammell years and the 15 years of starvation and hard times that began my art career.

This is the front entrance to the school which was built in the 1880's, the steps are worn hollow from all of the traffic they have seen. The campus is full of fabulous buildings, but this is the best. The hallway from that entrance looks like this.

The school had many traditions and one of them was that this hallway was reserved for seniors. So I didn't spend much time on that red carpet. The school was run on a what was called the new boy-old boy system. That meant that the senior class ruled the school. Discipline was very strict. The system was a hundred years old when I got there.

The upstairs of the building is a theatre, also late 19th century. Lots of wood. Here is a view looking back from beside the stage. Marlon Brando was a student there . A tradition of signing your name on the wall of the back stage area after each production resulted in this.

Like me, Brando left before graduation. Below the theater is the hallway leading to the refectory where we took all of our meals, here is the hallway leading to that.

I loved the aesthetic of the place. If you can imagine the hallways all filled with young men in uniforms with braid on their epaulets and shining brass. The seniors and some juniors who were officers carried sabres on their crisscross or Sam Brown belts that went over one shoulder and around their waists. The crack squad, a sort of Zouave drill team, carried 1892 trapdoor Springfields, an elongated "needle gun" a relic from before bolt action weapons that had a trapdoor that opened in the breech to allow loading. Very elegant.

Here is the stairway I took up to the classrooms. Many of my classes had about ten students in them. The teachers were excellent, far better than I saw later in college.

It was so beautiful, the pageantry and the architecture, that it was like being in an old movie. When I was there nothing had changed in a century. I sometimes have a hard time believing I lived for a while in that world. The Vietnam war, changing ideas about education and the alterations in society born in the 60's swept it all away and the school is now an elite boarding college prep school.

Below is the refectory where we all ate. It isn't much changed except now it was cafeteria style and in my day it was in a formal family style with a master (which is what we called our teachers) at the head of each table. The seniors sat next to them and the underclassmen were arrayed towards the foot of the table, seated by their class. Freshman, or new boys as we were called, sat at the bottom of the table and had to pour their drinks from pitchers there and pass them up. An elaborate system of hand signals was used to signify what each of the upperclassmen wanted in their glasses, which we filled and then passed back upto them.

There is only one teacher left who remembers me from those days, or at least he claims to. I have been painting very publicly , I did a seascape in the middle of a busy hallway today and I have been talking in the various classes. The director of the arts department was born 2 years after I was in school here.

I haven't been in these hallways in 40 years. The alum who interests me the most and with whom I identify somewhat was Townes Van Zandt. Townes graduated a few years before I arrived and became a legend in Texas folk- country music before his untimely death from a drinking. There is a movie about his life which was melancholy and half psychotic, but produced many eloquent and achingly beautiful songs. here is a live clip of him preforming one of his tunes that Emmy Lou Harris later covered.

On career advice for young painters, beginning well enough, but ending badly

The video above gives an idea that many people have about the life of an artist. I think many kids enter art school with those ideas too. Art school may attract students who are like that, but the artists I know are extremely hardworking. They work like any one who has a small business, because that's what being an artist is, small business.

A working artist has all the functions of any other business,such as accounting and management of inventory, communication with suppliers on one end, and vendors (dealers) on the other. They have thick income tax forms that have to be done by an accountant. They have to track their costs so as to turn a profit at the end of the process.

I think it is very rare that a love of running a business and painting occur in the same individual. I am sure it happens, but for most artists I know the business end is the part they like least. I have owned galleries and done a lot of self promotion and advertising.I did it because it was necessary, and I would still be waiting for some one else to do it if I hadn't.

I sometimes hear "would be" artists say that they want an agent. I don't know anybody who has an agent. It doesn't work that way. I guess you could say a gallery is your agent, but they expect to deal with you, they are certainly not interested in cutting a third party into every transaction. So you can't wait for an agent to discover you.If you want to be in the art business you have to do business.

