ART TALKS at The Artistic Forum

©"Lilacs by the Sea", oil on panel by Shawn Lütz

©"Midsummer", o/c, by Peter C. Stone

Part One: the artists:

Peter C. Stone says the “torch was lit” for him and his path as an artist was determined while still attending Middlesex School in Concord, MA. It was there, he says, at age seventeen, that his interest in the arts in general: theatre, sculpting, writing, painting were nurtured. “I became very involved in theatre during high school. This was the same period that other aspects of my creative self were nurtured and began to come forth.”

Stone remains interested in theatre today and is an accomplished musician who lists among his many accomplishments the fact that he recorded a couple of records years ago when, as he notes with some humor, that was the way we bought and listened to music.

Proficient with the sax, guitar, flute and keyboards, he decided to attend Claremont Colleges in California in 1974 after visiting Africa. He chose Claremont, he says, because of the wide variety of courses on its five campuses. While majoring in biology and studio art during the days, he worked evenings as a musician playing local clubs and coffee houses in Los Angeles. Theater was his first interest, then. It provided income, enjoyment, an opportunity to travel, something that he did with his family often as a younger boy, and an outlet to grow artistically.

But it was his experimentation with and love of painting while attending college – painting bogs, swamps, fields, estuaries, particularly, that fascinated him most and which would eventually define his art later in life. “I found it quite easy to sit down for hours on end and become absorbed in the object of my concentration”, he says. “I went nowhere without my sketch board, watercolors and charcoal.” Eager to learn more about art, he says the turning point in his career came when mid-way through college he snuck into a graduate school drawing course also at Claremont. “I was hooked immediately by the open high energy ideas. I was surrounded by people with incredible skills. It was humbling, but made for a steep learning curve.”

Stone says he never looked back after that experience. Upon graduation, he “began writing and

©"Land Cradles", oil on canvas by Peter C. Stone

painting each day to learn my crafts” – a work habit he says that “has been the foundation of my method.”

As he studied and traveled, he discovered there was a market for his art. “The response to my work then was very encouraging, not just from selling pieces, but the actual words of encouragement from viewers.” Interestingly, traveling seems to be an integral and recurring part of Stone’s growth and attraction to landscape painting in particular. “I’ve had the good fortune to be able to travel and paint. Painting is a wonderful universal language like music.” Indeed, his résumé lists “Australia, Indonesia, India, the rugged shores of Labrador and Baffin Island, the Antarctic,

©"The Cove", oil on canvas by Peter C. Stone

the mythic tableaux of North Wales and Nepal’s Himalayas”, as just a few of the places where he has drawn inspiration and ideas for his work.

By 1982, Stone, who had gained experience and a loyal following in local group shows, and who made the leap to gallery artist when he was invited to exhibit solo in a small gallery in L.A., was ready to move back east. With painting occupying more and more of his time, and his growing experience using flat brushes and fans to brush his paint across previous painted, tacky surfaces, he viewed his progression as an artist as inevitable. “It was the progression of these experiences, no single one, that kept beckoning me to continue as a painter. I learned that to see a body of work presented in a gallery at a single moment was, indeed, as much a part of the process as working on a single canvas.”

The years proved Stone correct. By 1985, drawing inspiration from what he liked best about Renoir, Rembrandt and Parrish, whom he admired for “his sense of wit and powerful glazes”, and Bierstadt whom he liked “for his outdoorsmanship and willingness to experience environment in person”, Stone evolved and focused on what apparently fascinated him most: a style the Vose Gallery of Boston termed “upscale tonal realism” – although I would view the latter element as impressionism.

Over his career Peter Stone has presented more than thirty solo and group shows in galleries and museums across the country, including the Art Expo in New York, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, the Copley Society in Boston, and now at Winstanley-Roark Fine Arts Gallery in Dennis, MA. His work (he produces about fifty pieces a year, an amazing feat when you understand what is involved in each creation) is a unique interpretation of the early tonalist painters of the Barbizon School, and is noted for its dull and gauzy, textured presentation. Unlike the darker more moody works of early tonalists, however, Stone says he gravitates toward the brighter, luminescent side of the style without employing either varnish or smoothing techniques used by realists. How does he accomplish this? He says it comes from his unique handling of the paint and pigment on a stippled surface, a technique he says he adopted in 1985. “That was probably a pivotal turn that came from wanting to control the layering of pigment and gaining greater control of texture in the underpainting.”

