26 Jan Winter 2010
Painting and Life Writings
“My introduction to Jim Gahagan came as an undergraduate student of his at Pratt Institute in the 60’s. I was also studying realist painting under Lennart Anderson at the Art Students League. I felt frustrated because something in me was not getting expressed. That something missing was emotion, which abstract painting satisfied and has lasted. When I worked with master painters, they said I was too emotional, (when painting skin, hair and eyes. This felt like me going to church and having to pray like everyone else). Then along came Jim, who happened upon my getting so frustrated I mushed with my hands right into the paint of a figure I had been painting for over a month. “Space,” he said. “Look at what you’ve got.” I put a thin line of orange around what was mud, then a blue dot to vibrate against the orange, and then a warmer blue, and there I was, engulfed with expression through how the colors moved the space. I could say that Jim, being the dynamic teacher that he was, both blessed and cursed me for life, for once the trusting of color to move space took hold, I sacrificed everything for it. Whatever depths to which I now find myself enmeshed in my painting came from this very seed. The choices I have made in my life continue to deepen roots from this very same seed. Reinforced when I was only in my 20’s, Jim asked me to teach painting at his new school in a geodesic dome in northern Vermont. I endured black fly bites that sent me to the local hospital, embarrassed that my mouth was over where my ears should have been. I was a child who did not know to get myself out of the woods where my easel was holding a painting of a waterfall I wanted to finish as I got stung again and again. Long lavish after-dinner nights of Pat and Jim bouncing ideas off each other fascinated me at that time. Then Jim would take me into his studio so I could see new paintings. Our conversations then were at their best. They weren’t always so good for me when at 4am when Jim was quite awake he’d talk my head flat onto the dinner table, until I would hear Jim say, ‘you tired? go to bed.’ Then he’d paint until early a.m. as Pat and I would begin to awaken. Jim always got the better of me when I was too tired to talk and became a good listener. He always had so much to say about so much: painting, of course, politics, of course, his experience as a medic during the war, his insight into people we knew, and, I listened. The demise of the geodesic dome is another story someone else will surely tell. But we taught there, worked from the model there, critiqued each other’s work there, and lived the life of an artist to the fullest, as though in another time and space, which remains with me to this day. This is how Jim ruined, (kidding), and blessed me both.
There is not a ‘painting-day’ I am not thanking Jim for his generosity, idealism, wisdom, and for his paintings, with which he has left me abundance. he was a very important teacher for me. I am carrying on a dying tradition, through my own teaching and my own painting. Jim has come into my dreams and I feel his presence always.”