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"Sunday
Morning", 20.5 x 17,
Egg
Tempera, © G.
Gilmartin
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Garry Gilmartin is an extraordinarily talented,
award-winning artist whose work is both growing in demand and
increasing in value rapidly. He’s courted by gallery owners
who see in his talent a certain “something” that attracts
buyers who spend, and spend big for what they want ― and
the word is, they want his work.
But if you were to ask him to attribute a
reason for his success as an artist, words like “gifted”
and “talented” wouldn’t likely cross his lips; at least
they didn’t when I interview him recently. He’s far too
modest for that. Instead, Gilmartin says he is “a lucky
guy” who is “recovering” ― always recovering, in
fact, from a life that at its lowest saw him “painting signs
in a barroom for drinks”, not caring from day to day for
anything except how he would pay his next bar bill. |
His incredible journey from a life of addiction
and low self-esteem to successful emerging artist today is an
inspiring story that he recounts with understandable trepidation, and
for obvious reasons. What will his colleagues in the arts community
think? What will buyers think? He tells me straight out that few
people know this part of his life, and he wonders whether he really
wants to air it now?
“Yeah”, he says, after a pause, “why not?
Maybe it will help somebody.”
I interviewed Gilmartin over a period of three
nights. As we spoke, a pattern emerged that I believe even he was
unaware of when we started, a pattern that I think pretty much speaks
to the enormous influences key people had on his life. His rise as an
artist is epochal. There were periods of amazing successes,
interrupted by periods of dismal failure, connected by people who came
in and out, and to varying degrees, changed his life both for the
better and for the worse.
Make no mistake about it; Gilmartin is a
different man today than he was ten years ago, when a low self-esteem
and stubborn addiction to drugs reduced him to painting . . . well,
we’ll get to that in a moment.
What is important is that today, Gilmartin is a
man who is comfortable with himself, relaxed, friendly, philosophical,
a wiser man to be sure ¾
an artist on the rise.
Reflecting on his gradual turnaround, he says
that while he owes his current success to many people, four
individuals, particularly, whose involvement inspired and bolstered
him when he needed it most, “changed my life”. These four, he
learns ¾
I learn ¾
as we talk, both recognized the tremendous gift for painting that he
possessed, and encouraged him at different stages to pursue his
dreams. They had the patience to involve themselves with him when they
knew that his greatest liability, the only
thing really holding him back, was his own self-destructive behavior.
First
person:
For Garry Gilmartin, the journey began when he
was five years old, growing up in Palmer, a small town of 10,000
residents in western Massachusetts. It was there as a boy, while
drawing pictures from the back of matchbook covers, that he sensed for
the first time that he had more than a passing interest in art. His
early matchbook portraits excited his imagination and allowed him to
slowly and on his own develop an interest in something that came to
him naturally. From grammar to high school, Gilmartin says he rejected
attempts by teachers to persuade him to apply himself academically.
It’s not that he was a wise guy, or anything like that, he says,
it’s just that he wanted to have fun and was far more interested in
the extracurricular activities that occurred after school, than
anything he could learn in class, except art. “Art was the only
thing I shined at in grammar school,” he says.
An indifferent student, Gilmartin says that if he
had any reason to stay in school it was because he wanted to be like
his older brother, Tom. Tom, ten years his senior, had artistic
talent, and everything else, it seemed: Eagle Scout, class President,
plenty of friends, status; he was a young man who both knew what he
wanted, and understood what he had to do to get it. He even had a
picture of himself with Senator John F. Kennedy by his side, the year
before Kennedy won the presidency. “My brother was and is in my
eyes, a real hero. He’s my idol. He was good at art, and got into
art school because of it. He was good at everything he did,”
Gilmartin recalls, with obvious admiration.
Gilmartin speaks affectionately of his brother
who, at the height of his artistic career, was Museum Director at the
Ashville Museum of Fine Art, in Ashville, North Carolina. “He really
made that place what it is,” Gilmartin says, with what I suspect is
a slight exaggeration.
Through the best and worst of times in his life,
the quite influence of his older brother, Tom, more than anything
else, provided him with a clear vision, a benchmark if you will, of
the measure of what a good man should be. Tom was the Eagle Scout, the
class President, a hero to his younger brother, then, and very much so
now.
