ABOUT THE ARTIST

I got interested in painting the view out my window during a landscape painting class at the School of Visual Arts. Lucy Reitzfeld, a marvelous painter and excellent teacher, laid out her version of a palette used by the old masters and showed us how to mix paint to get shades of color and deep, warm shadows, and how to paint in layers. To the classic question, “When is my painting finished?” she answered that it’s finished when you, the painter, like what you see. Most serious painters want others to see their work, but racing to get the picture “to market” doesn’t make for quality painting. If the artist is happy with the result, no matter how long it took to get there, the painting will sell itself.

Instead of painting a country landscape in Lucy’s class, I decided to paint a New York cityscape, a panorama of low-rise rooftops with a wide array of wooden water tanks. When I brought the finished painting home from class, my lovely wife and muse, Nell Merlino, encouraged me to keep on painting water towers until I had enough of them to exhibit. The twenty-plus paintings I have done so far are all on this website.

Joe Millar, a published poet and an old friend of mine, gave me the following compliment:

“These paintings are kind of strangely silent and portentous-seeming, maybe because of the potential implied by the huge masses of water held aloft, maybe they’re an urban vision of the Aquarian age, maybe because one usually associates such tanks with rural settings where’s there’s only one, or maybe because of the cone-shaped tops which look like a Sufi headdress. I like ‘em, and I like the light you painted.”

Please contact me at gbc@nyc.rr.com if you want to discuss any of this.