Painting for Life

The Infusion of Precise Colors

By Gavin Glakas

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"My husband's grandfather gave those rings to his mother as she was going over the side of the Titanic into a lifeboat," the woman said, after asking if I could touch up the color of a ring in the portrait I had recently finished. "She survived, and his grandfather and uncle went down. That's why we need to get it right."

I'm always willing to touch up a commission when asked-whether it's a ring or the corner of a mouth. So I went back to work on the painting, which already was hanging in the entryway to the Society of the Four Arts, an art museum in Palm Beach, Florida.

In addition to making the painting a bit more vibrant, this incident served as a reminder of some thing I've told myself throughout my career as an art-ist-bring as much life experience and knowledge to my work as possible, and try to rely on photo references only when absolutely necessary.

I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, fell in love with drawing at a young age and was lucky enough to have parents who always encouraged me. My father must be the only lawyer in Washington who successfully convinced his son not to go to law school so he could become an artist. In high school at Walt Whitman, where I studied with the great Walt Bartman, I planned to go to art school and become an animator or, if Disney wasn't hiring that year, possibly a painter. However, enough people told me that artists don't make any money to convince me to go to a traditional college, get a job on Capitol Hill and plan to go to law school.

There is no worse feeling than knowing what you want and not having the courage to do it. Every time I would see a writer signing books in Barnes & Noble or a musician performing on TV, I thought to myself, "There goes someone with more courage than me."

After a year on the Hill, I made the decision to become an artist. I drove to my parents' house, sat down and told them, and then a curious thing happened: I got really sick. I spent six months in and out of hospi tals, and ultimately had a benign tumor removed from my lung. This terrified me and, though I know many people who have been through far worse experiences than that, I came away determined to do whatever needed to be done to turn my love of art into a way of life.

I got a job at an art gallery in Bethesda, started taking classes on Thursdays and Fridays, and painted nonstop in my parents' basement. I began selling my paintings and doing commissioned portraits through my Bethesda gallery, practicing as much as possible and, in the spirit of Winston Churchill, kept buggering on.

The problem I ran into with the ring from the Titanic is that I had to work from photographs that just didn't capture the color of the ring. 1 want my work to be full of life and energy, whether it is a portrait, a cityscape or something totally dif-ferent, and that is why I'd prefer to work without a camera. It's not always possible, especially in today s hectic world, but it's absolutely necessary to try.

In the days when John Singer Sargent would visit Blenheim Palace for two weeks to paint the duke and his family, people had enough free time to pose for an entire por-trait, or at least for the head and shoulders. As an artist, I would love to have that luxury. The human eye can take in so much more detail and subtlety than even the most expensive cameras.

These days, however, people don't have time to pose for paintings, so I try to get a couple hours with my subjects to take some pictures, get to know them a bit and then do some sketches and a color study-a small record in oil of all the colors I see so I'm not held captive by the oversimplified colors in a photo graph.

This color study doesn't usually look like very much. When I did one of the late Congressman Ike Skelton for a painting that now hangs in the U.S. House of Representatives' Armed Services Committee room on Capitol Hill, I placed two patches of red next to the colors of the subject's face to represent his chair.

When the congressman looked at the color study, he skeptically asked, "What are those two big Dumbo ears?" After I explained my process to him, this kind and dis tinguished white haired gentleman simply said, "Just make sure you get the color of my hair right-black."

A camera can be a helpful tool for a painter, but if an artist relies on it too much, he can stop experimenting and taking chances and settle for a poor copy of a second-rate photo that lacks soul or personality. That's why I'd always rather be there in person-to better catch the late afternoon light on a building or the precise color of a precious stone.

I do everything I can to find knowledge, ideas and inspiration from life around me without the camera.

I paint models in my studio in McLean. I work downtown to capture the motion and excitement of real life, both to create the best possible paintings for my galler-ies, and simply because it's great fun. I teach portrait and figure classes at the Yellow Barn in Glen Echo, Maryland.

I teach a workshop in Tuscany each summer, not only to infuse my work with the sunshine and food and wine and ambience of la dolce vita, but also to get up close to all of those incredible works by Michelangelo and Veronese and learn their secrets. I venture down to the National Gallery with my sketchbook to investigate how Rembrandt or Sargent or some Dutch artist I've never heard of solved a certain visual or psychological problem.

It's all in service of the cause, which is to create exciting, soulful, compelling works that reach out and grab people in an age of IMAX movies, lifelike video games, widescreen TVs and the Internet.