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Last Leaves
Oil on canvass, First Manhattan Period, Autumn of 1965.
During my time at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, I spent a lot of time in Central Park.
My first residence was in a dormitory style accommodation at the McBurny Y.M.C.A. on East 23rd Street in Manhattan. I was getting little or no artwork done after school except for a few portraits of the others in the dorm.
After coming back one day and finding a rock on my bed which had been thrown from the street six stories below, that was the last straw and I got one of the tiny private rooms where I lived for a couple of months.
There in this small room listening to classical music and Joan Baez albums, I did a few paintings. I was residing there during the Great Blackout of 1965. It was there I did this painting from memory. I was sitting on one of the huge erratic glacial boulders admiring it's texture and marveling at the wonderful job the fog was doing making the apartment buildings on the West Side edge of the park seem like palaces.
It was late Autumn. In those days, before global warming was bantered about as myth or fact, the climate was colder. Whatever. Who's arguing? It was cold, OK?
I sat there in the cold doing my job. I was observing. I was enjoying the beautiful golden color of a brave little willow tree growing near the water. It was the last tree to lose it's leaves, and it hung on to them fiercely and begrudgingly, it seemed, surrendered them almost one by one into the waiting water.
Now there are art movements afoot it seems, these days, that cater to those who want only the thoughtless exercise of realistic detail in all art and nothing but. The artist pandering to their demands becomes reduced to a tin pan alley magician producing one dry academic exercise of unfeeling realism after another.
But in this painting, I paint a memory. It's my memory of the rock, the buildings vanishing in the fog, and that brave little tree. I have many such memories now in my 54-year-old mind, most of which didn't have the same opportunity to jump on to the canvass as did that of the little willow and it's last leaves in that tiny room back in 1965.
One day there was a riot in the TV lounge started by a local West Side gang of young men. I was in the lobby waiting for the elevator, I took the stairs. The incident helped me to realize that I was going to need some more space if I was going to be more productive.
I decided to get an apartment, which turned out to be a great move, because I was to get more done in that apartment than I ever was able to do in one place like that ever since!
"Last Leaves"
Click here to return to the Voice Introduction for Oil Paintings, Page Two.
Click the thumbnail to see the digital art used for the background,
"charc100image132copy".
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Last Leaves
Oil on canvass, First
Manhattan Period, Autumn of 1965.