Sketches of Marvin Franklin

Some artists are indefatigable sketchers.  Once such example was the late, great Marvin Franklin, a working artist in every sense of the term.

Franklin worked two jobs.  At night, he worked on the New York City subway system, fixing the tracks.  By day, he would work on his art – drawing, painting, and attending classes at the Arts Students League.  And for good measure, he volunteered two days a week at a homeless shelter, volunteered one day a week at his church helping young kids, and taught art classes to teens in the Bronx.  Franklin was clearly a man of remarkable energy and significant artistic curiosity.

Franklin lived with a sketchbook in his hand.  He always carried an 11x14 sketchbook, and usually used a simple ballpoint pen.  Franklin thought the pen was the ideal tool to hasten his artistic development; he thought it made the artist look more closely and draw more carefully since erasure was impossible.  He also thought ballpoint pens were resilient, compact, handy and ubiquitous. 

I don’t know how the many impromptu models felt when Franklin sketched them, but I’m sure it helped that he was over six feet tall and weighed some 230 pounds.  Franklin would fill an entire spiral sketchbook every week or two; his pen seldom left the surface of the paper. 

On April 29, 2007, Franklin, then 55, was carrying a piece of equipment across the tracks at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Downtown Brooklyn when he was struck and killed by a G train. He left behind a wife, three grown children, and hundreds of sketch pads, watercolors and etchings. Many of his works depicted subway riders and, often, homeless people.

Franklin came to his empathy for the homeless through direct experience:  he was homeless once himself for about a year, and said that the discipline of art helped him put his life into order.  Upon his passing, the New York Transit Museum curated a show of his most significant work.

Even the most cursory look would reveal the Franklin was an acute observer of humanity, and that he sketched with a remarkable fluidity and sense of detail.  Though his sketchbooks were not home to finished drawings, the images he created had a vitality often missing from more academic work. 

What would have happened to Franklin had he lived longer?  That will be forever unknown to us; he seemed to live for his art, but did not dream of artistic fame.  His ambitions (and passions) were more down-to-earth; to Franklin making great art was not more important than being a good man. 

I had not the pleasure of meeting Franklin, though his legend at the Arts Students League looms large.  I would’ve been delighted, I’m sure, to call him a friend.

Pretty Mother of the Night, by Frederic Remington

We continue our look at Western artist Frederic Remington (1861-1909) with a picture very different from the frenetic and violent A Dash for the Timber: Pretty Mother of the Night.

Following his first commercial sales to Harper’s Weekly, Remington went to rural Peabody, Kansas, to become a sheep rancher.  He quickly found out the life in Kansas was boring, isolated and rougher than he anticipated.  An Easterner at heart, he was never really completely at home in the wilderness. His inheritance dissipated from the failed venture, Remington returned home.

His mother loaned him enough money to go to Kansas City and start a hardware business.  However, some kind of swindle (the details have never really been clear), made the business fail.  He took what money he had left and invested as half-owner in a saloon.  He also married his New York sweetheart Eva Caten and brought her to Kansas City.

Eva was as unhappy in the saloon business as Remington was in the sheep business.  In addition, she showed little interest or appreciation in his art, and left him to return to New York.  This desertion may have served as something of a wakeup call to Remington, who started to sketch and paint in earnest.

His painting created greater success for him than any of his business ventures, and he soon identified as an artist.  He returned to New York and reunited with Eva in Brooklyn.  He studied at the Art Students League in New York and improved his technique.

At this time, there was a fear in the East that the great open spaces of the West were closing down, and that the pageant of the American West was drawing to a close.  Remington was able to capitalize on that by submitting work to Harper’s Weekly and Collier’s, documenting his recent (and largely exaggerated) Western experiences.  Eastern editors took him for the genuine article, and started sending him back to the West to chronicle its final days.

Between 1885 and 1888 Remington made a number of trips to the American Southwest, principally to cover the U.S. Cavalry and its pursuit of the Apaches. He also followed the Cavalry in pursuit of the renegade Indian Geronimo.  The stark landscape and dramatic human events he encountered there greatly influenced his artistic development. Remington filled his diaries with observations, made countless field sketches, took many photographs with the latest equipment, and collected numerous artifacts to use in his paintings.

In the eternal comparisons between Remington and Charles Russell (1864-1926), one of the most interesting points is their respective feelings toward the American Indian.  Russell genuinely liked Indians – to him, they were just as much a symbol of freedom and living-in-nature as the American cowboy.  He learned the exacting sign language (he and his wife used it as both a private code and a party trick), and even camped with them for extended periods.  Though he never shied from depicting the occasional savagery of the Indian, he also reveled in his beauty, capability and stoicism.