Shawn Lutz, like Peter Stone, is an artist with an interest in theatre whose early years were occupied with travel. An admitted Air Force brat and son of a pilot father, Lutz says he lived at times in the Philippines, Thailand, Texas and California, before moving back to the east coast with his parents and settling in Scituate, Massachusetts. As described in an earlier piece I did on Lutz for Art Talks, painting came naturally at an early age and was supported by his mother who encouraged him to enter one of his works at an outdoor fair sponsored by the Copley Society of Boston. That painting won Third Place.

Unlike Stone, however, Lutz didn’t chose art as a career, even though he was constantly painting and amusing high school friends with his above average caricatures of teachers and fellow students. At best Lutz, who became a varsity wrestler and represented his class at the New England Division varsity wrestling competition, simply enjoyed his art for what it was and hoped that one day he would be able to duplicate the glaze his high school art teacher achieved with apparent ease, but as for making a living as an artist, he didn’t see much reward.

©"The Gift", oil on panel by Shawn Lütz

Ironically, his skill at painting commercially was not on canvas, but metal – automobile painting to be exact. It was while attending Massassoit Community College in Brockton, MA that Lutz decided that he would use his skill as a painter to earn a living painting and repairing dented cars. To his disappointment, however, he discovered that auto body shops wanted people with experience and a specialized degree in the field. He could paint, but he lacked the degree. So, naturally, he enrolled in an intensive nine-month program at the Rhode Island Shop School. The year was 1991, and little could Lutz have realized, then, that the course of his life had been significantly altered by this one decision.

Lutz became very, very good at a trade that, he soon discovered, required an intimate knowledge of paints and application techniques. He also learned to work with and master a medium that up until that time, he avoided -- oil. He hated working with it on canvas, he says with some amusement, because he didn’t understand it. As he gained experience as an autobody specialist, he eventually mastered what he avoided earlier. There were regular paints, base coat paints, clear coat paints, highly

©"The Room was the Color of Spring", o/p by Shawn Lütz

specialized combination of colors of paints that produced what manufacturers wanted kept as closely guarded secrets, and then there were the pearlescents that would actually appear differently colored depending on where you stood when you viewed them, and, of course, there was the glass-like finish that made even old cars look new.

A pearlescent paint combines so much color, he says, and requires that it be mixed in the exact color combinations specified by the manufacturer, that in the absence of the code, achieving the color became an autobody specialist’s worst nightmare. He describes it this way: “In the sixties, cars were red, black, blue. Today one color can be comprised of silver, translucent pearl, black and green. What color does that make? he asks. And you can run into problems along the way. “If, for example, when you’re mixing the paint, you’re off by five pounds of pressure, you’re done. It would throw the whole thing off.” And then, “you have to consider the wear that comes from being outside in the sun, and the natural fading process over the years. Manufactures supply paint that matches the original color, but they don’t provided faded paint. That, you have to figure out yourself.”

After six years in the business he quit with no regrets. He left with a better appreciation of what it took to give paints the luster he so admired in his high school art teacher’s work. Shawn Lutz didn’t realize it then, he says, but what he had learned about paint in the autobody business, and how to use it to achieve the result his customers needed and wanted, was about to change his life. It happened, actually, by chance, while he was still doing autobody work and acting on the side.

Still not convinced that being an artist was his forte, Lutz, like Stone went into the theatre and took up acting – “way off Broadway – as he explains it, to earn a living while continuing to paint, but with considerably more talent and experience than before.

