Jack Shear lived with Ellsworth Kelly for 32 years, in
a house adjacent to the studio where Mr. Kelly worked, in Spencertown, N.Y.
After Mr. Kelly’s death in 2015, Mr. Shear preserved the studio intact,
occasionally photographing the space, until Mr. Kelly’s last canvases were
removed to be shown at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.
“Mr. Shear left Mr. Kelly’s studio untouched for more
than a year. “I know there are stories written and movies about a room that
someone never goes into, because someone has died and they want to leave it
exactly the same way,” he said. “I’m not sure whether it’s a way of holding
onto the person for as long as possible or a way to try to memorialize them in
a particular way that they don’t feel is possible any other way. “”
“Somebody moved a
pencil and I went by, and it was gone, and I yelled at everybody to find it and
put it back,” Mr. Shear said.”
“At the end, his
studio became like where he was living,” Mr. Shear said. “He was not only
painting, but he was actually living in the studio. I mean, Ellsworth
considered Spencertown — and probably the studio in Spencertown — the center of
the world, the center of the universe. This is where he finally, toward the end
of his life, really wanted to be.”
“Ellsworth would
come to work in the morning, and if he was painting that particular day, he
would actually change — literally strip down to his underwear,” Mr. Shear said.
“This was basically his uniform. He would put on a paint shirt, he would put on
old paint pants, and he had these Tyvek paper suits that he would wear.”
Mr. Kelly also wore a hat in the studio. “I think that
might be, since ’84 — that might be the fourth hat,” Mr. Shear said. “His face
would get splattered with paint, he was working really quickly.”
Mr. Kelly painted fast, working methodically from one
side of the canvas to the other as the paint dried. “The thing you’ll notice,
especially in the last probably five years, is that you see the brush strokes
more. It’s more difficult for him to be painting those large surfaces,” Mr.
Shear said. “But toward the end of his life he did embrace the texture — the
brush stroke.”
I asked Mr. Shear why he chose to photograph the space
in black and white. “I think color belonged to Ellsworth,” he said. “I mean, I
can see the colors, I can feel the textures. And I think it’s a remove from
reality, in a way.”
In addition to skylights, Mr. Shear said, Mr. Kelly
asked for a large, high window in the room: “Ellsworth said he wanted that big
window there, that looks out onto pines.”
“I don’t ever think I ever remember him painting at
night. He needed a lot of light,” Mr. Shear said. “The light would be raking,
so he could see where the overlaps were. When you paint a yellow on top of a
yellow on top of a yellow, your eyes get really saturated and so you really
need to see where that glossy paint is versus the paint what you had painted
before.”
He painted from filled pans. “Every yellow is different. Every red is
different,” Mr. Shear said. “I think he even mostly put either white or a color
into his blacks when he used them. He never just wanted anything out of a tube
— he always mixed his color.”
“Sometimes he mixes for 15 minutes and sometimes he
mixes for an hour,” Mr. Shear said. “He actually understands what a color will
do when it’s wet. He understands it’ll either get darker or lighter. He knew,
by painting for so long, he knew exactly how a paint would dry.”
Mr.
Shear said, “I still talk about Ellsworth in the present, like we’re doing
projects together.”
Mr. Kelly suffered from emphysema, the result of long
exposure to turpentine and paint fumes. A small device was used to monitor his
oxygen levels. “His nose sort of dripped, his eyes watered, he was always
looking for Kleenex,” Mr. Shear said. “So there are Kleenex boxes in every room
of the house.”
Mr. Kelly’s last, unfinished canvas had been gessoed,
but not yet painted, when he died at the age of 92.
Ellsworth Kelly is
definitely is one the best
painters of the twentieth century. This
article was published May 3, 2017. Just
before a show of his last paintings. [Kelly died December 27, 2015., aged 92 years old.] Writer Hilarie M. Sheets takes
a tour of Kelly’s studio in the company of his friend Jack Shear.