It was an entirely different story with Remington.  Most of his interactions with the Indians were while he was covering the Indian Wars in the company of the U.S. Cavalry.  They were never anything less than the enemy – wily, unscrupulous, untrustworthy and … alien.  There are few positive depictions of the Indians in Remington’s work.  That is why Pretty Mother of the Night (oil on board) is such a remarkable picture.  Seldom has he portrayed the Indian with such a sympathetic eye.

Pretty Mother of the Night is best labeled a nocturne – its explores the technical and aesthetic difficulties of painting nighttime pictures.  (It is a feat at which Remington would excel.)  Painted around 1900, this picture was meant to serve as an illustration for a novel he had recently written called The Way of the Indian.  In the novel the hero, White Otter, addresses the moon (Pretty Mother of the Night) after successfully completing a test of manhood. 

Aside from the lack of the frenetic energy in a painting like A Dash for the Timber, look at the other things that Remington does differently.  A Dash for the Timber details man, horse and landscape with an almost photographic attention to detail.  Here, Remington uses a significant change in compositional technique.  Though beautifully rendered, the horses, Indians and landscape are all done with an almost Impressionist lack of detail. 

Also … Just look at how he poses the subjects and what he’s doing with them.  If the landscape is barren and empty, Remington underscores the hardness of the landscape by the lean, almost skeletal sparseness of the Indians.  These are not well-fed warrior princes, but, rather, people of the land barely squeezing a living from it.

Also, too, look at how he compares the barren immensity of the landscape and its two dots of life with the immensity of the heavens with its corresponding dots of light.  Remington here underscores the quiet miracle of life, both here on earth, and in the heavens.

More Remington tomorrow!

 

 

Full Moon, Winter Crossing by Peter Fiore

It’s always a pleasure for us to cover contemporary artists here at The Jade Sphinx, and when coming across the fine work by artist Peter Fiore (born 1955), I wanted to take a closer look at one of my favorite paintings, Full Moon, Winter Crossing.

Fiore is predominantly a landscape painter; he has won a number of awards, including first place for landscape in the Art Renewal Center’s Annual Salon, along with receiving the Grand Prize in the America China Oil Painters Artist League (ACOPAL).

 

Fiore was born in Teaneck, NJ, and studied at Pratt Institute and later at the Art Students League in New York.  He is also a professional illustrator, collaborating on thousands of projects while also working on the faculties of Pratt, Syracuse University and the School of Visual Arts.  He lives with his wife, the sculptor Barbara Fiore, alongside the Delaware River in northeastern Pennsylvania.  Readers are encouraged to look at his Web site at:   http://www.peterfiore.com/.

Many of Fiore’s paintings are wintry landscapes.  As your correspondent considers this the most beautiful time of year – and thinks Pennsylvania among the most beautiful of places in the United States – I wanted to show you Full Moon, Winter Crossing, painted on linen and about 48x60 in diameter.  As Fiore writes on his Web site: I am especially drawn to the winter landscape. It is a time when the earth loses its leafy covering and reveals it's true self. Covered in snow, the world reflects light and creates a spectrum of colors that are both dramatic and beautiful.

Well… where to start on this wonderful picture?  First, I am struck by the stark beauty of the winter landscape.  The dead trees stand silent sentinel at the riverside, and bits of withered vegetation struggle to peek through the snow.  A small house is visible in the distance, but there are no lights in the window to connote a sense of hearth; there’s no fireside warmth on this night.

For Fiore, the river is a living thing.  It captures the moonlight and reflects it back, reshaped on the currents of water.  The shadows of the bridge create rich shadows which shimmy, and the water grows more darkly blue as the eye travels left, away from the moonlight.  And this is not the placid water of a summer day – this water flows.

Another striking thing about the picture is the quality of light.  Look at how Fiore plays the moonlight on the bridge top, illuminating the steel girders with yellow highlights.  More interesting, look at how he plays the light on the pier supporting the bridge or on the snow in the foreground:  shadows are not black (or brown washes), but nighttime blue in the cold evening light.  Even the moonlight that catches the rippling water has a quality of coldness that perfectly captures the season.

Despite the empty house and cool colors, there is still an element in the picture that is welcoming and beautiful.  This is not winter desolation, but, rather, winter in all of its cool, clear, crystalline beauty. 

One last thing – sometimes the power of a painter in not in the finished picture, but in the sensory associations it suggests.  Though there is nothing at all overt in the picture, what I sense looking at Full Moon, Winter Crossing is not the cold, nor the damp of the water, but a sense of quiet – the special muffled quality to the air that only a snowy winter day offers.  It is, like many interesting pictures, powerful in its suggestions as well as its representations.