My 5 Favorite Painters

In June of 1975, the movie Jaws opened and like most teenagers I went to see it with my friends on a Saturday afternoon when ticket prices at the Garden Theater were discounted. The author, Peter Benchley lived in town just a couple of blocks away on Library Place and he was rumored to have had a Great White Shark painted at the bottom of his swimming pool with all the money he made from the first Summer blockbuster in film history. I don’t know if that was the spark that led my friend Brian Trubee and I to sneak on down to the Community Park Swimming Club to paint a series of bloody handprints and a black shark fin above the colorful mural of swimming children and aqua colored waves that adorned the wall which surrounded it. A patrolman with the township police department happened to be pulling in for a shift change when he noticed us completing our handiwork, red-handed, so to speak. My mother was friends with the Chief of Police and since we had no criminal record and we agreed to remove our improvement and restore the mural to its original condition, we were let off the hook, at least legally. My mother, however, had additional plans. She’d decided that since I had shown an interest in painting it might be an appropriate punishment for me to spend several days each week taking painting lessons at the Arts Council which was at that time housed in a converted barn at the Ettl Farm off of Rosedale Road. Both of my parents worked so I had to ride my bicycle from our home to class, giving up those precious hours of vacation freedom to stand at an easel in a room full of old ladies painting flowers. The teacher was an 80-something woman who wore paint-stained overalls and Chuck Taylor high-tops and she moved with the alacrity of a squirrel from student to student to offer suggestions and praise. I was adamantly unimpressed with the flower arrangements she’d set up on a table in the center of the room and though I’d come with the required tubes of titanium white and raw umber, linseed oil and turpentine, a palette and a few sable brushes I’d only used on tank models before, I told her I wasn’t going to paint that.

“Paint whatever you want,” she told me and walked on to the next student without a second glance. I took her comment as a challenge and decided I’d show her what I could do and put all of my efforts into recreating a Roger Dean illustration I knew by heart.

My first real job was stocking books at Titles Unlimited just past the airport outside of town and I would wind up at the end of each week owing more money for books than I had earned unboxing and shelving them for the store’s owner. Most of the books I was drawn to were the big coffee table type with full page color plates; Frank Frazetta, Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp. I didn’t know much about art, but I knew what I liked. In the evenings, alone in my room, I would listen to either WPLJ from New York or WYSP out of Philadelphia and pore over the images while the music played a soundtrack to my adolescent life in the background. During the preceding Winter my father and I had gone to the Princeton Public Library every Wednesday night to watch a series of films about the Impressionists; Monet and Manet, Seurat and Cezanne, Van Gogh and Degas. Those hours listening to the drone of the narration against the soft clacking of film reels unspooling in the hot air of the second-floor conference room were all I knew of art. I was naive and untrained but I had a sense of what an artist was and I took that small ember out to the studio with my backpack filled with painting supplies. I set to put on canvas, in that sweltering north-lit loft, my first painting that wasn’t an act of teen-age vandalism. The teacher, Liz Ruggles, became a lifelong friend and as the Summer progressed, I gave in to her instruction. She took me under her wing and began to teach me not only in the technical aspects of putting paint onto canvas, but to open up the world of painters and art history beyond the glimpse I’d had in the library and my small collection of books. I didn’t know at the time about her reputation as one of the region’s most sought-after portrait painters, but rather as one of my first real adult friends whose interest in me was as a young artist. She must have seen some kind of talent in me to give me so much of her time and attention because there wasn’t anything else I had to offer beyond assembling stretchers and applying gesso to her giant canvases as a form of payment for her instruction. She took me to all the museums and walked me through the giant halls, explaining the history of each school, and the connections between the historic advances in each genre. She was one of the New Hope School painters, only one generation removed from John Singer Sargent and his Schuylkill set. She’d studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and knew every artist- or so it seemed- that we ever came across on those trips into the cities. I will never forget her kindness and patience with me so long ago and the love for art that she instilled in me so many years ago.

Elizabeth “Liz” Ruggles
1915-2013

“I’ve a rich experience in the past, both teaching and learning from my students, but I do believe that my best canvas is the one I’m going to start tomorrow. It is fun to live in hope.” -Elizabeth Ruggles

With the Summer upon us again I am carried back through the years to those days in the atelier and the smell of oils, the sounds of paint brushes and palette knives against canvas in the mote filled air, and I can see the images as clearly in my mind’s eye today as I did in life so many years ago. Art- or at least our appreciation of it- is very personal and while I doubt that any two people enjoy the same paintings in the same way, it is always a pleasure to share that appreciation with other like-minded folks when the chance presents itself.

These are — in no particular order — my five favorite painters.

Fairfield Porter- American 1907-1975

Edvard Munch- Norwegian 1863-1944

Camille Pissarro- French 1830-1903

Thomas Eakins- American 1844-1916

Jamie Wyeth- American 1946-