Eugene Ludens fit exactly my vision of a Dutch master. Round, florid, tweedy, avuncular, he suggested I start right out painting with oil paints and it turned out to be my best choice. “Your first efforts probably won’t be keepers,” he told me, “so you can paint on anything. Try plain old brown paper. It’s cheap and if you do happen to paint something worth keeping, the paint will preserve the paper and you can mount it on a piece of fiberboard and frame it.” I was familiar with Upson panels, precursor to today’s plaster-like drywall, from my work in stagecraft, and soon made my way to a building supply store, purchased a four-by-eight-foot sheet and had it cut into several different size rectangles. I was optimistic that my early efforts would be keepers and I wanted to be ready.
The class did not consist solely of undergraduates and I seemed to be the only “beginner.” Several of my classmates were grad students and one, I learned later, was actually teaching one of the design classes. I found the atmosphere intimidating in the beginning, but soon began to learn from observing the more advanced students. Often, there would be a live model posing on a platform in the middle of the vast painting studio, but we were not required to draw or paint them. Several students opted to continue work on other paintings.
The early fall weather was mild and sunny when classes began in my sophomore year and Mr. Ludens directed several of us to take sketch pads downtown and draw some cityscapes that we could work from back in the studio. I realized later that drawing buildings from the alley viewpoint was an excellent exercise in perspective – something I had mastered in those high school mechanical drawing classes. I found a cluttered alley with windows, fire escapes, garbage cans and packing crates an interesting challenge and made a detailed drawing on a large sheet of brown paper. I was confident that I could complete my first masterpiece within just a few class periods.
I had yet to squeeze out any of the thick, fragrant oil paints onto the pristine wooden palette that I had seasoned with linseed oil according to the directions of one of the older students. She told me that, once dried, the thin skin of dried oil would make it easier to clean off any dried paint left behind. I soon learned that, while oil paints were slow to dry, they became stubbornly difficult to scrape away once they had hardened. After I had ruined one of my thin, flexible palette knives in the attempt, my dad gave me one of his best, sturdy putty knives for the purpose. Through trial and error, I learned just how much paint to squeeze out at a time to avoid waste and began to make new colors by combining two or more of the basic twenty or so that I had been advised to buy.
Once I began to paint the alley drawing, I found it difficult to “paint all over the canvas at once” rather than concentrating on a specific feature. The drab browns and dirty brick reds dominant in the alley served to emphasize the few areas of sun-reflecting windows and, in particular, a large yellow barrel that sat beside a heap of cardboard boxes. My brush kept going back to the yellow barrel, emphasizing its roundness, defining ridges and shadows and colors reflected off nearby objects. The barrel seemed to hover in front of the rest of the drawing as if it were the only real thing in the picture. An amused voice behind me said, “Stop! Quit making love to that barrel! You need to bring the rest of the painting up to the same level.” I looked at Mr. Ludens, then back at my painting. “I really like that barrel,” I told him. “It looks so real.”
“Sometimes you have to get rid of the best part in order to allow the rest of the painting to catch up with it,” he said. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy the barrel and eventually abandoned the painting. During the next three years, whenever I got carried away with one detail, he reminded me not to paint yellow barrels. That lesson goes beyond painting, I discovered. Sometimes, in writing as in painting, you do have to get rid of the best part of something in order to give the rest a chance. That’s life.