Leeuwarden 1962
In the photograph, I am the dapper young boy in the bow tie on the far left. It it summer, the boys are in shorts, the girls, dresses above the knees. All the men are in ties and the mothers are in pearls, hats, and jackets. It is 1962, I was six years old, and my family is posing before boarding a charter flight to the Netherlands. My parents had not been back to Holland since immigrating to the US immediately after WWII. For my two sisters and I, it would be the first time flying on an airplane.
Adults riding bicycles everywhere, a boy openly smoking on the street, large whole cheeses shaped like cannonballs, and women unashamedly changing into bathing suits on the beach; I remember many things from this trip.
One memory had an impact on me becoming an artist.
We were to visit a studio/ storefront belonging to an artist, the husband of a family relative in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. He painted local scenes of the area. A wine-colored, velvet curtain hung in a passageway between an apartment and the artist’s studio.
I recall its weight as I got to push the curtain aside. We moved from the living area into a space where the artist’s paintings were revealed. I did not have words to explain what I felt passing into the studio, but I remember it feeling mysterious, even magical. Standing in a room filled with real paintings felt like a secret.
Being six years old I didn’t know anything about art other than it could be found in museums. I don’t remember any original paintings on the walls of our family home. I had heard my parents say that Rembrandt was an important artist but I did not know why. It would be many years before I had any idea what qualities made art remarkable or how to describe why it was something to talk about.
The memory of the velvet curtain had both a physical weight and a metaphorical weight. Why art differs from everyday things is something I think a lot about. When I am in a museum, a gallery, or someone’s home filled with paintings, I pass into a world that is separated from the outside world. The world of art often shifts my consciousness. That shift, a change in perspective or thinking, also takes place when I enter my studio, surrounded by the paintings I am working on. This change is both intellectually and viscerally exciting, and it also provides me with a much-needed alternative to the disturbing and tragic aspects of the world.
I pull aside a symbolic curtain whenever I start a new painting. The task is to take the four-dimensional information in the world and transform it onto a two-dimensional flat canvas. What I aim to achieve, and it doesn’t happen all the time, could be described as an aura or something that might be considered beauty.
The ineffable quality of paintings makes it complicated to completely describe what happens in a painting, a painting worth thinking about. I’ve written dozens of artists statements and I feel there is always something missing in them. When I first began writing this piece I thought it was going to be about my search for the words to describe beauty in art. I thought I would write about how for years I have self-studied philosophy and art, looking for kernels of wisdom that could give me language and articulation.
Reading philosophy is not easy for me. I spend hours reading and rereading its dense language, looking for something akin to a secret code that has the potential to unlock a realization for me. But through all of this study, I often have to remind myself that words describing aesthetics do not fully explain what happens when I pull back the curtain and stand in front of a work of art that will captivate my attention for a lifetime.
It has been 61 years since my experience with the velvet curtain. Have I remembered that day in the painter’s studio correctly? Its impact on my life as an artist? Possibly my immigrant parents, who lived much of their life feeling separate from the Americans around them, instilled in me a desire to remain separate from the everyday or even the rest of the world. Maybe I got lucky in life. I had an experience that opened me up to future experiences where I saw the power that art has in the world. I was in the right place to want to learn more, to experience the sense that beauty in art makes life full and wondrous.
You can see more of my paintings here
Thank you Richard, for this tender story, and your work at try to pull together the thoughts and feelings into the gel of understanding and revelation in words. Most of all, thank you for your ability to see and share the visual beauty, which transcends words.
Ah yes, the curtain. You describe it so well.
This essay has made me wonder about my own earliest, transformative encounters with art. A worthy excavation for anyone. Thank you for sharing this beautiful night painting—I love the whole series!—and writing with us.