High School in Palmer Massachusetts was a
non-starter for young Gilmartin, who found carousing and drinking with
the guys to be more fun than geometry. An acknowledged “C”
student, at a time when grades meant something, he says that if it
wasn’t for the intervention of his art teacher, Mr. Charlie
DiMascolla, who is today a Catholic Priest in South Hadley, there’s
no telling what direction his life would have taken. DiMascolla was a
teacher from the old school, who demanded a lot of his students and
gave a lot of “C’s” to show his displeasure when they didn’t
measure up. “But he gave a lot back to us, too”, Gilmartin says.
He was the kind of art instructor who fought hard for his students,
who made sure his students learned what they were supposed to learn
― no social promotions in those days ― and who made
whatever deals were needed to ensure that his kids got their share of
limited school funds.
“I
remember one time the art department needed a press,” Gilmartin
recalls of the ingenuity with which DiMascolla bargained and bartered
to help his class. “Charlie made a deal with the athletic department
that if they gave him money to buy a press, he’d do publicity
posters for their games. It worked, we got the press and the athletic
department had all the posters they needed. That’s the kind of guy
he was.”
Honing
his skills as a budding artist while in high school, Gilmartin says he
won the “Gold Key” award from the Boston
Globe in his senior year, but was still undecided on a career, far
more interested in having fun and an occasional drink than applying
himself academically. DiMascolla would hear none of it, however. He
saw in Gilmartin the makings of a truly gifted artist, and urged his
young protégé to persevere. “I was rejected by the Museum
School,” Gilmartin recalls of his first application, saying he was
about ready to quit when DiMascolla intervened again. “He not only
made sure I applied for art school, he drove me down to the Paier School of Art in Connecticut and saw to it that I enrolled and
got accepted. He kind of saw me as a diamond in the ruff,” Gilmartin
recalls with a fond laugh. “He didn’t give up on me. He’s a
dedicated man. ‘Come on Mr. Gilmartin we have an interview today’,
he said to me one day. ‘I asked, where are we going?’ And he said,
“Connecticut.’”
Gilmartin
remembers his art teacher as a “great guy” whose influence on his
life was enormous. “He set the mold and I followed it.”
Third
and Fourth persons:
By the
time Nancy Horton, a retired art teacher, and Sandy Backman, a retired
English teacher, met Garry Gilmartin; major changes were underway in
his life.
It was
the liquor and drugs that destroyed a rising career. It was
determination and persistence that could save him. “I was in
recovery,” Gilmartin says of that period.
But the
booze had made a mess of his life.
Achieving
a moderate degree of success as an illustrator after graduating from
Paier in 1972, Gilmartin couldn’t keep pace with an addiction that
started in high school and turned into a tyrannical master that
demanded unquestioning obeisance to its will after college. “I was
making good money as an artist and illustrator,” he tells of those
years, adding derisively, “and living in a cold water flat in New
Haven paying a hundred dollars a month rent. Man, I got so low that I
depended on a good hearted Irish landlady to feed me when I was out of
money and hungry.”
I am
reminded as I write these words of something a former addict told me
about priorities: “first the drugs, then you breathe, then you eat,
in that order.”
These
were the flush years for Gilmartin, both figuratively and literally.
It was the early seventies. He was employed as a freelance illustrator
in New York where he designed book covers for major publishers such as
Ballantine Books and Random House. His illustration business was
productive. He was earning good money but was quickly drowning in a
world of increasing addiction and loss of self-esteem. He seemed hell
bent on self-destruction. “I was twenty-four years old and I would
walk down the street with my portfolio under my arm on my way to a
job, knowing that I’d have money in my pocket to celebrate my
success in a bar afterward. It was awful.”
It was
ten years of his life, wasted, as he recalls it.
He ended
up losing just about everything he worked to achieve, eventually
moving back to Boston for a while, then to Palmer to live with his
father, then to the Cape, where he resides today. One thing he
didn’t lose and alcohol couldn’t take: he never lost his ability
to paint.
Even
with his drinking problems, his illustrations were good enough to be
accepted by Parker Brothers and Digital, among others. He was a design
illustrator, working in Boston, prisoner, unfortunately, to a bad
habit that wouldn’t let go. As it had in New York, his habit
required his undivided attention.
The
years between 1982 and 1988, Gilmartin says, marked the lowest point
in his life. A Boston career shot, he took up residence on the Cape,
and painted infrequently, and when he did paint, it was usually to
earn money to drink and do drugs. Art school, graduate school, good
paying jobs in New York and Boston, recognition, spending money,
friends, family, women ― all gone! “I was reduced to painting
signs in a barroom for drinks and drugs.”