‘’On the eve of his 90th birthday in 2013, Ellsworth
Kelly told me that working in his studio in Columbia County was “as exciting
for me as ever.” “I have had some physical challenges related to aging, though
I accept it,” the painter said. “But it has given me an added surge for
continuing to create new work.” Though suffering from emphysema in his last
several years — a result of longtime exposure to turpentine fumes — Kelly was
still remarkably productive and immersed in his lifelong investigation of form,
color and plane. He died in his home here on Dec. 27, 2015, two days after he
and Jack Shear, his partner of 32 years, hosted Jasper Johns and Terry Winters,
among others, for Christmas. Kelly had 10 paintings on his studio walls
completed that year, with a freshly gessoed panel ready to work on. These
paintings, some reworkings of much earlier canvases, go on view for the first
time on Friday in “Ellsworth Kelly: Last Paintings,” at the Matthew Marks
Gallery on West 22nd Street in Chelsea. A companion show next door, “Ellsworth
Kelly: Plant Drawings,” includes 25 images of flowers, fruit, vegetables and
leaves dating from 1949 to 2008, most never before exhibited and often drawn
without the pencil’s ever leaving the page.’’
‘’In the artist’s brilliantly illuminated
studio hung a two-panel painting titled “White Over Black III,” a white
vertical rectangle overlapping a slightly larger black one. “It has this
doorlike quality to it,” said Mr. Shear, noting how the white shape
perceptually “flips” between projecting forward and receding. “Ellsworth likes
to play games with vision more than anything,” said Mr. Shear, who still speaks
of his partner in the present tense.
On another wall, a green rectangular panel
hung beside a blue oval. The diptych recalls Kelly’s 1963 canvas “Green Blue
Red.” By eliminating the red background, Kelly changed the dynamic and
integrated the white wall as a compositional element.”
Mr. Marks, the gallerist, traced the source of both
paintings to a 1950 photograph that Kelly took, “Trapeze Swings, Meschers,”
showing a right-angled swing hanging in a jungle gym beside a curved swing.
“It’s a huge leap to get from that” to the paintings, Mr. Marks said, “but he
saw things in nature that inspired his work.”
Kelly had been an avid bird-watcher since his boyhood,
and Mr. Marks connected the artist’s recurring use of the arrow form with his
early study of bird shapes in Audubon watercolors.
Kelly developed his rigorous
approach to abstraction as a young artist in 1948, pivoting away from the
psychologically charged paintings of the Abstract Expressionists who dominated
the New York scene. He went to Paris for six years and began isolating
interesting shapes he found in plants, buildings, shadows and reflections —
which he then blew up in scale and painted in flat, monochromatic hues.
While
artists, including Monet and Picasso, have often had a dramatic shift in their
late work, Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the
Museum of Modern Art, was struck by how “remarkably true” Kelly remained to the
vocabulary he had established seven decades earlier.
Mr. Shear pointed to the artist’s main work table, with a
notebook open to thumbnail sketches of four joined-panel paintings. “He didn’t
really struggle with painting much, but towards the end, he was really going
back and forth on these paintings,” he said, showing the finished works in an
adjacent room.
One has a large white arrow overlapping the edges of a black
rectangle and slicing it into five triangles. The sketches show that Kelly
originally had the arrow completely contained within the border of a larger
panel. “He didn’t think there was enough tension,” Mr. Shear said.
Mr. Shear saw the struggle others didn’t. “These last
paintings took more time to do because of his health,” he said. “In his last
three months, Ellsworth started signing drawings from the ’50s and ’60s that he
never signed.” It was a harbinger of his acceptance of the end. After Kelly had
died, Mr. Marks said that his artist friends all told him the same thing: “You
do know that is every artist’s hope — basically dying with a paintbrush in your
hand.”
On his last work : a
2,700-square-foot building loosely modeled after a Romanesque church on the
grounds of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas. which took three decades in the
making.
More on the chapel here :
ArtNet News
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