I wrote a series of posts some time ago on the art business waltz, you may want to go back into my archives and read them if you have any curiosity on how the artist does business.For some reason Blogger has given me two separate archives marked art business. I can't seem to amalgamate the two so there they remain. Twins. One for each eye.

I get e-mails rather frequently from art students asking my advice on their training. I always tell them if they would be willing to teach, or do graphic art they should. Artist should be the career of last resort. If you have the ability to be anything else, I think you should. Here is a story of Ives Gammell telling me that.

After I had studied with Ives for a while my parents came to visit me in Boston. They lived in Minnesota, so I hadn't seen them since I got to the Fenway studios. I arranged for them to meet Gammell. He gave a time for me to bring them to his apartment on Beacon street. My elegant mother arrived in a mink and a nice wool suit from Bonwit Teller or somewhere and carried herself, as always, like the queen of England, as played by Scarlett O'Hara. When we got there he asked me to wait in the small living room and he took my parents into another room to speak to them. I sat and admired a lovely little Alfred Stevens of a woman in a beautiful gown that was impossibly well painted, that he had hung in the room. After a few moments the door flew open and my mother briskly floated out, and said to me , "Come we me must be going", she was obviously angry.I said goodbye to Ives hurriedly and followed my parents out the door. When we got down to the street below my mother said that Ives had told her that he saw nothing that led him to believe I had the makings of a painter. He said I was a bright young man and reminded her of Calvin Coolidge (?)or maybe Woodrow Wilson I don't remember which, and that they should send me to law school so I might have a future. I am certain my mother tore into him verbally, she was not a woman you would want to trifle with.

I am sure Ives really felt I had zero potential, but he later said something that led me to see how he thought about advising young men on painting careers ( he advised young women,not at all). He said that if he discouraged a young person from trying to be a painter he would spare them a life of disappointment, endless work and failure, because they didn't have IT.If they did have IT, nothing he could say or do would discourage them from becoming a painter.

I can't imagine being so blunt or perhaps even remorselessly nasty to a student but Ives felt that it was a reasonable act, and he was justified in his treatment of me, He said nothing to me up front that he was going to unload that on my parents, he deliberately sprang it on us, with out any warning or foreshadowing. Since my father was helping me financially so I could eat while I studied, it was an act that was at best inconsiderate. But I showed up and studied with him again the next day, and never mentioned it. Because I had IT. I have now told hundreds of you the story. Serves him right.

Richard Lack 1928 - 2009

Richard Lack, image from the Gandy gallery

On Tuesday Richard Lack died. Let me tell you a little about him and what he did. Richard Lack was from Minnesota and studied at the Minneapolis College of Art. He was interested in realist and old master painting and went to New York hoping to find instruction in that. He was unable to find what he was looking for until one day as he was copying a painting in the Met, he was approached by another young artist who told him about R.H.Ives Gammells small atelier in Boston. From 1950 until 1956 Lack (with a couple of years taken off to serve in Korea ) studied with Ives in the Fenway studios.

In 1957 Lack returned to Minnesota. I remember hearing how disappointed Gammell was that he did not stay in Boston. With (I believe) financial assistance from E.T.Greenshields and Ives Gammell Lack in 1969 opened the Atelier Lack. An atelier is a studio school based on the 19th century French methods of teaching. Both men hoped to foster a resurrection of traditional painting in America. They certainly got their moneys worth. Dozens of ateliers spread across the world have their roots in the Atelier Lack. He trained students who set up their own ateliers . There is now an international web of teaching ateliers mostly because of Richard Lack, setting up his own, in Minneapolis, of all places.

In the Atelier Lack, students were taught in the hybrid Boston school-French methods of mostly visual draftsmanship before the cast and with a focus on still life, portraits and figures. Lack took the Gammell teaching system and work ethic and made an organized "school" for painters out of it. He said " I can teach you to paint" in a time when the very idea of teaching someone to paint was in doubt. 1969 was in the time of total dominance by the Avant Garde school of thought that still runs the academic institutions, but does not have anything like the hold it once did on the larger art world. What he set out to do was intensely radical and he was treated like a pariah in the art world. But there were plenty of young students who wanted what he had. I was one.