The
months droned on. And choices had to be made. He knew it. His career
was quickly slipping. He rarely painted sober. And the thought of this
was sobering. One of the few paintings he did when he was clear headed
hung not in a gallery, but in pizza shop in Orleans, where he
delivered pizzas for a living, among other things. His self-esteem had
long since vanished.
Then,
one day, in 1990 two women, Nancy Horton, a retired art instructor,
and Sandy Backman, a retired English teacher, owners of the now
defunct New Horizons Gallery on Rte 28 in Orleans stopped by that pizza shop
for a snack and noticed something extraordinary hanging on one of the
walls, a series of pencil sketches that they immediately recognized as
a considerable cut above what you’d expect next to a hot pizza oven.
They inspected the works closely. “We went up and looked at them.
Just pencil, and they were wonderful. They were so well executed,”
says Backman of their first encounter with Gilmartin’s work. “We
knew there was an artist behind them, and just assumed because he was
delivering pizzas that it was a young boy.”
Gilmartin,
however, was approaching forty.
They
wanted to meet the man who behind the sketches.
Gilmartin
says it took him a year to actually get around to responding to their
initial request. But when he did, he found they hadn’t forgotten him
or lost interest in his work.
They
knew his situation, he says, and encouraged him to stay in recovery
and concentrate on his painting. Without preaching, they told him that
his life was wasting away; that he had far too much talent to allow
any addiction to get the better of him. “They were like older
sisters I never really had,” he recalls. “They were stern, but
with a guiding hand. They came along at about the time I started
recovery and began listening
to what people had to say.”
Backman
recalls that “both of us being teachers, we didn’t cradle him at
all. We knew we liked him personally, and there was no doubt in our
minds that he was a phenomenal artist. Nancy, at that time, being a
top notch art teacher, took him under her wing and encouraged him.
More than anything else he needed goals.”
“I
gave them four paintings my first year” Gilmartin says of his
gradual journey back to doing what he did best, being an artist,
“and they sold them all.”
They
wanted more. “They thought enough of my work that they offered me a
one man show, if I would just paint.” Throughout the year he stayed
in contact with both women, apprising them of his progress, drawing
confidence from their encouragement, Nancy the art teacher especially,
to continue.
Determined
to succeed and break his addiction, he plunged himself into his work
in earnest. In 1991 and 92 he earned “First Place” for Oils from
the Chatham Creative Arts Center. In 1992 he earned an “Award of Merit
in Watercolor, Academic Artists’ at the
42nd Annual National Exhibition of Contemporary Realism. In ’93,
he earned two “First Place” Awards, one at the Cape
Cod Art Association, another “First Place”, Leo Diehl.
It took
another year, but when he was done, he produced sixteen paintings for New
Horizons. It was 1994. As
she reflects back on the yearlong wait, Backman recalls how she and
her partner viewed his work. “You can’t separate the artist from
his art,” she says, referring to the detail he puts into his work.
“It takes a particular kind of artist to do the kind of paintings he
would do. He has more than a facility to paint, its his passion and
focus.”
Opening
night had arrived.
“I got
on my knees and prayed to God,” he says of his anticipation for the
show. “I couldn’t imagine God listening to the payers of a
recovering addict,” he says, in a self-deprecating way. “But I
prayed.”
His
one-man show, a remarkable opportunity for someone in his position,
was ready for public viewing. Still plagued with nagging self-doubt,
and even after winning all these awards, he nonetheless worried that
he might have lost the edge that was once his. “Floundering in a sea
of insecurity” is what he would later write of those times. He
wasn’t being asked to select and show one or two of the paintings
that he thought were good
enough to show; he was being asked to show all his work. “I prayed,
‘please God, let them just break even’,” he says of the angst he
felt leading up to the event, and of the concern he had that Nancy and
Sandy’s investment in him might not pay off. He had developed a deep
emotional relationship with both women, and wanted to succeed as much
for them as for himself.
“On
the week leading up to the show, four of my paintings sold,” he
says. “I produced both watercolor and egg tempera.” Backman
recalls that a husband and wife from North Carolina came by the
gallery and bought four paintings the day before the show. Only some
fast-talking by Nancy kept the paintings in the gallery until after
the show was completed. To say they were excited about the early sale
would be an understatement.
