Painting is Back

Painting is back
by William Chill



The weekend of Jan. 15th was another busy one for art around the Westside with the opening of the faculty show at BAYarts and the quarterly open house at The Studios at 78th Street in the Gordon Square Arts District.

I taught a painting class at BAYarts years ago and have watched the momentum that the venue has been gaining of late, and the current faculty show exemplifies this new energy. Included in the show were some nocturnal landscapes by Jeff Yost that dance the line between realism and abstraction.

The distinctive colorful landscapes of well-known Bay resident and artist, Mary Deutschman, were also included, as well as a mix of photography, watercolors, collage, and jewelry. There was an assortment of media on display representative of the wide range of talents from the BAYarts teaching faculty.

After leaving the BAYarts show, I took the easy coast down Clifton Avenue to the Studios at 78th Street (where I just recently moved my own studio), to catch the final hour of their open house.

The building’s owner, Dan Bush, just carved up five new artist studio spaces in the massive brick building, which used to be the American Greetings building from a previous era in the city’s history. The outside of the building still appropriately bears the ghost image of the painted banner, “Creative Studios.”

Inside, the place buzzed with a comfortable rhythm of art-goers and art-makers. After working my way through the studios and galleries, I lingered a bit at the Kenneth Paul Lesko Gallery, where this father-and-son team travels the world in search of quality painting. If you are a fan of painting, you will always be pleasantly surprised at what you can find hanging on their walls. What I like most about their approach is that they acquire paintings of quality, independent of the artist’s reputation or resume. In this regard, you could even say the Leskos are to painting what Robert Parker is to the world of wine.

My last stop was at Tregoning and Co. to see what dealer Bill Tregoning had in store. As I walked past Bill’s office I saw local Ab-Ex stalwart, Matt Dibble, sitting in Bill’s office engaged in a conversation with Bill and a couple other folks. As I went in to talk to them, I wasn’t sure if I was intruding in on a private club, or a kind of secret backroom, but I knew I had an admission ticket as soon as I saw Matt stand up to shake my hand. Whew.

Within the art world, artists, dealers, and buyers often exist in different orbits, and when their worlds intersect it could be a kind of quantum soup (think of the shy and inarticulate Jackson Pollock at a dinner party of New York socialites). Matt Dibble was dressed in paint-spattered jeans, black work boots, and a denim jacket over a blue hooded sweatshirt, topped off by a black knit watch cap. He looked like he just came from his studio over on Superior Avenue.

We talked a little bit and Matt was pleased to hear that I just moved my studio here to 78th Street. According to Matt, this building was definitely committed to painting, and I made a good move to relocate here. It seemed Tregoning, Lesko, and Scheele – the three anchor galleries here – had an appreciation for painting and a reputation of bringing in the buyers and collectors.

“Abstract painting is coming back,” Matt quipped, with a chuckle. We both spent a few minutes musing about conceptual art, installations, and other such contemporary works along the lines of resin dripping from a bucket attached to the ceiling while a video streams an image of a woman painting her toenails. Those genres can be engaging and thought-provoking but who can resist the authentic pull of painting?

Could it be that the nostalgic re-birth of painting can occur right here in rust-belt Cleveland? I don’t just mean painting, but painting – serious, intense painting in the spirit of DeKooning, Pollock, Gorky, and Kline. The current state of artistic self-absorption which is Chelsea and SoHo eliminates that from happening there.

It only seems right that painting like that finds its second wind in a town that was the home to the Hulett ore unloaders and a grid-work of urban-industrial patterns that mimic the harmonic rhythms of painting. New York may not know it yet, but painting is coming back and, in our work boots and coveralls, we’re bringing it back.

William Chill lives in Bay Village.