I became aware of Richard Lack in the late sixties, I think it was just as, or just before he established his atelier. I lived eighty miles south of Minneapolis in Rochester, Minnesota. Rochester had a fine little Art Center with an exhibition space that did revolving shows. My mother took classes there studying art history in what must have been an excellent program that went on for many years. Oddly, I still remember the name of the woman who taught it, Polly Krinke. While at the Art Center my mother saw a show of the work of Richard Lack and insisted that I go see it too. I did and I guess I was impressed, but I was too young to realize what it was and I supposed that the Minneapolis College of Art (and later, design) would teach me what I needed to know. It is important to stress how totally naive, stupid and bereft of any good sense at all I was at this point.

I drifted through art school for a a year and the University art department for another, until I met a student of Richard Lack one evening in the etching labs and was very impressed with his work. I told that story here. At his suggestion I visited the Atelier Lack and signed up for an course of evening drawing classes. The Atelier Lack was up a flight of stairs in a section of Minneapolis called uptown that was full of low rise office buildings and stores from the streetcar area. Uptown was a bustling place and the quiet deliberation that went on in the studio was a big change after walking through the busy city surrounding it. I remember all these years later the layout of the Atelier.There were little individual carrels set up for each of the students to study cast drawing and still life.

He had a figure model and we surrounded her on drawing horses, those sort of bench-drawing board- easels, and he came and gave each of us individual instruction. I wish I could remember more or what he told me but I do not. I know I was encouraged to copy drawings and did quite a few, mostly Ingres. I do remember a student asking him to dissect the composition of an old master (I think Italian) painting in a book. A semicircle of us stood around him and we listened to his description of the rhythmic lines that bound the design together.

I believe I was told by a student, or more likely a monitor who oversaw the evening classes sometimes, that there was no room left in the atelier, or perhaps they didn't take me very seriously and gave me that reply. Either way I began the correspondence with Ives Gammell that would lead me to Boston and my training there. I don't remember that I took more than that one series of evening drawing class and I certainly passed unnoticed through the scene there. I have so many times like Forrest Gump been a fly on the wall in some very interesting places .

Richard Lack was himself a fine painter and did many portraits, here is one of his daughter

Richard Lack painted landscapes, still life allegorical pictures and who knows what else. He was an excellent teacher partly because he could already do most anything you wanted to learn.

In 1983 Richard Lack while organizing a show of his work and that of some students and friends coined the phrase "Classical Realism" that phrase is heard so often now, it is easy to forget it didn't always exist. Lack coined it to define what he and like minded artists were doing, and to differentiate it into a separate category from just realism, which of course, would include photo realism and Andy Warhols soup cans, popular at the time.

Lack turned the Atelier over to several of his students in 1992 due to health problems, and it became simply "The Atelier". The class I took there was well over thirty years ago and I have no idea what goes on there now. I am glad that although I never really knew Richard Lack, I had a chance to meet him and study briefly in his studio. The little atelier that Richard Lack started had a big role in the revival of interest in traditional painting and that influence is growing geometrically now.Ives Gammell never lived to see the change, but Richard Lack did. I hope he was satisfied when he died that his had been a life well lived and of service to the art that was so important to him.

The rudest visitor I ever had in my Gallery

The picnic, by James Tissot, image from artrenewal.com

I taught a workshop today. From the time I rolled out this morning till I walked back in the door was twelve hours, most of it on my feet and thinking and talking. I am ruined. So tonight's post is mainly to avoid missing a day. Tonight I am going to tell you the story of the absolute worst visitor I ever had in my gallery . I did about fifteen years of retail galleries in Rockport, Massachusetts over the years, and in several different locations around the town . I must have seen hundreds of thousands of visitors. Most were the way people are, that is they walked in, looked at my paintings and then went on their way to the next store. Some were very friendly, a few were rude, and an even smaller number were horrid. But there was one visitor who eclipsed them all as the most singularly dreadful visitor I ever had. She was so nasty that she was in a league of her own, no one else has ever approached her in terms of venom or malice.