He freelanced as an actor during evenings, working dinner circuits and community stage productions at the Mystery Café out of Middleboro, and saw himself as a pretty good actor. “Funny”, he says of that period, “nobody knew I painted. I was renting a small apartment in Barnstable and set up an easel in my living room that was owned by one of the actors I knew from the theatre.” He had finally found a way to use art to supplement his income. And what better way to sum it all up than by cliché: the rest was history.

Shawn Lutz’s work is so much in demand today that viewing his work is a rare treat. Why? Because it sells by commission to private buyers before being displayed. If you hope to own a Shawn Lutz painting today, the wait is not measured months or even a year or two, but years. Of the shows for which he has produced a body of work, they sell out.

Part Two: their styles:

Both Lutz and Stone work in oil, and both utilize glazes to achieve the results they want. Lutz is a realist painter, whose attention to detail is exquisite. His technique involves painting in thin layers, baking his painting in an oven, applying varnish, then painting, baking and applying more varnish, all the while smoothing each successive layer until the painting literally shines. His work invites close inspection and harsh review for the smallest imperfection in detail or finish, which simply doesn’t exist.

©"Cape Estuary", oil on canvas by Peter C. Stone

Stone’s paintings are more impressionistic, but can be loosely defined as tonal realism, too. Instead of the smooth surface of a Lutz painting, Stone’s work is cavernous and textured. He strives not for the look of traditional realists, but for a textured, gauzy dull, 3-D affect that takes more definitive form the further you step back from and view it. He works on medium-rough canvas, not board, the rougher the better, the bigger the painting, he says, and describes his technique this way: “The paint is applied thickly – impasto – so that as I develop the image, the

oils can be drawn out and stippled to create the texture. This is achieved using primarily fan brushes, really a sculptural approach, except that the painting is within the now 3-D dimensional surface of the oils.”

As he nears completion of the first phases of his work, en plein air, thinner brushstrokes in a damar varnish mix are laid down. He then lets ten days or more go by before applying translucent glazes (pigments mixed thinly in a concoction of varnish, dryer, turpentine, linseed and stand oils). The canvas is then laid flat and the diluted mixtures are applied. The painting is then allowed to dry again before overpainting within the layers, using varying degrees of opacity. What emerges is a cavernous affect where the thinner fluid pigments sink between the ridges of the stippled surface. The thicker and more opaque strokes stay on top and build. After another drying period more fluid glazes are applied, followed by yet another build up of opaque glazing or overpainting. The entire process, Stone says, may be performed between two to four times before the final result is achieved.

This painting, currently a work in progress by Mr. Lütz, will be completed and available at the time of the unveiling taking place during the "Extreme Glazing" show on June 28, 2003 at Winstanley-Roark Fine Arts. Please contact the gallery for complete details or to be added to the drawing list and a chance to purchase an original Lütz..

Both Lutz and Stone bring an individual interpretation to their works with pure mastery of their mediums, gained by years of experience and trial and error. Both artists have secrets: for Lutz, the exact way he bakes and polishes his paintings to achieve the smooth look of a newly painted and polished car; for Stone, his secrets lie in the mixing ratios and knowledge of varying characteristics of the different pigments he uses to achieve consistent gazes. The juxtaposition of their work in one show provides an interesting and enlightening opportunity to view extremes, appreciate the differences and then, finally, come to the realization that good art is truly universal in its appeal, regardless.

"EXTREME GLAZING"

An unveiling of Shawn Lütz's latest masterpiece and an exhibition of Peter C. Stone latest works from his new book "Sanctuaries". Both will give a short talk about their work and Mr. Stone will be available to sign his new book "Sanctuaries".

"...Mr. Stone's ability to match evocative words with evocative scenery is haunting."- Heartland Reviews

Distribution: Baker & Taylor
Available at your bookstore or Amazon.com.

Artists' Champagne Reception with live jazz by
Naked Jazz.

Saturday, June 28, 2003, 5 to 8 PM.

Location:
Winstanley-Roark Fine Arts
601 Main Street, Rte. 6A
Local: 1.508.385.4713 or Toll Free: 1.866.385.4713
Email: wrfa@masterfulart.com
Internet: http://www.masterfulart.com

Show will run through July 2, 2003.