SILENT VOICES

THE LATE MRS. PERSIMMON (oil on linen, 30in.x26in.) 

Last week, Main Street Gallery in Clifton Springs opened a Robert Marx art show. The paintings assembled are all of a piece. In this work, ghostly skeletal shapes and pale funereal flowers dissolve into somber backgrounds. Two death masks stare back at viewers from gold leaf. 

Mr. Marx has painted a death sonnet.

Robert Marx celebrated his 90th birthday a few years ago.  Until then, he got out of bed every morning, dressed and drove to his studio several miles from home to work a full day. Two or three years ago, he moved his studio to the lower level of the home he shares with his wife, Francie. He still works a full day — every day — but (as the comedian said), the commute is shorter.

Until he retired, Bob taught art at the State University, Brockport campus. Before that, he taught at Syracuse University. His personal art iconography  became familiar throughout Upstate New York —portraits of needle nosed (mostly) unisex figures staring hollow-eyed from waxy backgrounds. He abandoned graphic color contrast choices early on in favor of grayed down, browned out, blackened shades to define clothing, accessories, and backgrounds. 

Robert Marx (artist statement)

Bob has enjoyed a respectable degree of acclaim. After more than half a century, people still want to purchase and live with his art. Those of us whose job it is to contemplate meaning in narrative art find his images challenging and fun to analyze. From an outsider’s view, his life looks satisfyingly full.

I asked Robert recently “Can you teach someone to be an artist?” He answered immediately: “No!”

I keep rewinding that conversation. He’s right, of course. Humans are problem solvers. It’s the problems that inspire our quest for solutions that send us down life paths: fireman, teacher, plumber, drummer. So we take classes or apprentice or experiment to find the solutions to those problems that capture our interest and our imagination. Any of us can learn art techniques. Does that make us “artists?” 

“Music is not in the notes but in the silence between them.” (Claude Debussy) 

I can play Ragtime on my piano as long as little black notes are placed on skinny music score lines…but I can’t play “ragtime.” I have no feel for it…I can’t improvise…I don’t know what “walking the base” even means. 

I enjoy playing the piano but I can’t label myself a “pianist.” “Solving the problems” of being really good at playing the piano required more work, more dedication, more totality than I was capable or willing to devote to the solutions. So it is a hobby.

Art is not a hobby for Robert Marx. He is an artist and after years of problem solving, understands the blank spaces — the silence between notes. 

At the gallery opening, me, Kathleen Leahy talking to ?, and Robert Marx

LOOK! THERE ARE THE SHADOWS!

One of my Bill Stewart pieces, circa 1995

Bill Stewart is leaving town.  I will miss him.

I can’t pinpoint my introduction to Bill’s outrageous clay sculpture.  Maybe it was a 1970s Finger Lakes Exhibition at Memorial Art Gallery. 

Rochester was an art version of Alice’s Wonderland in those days. Chip and I, dragging our young daughters along, discovered Shop One on Troupe Street in the Corn Hill district of the City. Shop One began as the whim of faculty superstars from the School for American Crafts. It provided a place for them, their students and their friends to exhibit and sell what became history-making art pieces.

Three Crowns, nestled between the Erie Canal and factory buildings in Pittsford, was such an exquisite building that I wanted to live there — with or without its contents. Years later, I went searching for that building. It was gone — or so changed that I couldn’t recognize it — another sad day!

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, as many as two dozen independently owned art spaces existed in Rochester. Oxford Gallery on Park Avenue is the lone survivor. 

A recent essayist wrote that galleries “are the beating heart of the art world.”  They provide a mechanism through which artists’ works find routes into great collections, and along with marketing art, they nearly always serve an educational function. Gallerists research art markets, and publish books and often write essays for trade magazines.  Art galleries  provide a place to exchange ideas and in doing that, they automatically become builders of community. 

It’s dangerous to spend much time walking down memory lane — no side rails to keep you from falling off into the abyss! But there’s no denying: the giants that lived in Rochester and carved new territory in decorative arts  have died, retired, moved away, or closed studios. A significant era has ended  as surely as our industrial giants— Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb — now gasp on life support. 

A case might be made that artists’ studios and social media have replaced galleries in this era of self-promotion. But clinging to its glory days as an “art capital” is over-stating Rochester’s present status. We might as easily point to the growth of micro-breweries as proof of manufacturing health. 

I wish the best for Bill Stewart and his family. His unique art informed and delighted us. Now that he and his contemporaries have left the stage, we wait for the next act. 

But where is the stage?