There was a guy who knelt to pet my old hound Trey, who lay in the middle of the gallery floor and greeted everyone with his tail, thumping it on the floor if they payed him any attention at all. He was a remarkable animal, a giant golden retriever, red, the color of an Irish setter and he weighed 130 pounds. This guy remarks as he pets Trey, I like your dog a whole lot more than I like your art man......

This woman was nastier than the pug faced and bald headed skeptic who gestured at one of my 8 by 10's with a very cheap cigar and dismissively asked if I would take ten dollars for it.

There was the woman who innocently tried to give me twenty five dollars for a twenty five hundred dollar painting. She knew a good deal when she saw one. Her husband just shook his head in disbelief. I tried not to be insulted, she just didn't know what paintings cost, and misread the tag.. No malice there.

But all of these were outdone by one dumpy and magnificently malevolent English woman who walked into my gallery one afternoon wearing all black clothes and dark sunglasses. As she walked around my gallery she looked at my paintings and said "I like art that is spiritual. My art is spiritual. This art is not!

I was at a loss for words, that doesn't happen too often to me. But THAT didn't earn her the title of nastiest. She left the gallery and I was more amazed than wounded that someone could be so unpleasant.
I was still smoking cigarettes in those days, and an hour or so later I was out on the sidewalk in front of my gallery under my big sign that said Stapleton Kearns Gallery, and she came walking around the corner towards me.

When she drew even with me she paused for a second, looked up at the sign and in a very English accent said" Stapleton Kearns, now there's a name that won't go down in art history, if you don't mind me saying" and then she walked on.

I will never know who she was and I remember thinking at the time that this woman was trying to injure me, an absolute stranger to her, for no reason other than I was an artist with a gallery and she probably resented that. She had what I came to to call artist two syndrome. I will tell you about that tomorrow night.

A studio and a story

I was asked in the comments about the photo I posted of the tenth street studios, so I will tell you a little more about them. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the brother of William Morris Hunt. It was built in 1857 and stood in Greenwich village at 51 west tenth street between 5th and 6th. It had a central domed gallery and the studios radiated out from that. The facade of the Fenway studios in Boston resembled It enough that it must have influenced that design. Some of the artists who worked here over the years included ,

• Frederic Church
• Albert Bierstadt
• Sanford Gifford
• Jervis McEntee
• William Hart
• Winslow Homer
• William Meritt Chase

The wonderful paintings of Chases lavish studios draped with oriental rugs and filled with antiques were painted in his studio in this building. A studio here was a sign of success in the art world of the late 19th century.The artists in the studios held lavish events in order to market their art, in which wealthy patrons were invited to the studios. The building was torn down in 1956 and replaced with an 11 story apartment building.

I will return to the history of the American tradition in landscape painting, but I thought I would tell you a little story this evening first. You may recall my post The Commonwealth Avenue years from about ten days ago. I recalled a story from that era that I thought I might add. This story is going to appeal to Frank Ordaz, a jazz fancier over there at On Being Frank

I have made some musical references in this blog and I have mentioned my love for fine guitar mastery. I have met a few really great guitarists over the years, and will be the first to admit I have always idolized them a bit. I have been to A LOT of concerts and seen many bands play. I became a painter, and that is fine, but If I could have played guitar it would have been nice. I unfortunately had zero talent. Is there negative talent?

I told the story of a burgler kicking down my door and finding NOTHING worth stealing in my apartment. Several other apartments in the building had been broken into before. I suppose because so many of the residents of the building were musicians, there were a lot of musical instruments to steal. The apartment across the hall from me was broken into in the same fashion as mine, with the door smashed to pieces. I didn't know the tenant terribly well but I had sat and talked with him a few times and I had enjoyed listening to him and his friends play their guitars while I painted. The fellows name was Mike Stern, and he played in Blood, Sweat and Tears at that point, about 1976, but a few years later went on to play in the Miles Davis band .