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Whatever
he may have felt before or during the show, nothing could have
prepared him for the way the evening ended. The show sold out. “The
show went phenomenally,” Backman, recalls, adding that they knew
Garry was gifted when a number of buyers sought his promotion piece
based on a mailing. “We could have sold that painting three or four
times.”
Gilmartin
recounts the exhilaration and sense of relief they felt after the show
this way: “Nancy, Sandy and I sat on the backs steps of the gallery
after the show, and we started crying. It was the biggest moment of my
life.”
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"Retired
Navy", Dry Brush Watercolor, 11 x 13,
© G.
Gilmartin
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In the
months after the show, he says, he made a decision to quit his job
painting houses and begin producing works of art in earnest, adding
that he was only able to do this because of the support and guidance
he received from Sandy and Nancy. They carried his work until the
winter of 1995, when it was learned that Nancy Horton had terminal
cancer.
Gilmartin
says he overcome his addiction with a lot of hard work, and under the
constant watchful eye of two loving mentors who renewed his faith in
his ability as an artist. A career was renewed, a life saved, and
Gilmartin says he is genuinely indebted. “For the first time in my
life,” he wrote in a deeply moving letter to Nancy before her death,
“I prayed for someone else’s happiness besides my own. No gallery
owners on the face of this earth did more for me than you did that day
I walked into the gallery. I’m an artist and you taught me how to
believe it.”
As
Backman reads the letter her voice chokes with emotion and I feel
helpless to console her. I feel as if I know her and Nancy personally.
The letter meant so much, she recalls, that the minister read it at
Nancy’s funeral service.
And now,
today.
The
artist, Garry Gilmartin, is on the rise. The hard work paid off and
the awards kept coming: 1996, “Best in Show” Leo
Diehl; 1997, “First Place”, Duxbury
Art Association; 1998, two awards from the New
England Watercolor Society, another award the same year at the North American Open Show, a feat he would achieve again in 2000 and
2001.
Today,
he produces approximately 20 paintings a year, sometimes two at a
time, from his studio in Truro. He paints in watercolor, and excels in
one of the most trying and exacting mediums available to artists: egg
tempera. “I just finished a painting in egg tempera. It took me six
weeks.” You can literally feel the relief in his voice as he tells
it.
His work
is currently on display at Addison
Holmes Gallery in Orleans, not too far from the old New
Horizons Gallery, where he first started. He has a growing list of
discerning buyers who expect to pay in the thousands for one of his
original, and interest from gallery owners who are hoping to carry his
work to a newer a larger audience.
Gilmartin
is at the top of his form. His creations are both original, detailed
and examples of artistic perfection. As a contemporary artist whose
subject matter is traditional realism, and whose style is simple,
focused and uniquely his own, it can truly be said there are few
better. He borrows a phrase that I brought up in passing to describe
what it was in a piece of art that drew me to it.
I explained that when I shopped for art, I’d stop at a
painting that attracted me and say hello, and if it said hello back, I
considered the romance to have begun.
He
summed up what he wanted of his future, by rephrasing my observation.
“I want to be that artist whose work says, ‘hello’ when a
someone like you stops by and says “hi.”
Fair
enough, almost.
Epilogue:
Lessons learned.
There
were some who advised against telling this brief story. “Why in the
world would you want to bring up the whole thing about your addiction
to alcohol and drugs?” they would ask, especially now. Sandy Backman
and I talked about this and both agreed that Garry Gilmartin’s story
is most definitely not about his past addiction, but rather about his
enormous talent and eventual triumph as an artist. Gilmartin’s art
won out in the end, not his addiction. That’s what counts!
The
talent to draw that came to him naturally at five, coupled with his
desire to remain in school so he could be like his older brother, set
his life’s compass in a direction that ended where it is today, for
had he dropped out of school . . . who knows.
His skills were recognized and developed by
a high school art teacher who literally commandeered him to an art
school at a time when what he wanted most was to wander elsewhere. Had
he gone that route . . . who knows?
His
talent emerged as a gallery artist and his dreams came to fruition,
given a route by two loving women who saw in him the best of what he
could be. It was a fortuitous meeting, indeed, in that pizza shop way
back then.
All
worked together, at different times, a common purpose unbeknownst to
any, then or now, except that each focused for a period on encouraging
a man not to let his talent waste.
Sandy Backman says she
wishes Nancy were alive today to see the results of her efforts.
Somehow, I think Nancy knows. |
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