I secured the door to the apartment and found a phone number for his parents who I think I remember lived in Washington DC ( it has been a long time). I believe Mike was on a European tour with BST. When he did return, he thanked me for securing the apartment and I

remember hanging out with him a little, although he was virtually never around.

Some months later Mike found out, (I suppose I must have told him) that my rent was unpaid. He immediately handed me 300 dollars to pay it. That was more money in those days than now, but he was very well paid as a musician. A month or so later, I recovered financially, as I had discovered the fine art of taxi cab driving in the nighttime, and knocked on his door to return the money, he wouldn't take it.

I moved out, or he did, shortly after that, and I never saw him again, although I did speak to him once on the phone.I suspect he wouldn't remember my name now and may have even forgotten the event, but I still remember his generosity to me almost 35 years later. Here is a clip of Mike Stern below.

The point of all of this is, that the LAST thing I am is a self made man, if indeed my success (best defined as survival in this art) counts as making it. Repeatedly mentors and teachers, acquaintances, crazy persistence and just stupid luck have allowed me to continue to paint and grow better at it. I am thankful to so many people that I couldn't begin to name them all. Although I suppose it might be good to begin with my patient wife. .

I will return tomorrow with another of the posts detailing the American Landscape tradition. Those of you who come to the blog for how- to information, understand that this is essential for you to know. You need to know what good painting looks like, if you intend to make good paintings yourself. You wouldn't try to be a guitarist without studying Wes Montgomery would you?

The summer I painted in Provincetown

Henry Hensche, still life, from outer Cape Auctions
I had a hard time finding an image by Hensche, if you have a good one you can e-mail me I would be grateful and will add it to this blog. For now, this will be our example.

I guess an adequate time has passed since I wrote my last autobiographical post, that I can write another. I have a a number of goals for this blog, and I often ask myself questions like,"what does a painter need to know?" and "will this be useful to my readers?" This blog is mostly a tutorial, but I do have some other goals, one of which is to document the things I have seen, and my own experiences as a painter.

The last post I did on my history had me in The Fenway studios studying with R.H.Ives Gammell. If you haven't read the posts before this on the Gammell studios , they are here, and here.

I spent several years in the Fenway studios as part of the Gammell milieu. There were a number of other students in the building of Gammell and some were from the Hensche studios Although there was some animosity between Hensche and Ives Gammell, we students, at least in the Fenway studios mingled freely and knew one another pretty well. The Hensche students spent their time drawing planes and we drew shapes. We occasionally shared models and drew figures side by side. A number of students of Gammell spent time with Hensche as well. But Gammell and Hensche evidently were not fond of one another. Being exposed to both approaches was an advantage and I remember many late night discussions on painting with Hensches students. I wish now I had learned more about the Hensche method. Although I don't really want to paint like that, all knowledge is useful and there was a lot of experience in those ideas.

One spring in the mid 1970's, I was invited by Robert Douglas Hunter, one of my mentors and himself a senior Gammell student, to spend part of the summer in Provincetown, on Cape Cod . I had begun painting landscapes and I jumped at the chance to paint the dunes and the historic waterfront . Ives Gammell had summered there for many years but had recently moved his summer retreat to Williamstown, Massachusetts. Hunter had the use of the Provincetown place.The old barn that I visited that summer was divided into two parts, half was where Hunter and I stayed, and there was an enormous studio with a loft at the back in which I slept. The other half contained the Cape School of Art . The Cape school had been started by Charles Hawthorne in 1899. Hawthorn was a famed impressionist painter who wrote a well known book. The Hawthorne book is a classic and should be in every painters library .In 1935 upon the death of Hawthorne, Henry Hensche took the helm of the school for nearly fifty years.

Here is my usual disclaimer, there are many Hensche students today who are far more qualified to speak about him and his legacy than I. I do not pose as an expert on his teaching. I do want to describe what I saw that summer though.

The big barn was rickety and very old, I think it may have dated from the 1700's, Massachusetts has plenty of historic architecture. The barn is now gone. That barn was used to teach painting for decades though. Provincetown was a tourist town and the streets were filled with crowds of vacationing people . It was changing over from being an old art colony into a gay travel destination. I saw the last of the art colony. The sandy streets lined with 19th century houses, the fishing fleet and the dunes running along the sea to Cape Race at the end of the Cape were beautiful.The barn was a few blocks from downtown.It had a little grassy yard out in front and a bit of worn out picket fence,weathered gray.

Out behind this dilapidated structure was a fenced in area where students could paint in the sunlight. They had stands upon which were set white wooden blocks about 2 inches high.The students painted from these blocks using only palette knives. The idea was to make the students work in planes and unable to model or blend their strokes together, they were forced to use color to turn their forms. That's an idea that pops up in a lot of places. It is a variation on the conservation off values idea. Rather than using a new value to describe each change of plane in a form, they used a different color or color temperature, delicate stuff.

They had what seemed a strange kind of color to me, but they all seemed to see it. The blocks in their paintings glowed with a preternatural sort of fluorescence. I have posted a link to a book on Hensches teaching and Hawthornes below. It has not much to do with how I paint, but I think I should make it possible for you to learn more about it if you choose. There are several Henscche students out there today teaching his philosophy.

Hensche studied Monet extensively and believed he was carrying on that tradition of color. The whole thrust of the training seemed to me to revolve around a heightened perception of color vibration. As I said before, I never really got it.They referred to it as "full color seeing" and were rather fanatic about it. ( undoubtedly some former Hensche student will log on to my comments and bite me, watch out! I am 32 feet tall and weigh over 1600 pounds ) I did see a show of Hensches drawings at the Guild of Boston Artists in about 1975, and they were very strong. His emphasis on planar structure gave the black and white portrait heads in the show a great solidity. I saw that he could draw very well.

I spent my days painting on the dunes around Provincetown I liked painting out in the bright sunlight on the dunes with the light blasting down around me from the cloudless skies and bouncing off of all of that sand. I got in touch with my inner lizard The light there is famous for its warmth.. Many of the other people there were naked, well actually, all the other people there were naked. I had a pair of lovely young women take off their clothes and lay down to tan themselves in front of my easel. I have found over the years, that never happens enough.They laughed about it later over dinner with me.

I was invited to see Hensche do a painting demonstration in the yard of his house. I remember I walked there from the barn- studio where I was staying. He was set up and working when I arrived, around him was gathered a group of his students and other interested onlookers. I believe he may have done this every week, although I was only there once.

What I saw was amazing. I described it in a previous post as like watching him chop the head out of a rainbow with an axe. The color was unlike anything I see, but the form was right there. I remember how fast it happened, I am trying to remember if he did it all with a knife but I can't. It was 35 years ago now. I don't know where all of Hensches work went, it doesn't seem to appear at auction very often. But I am glad I got to see him do that demo, and it was a little brush with an art historical figure that made my journey richer, and I am proud to have seen him that once.

I knew several of his students in those days and have run into a few of them years later. Some of them have become professional painters and a a few are very well known. Some of them lived in those days above a restaurant on the main street of Provincetown called Sals. There were a number of old studios up there which must have dated back to the Hawthorne days . They had a very historic feel and I expect they too have been improved out of existence. So many of the sets from that era have disappeared. I thought then that since they were so old and historic that they had made it through, and would be preserved from destruction. I was naive though, most of that old historic New England that is our artistic heritage has been destroyed .

The famous modernist teacher Hans Hoffman was there too, in a big white house on a downtown corner that had previously belonged to Fredrick Waugh. I was only vaguely aware of the Hoffman school at that time, but a who's who of abstract painters passed through there.

I was ultimately to spend many years at the other cape on Massachusetts, Cape Ann, but I am glad for the part of a summer I spent in the old art colony at Provincetown. I was a witness to that history for a brief time.