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ROBERT FRANKLIN GATES: PAINT WHAT YOU SEE INTRODUCTION
In fall 1973 I walked into my first class in American University's MFA program and met Robert Franklin Gates. He was a tall man, wearing a well-inked lab coat, and he welcomed me into his etching class with a big, friendly handshake. He spoke very little. I later learned his students in the 1950s gave him the nickname "Coop" after the legendary reticence of actor Gary Cooper, whose most famous line was "Yep." Still, on occasion, Gates would entertain us with remarkable, even inspiring, stories about his life and the path he took to become an artist. He didn't really need many words to be a great teacher, demonstrating on a copper plate the subtleties of intaglio printmaking, or showing us how to calculate the golden ratio.
The following semester, I took a painting class from Gates, where his four-word advisory to me was "paint what you see." What seemed a simple enough task soon produced the realization that all painting is a process of abstraction, with the artist taking line, form, and color from subjects in the
real world and imaginatively discovering and capturing their equivalents in paint―artifacts of the artist's understanding to create an image. When you rely on your own vision and understanding, you cannot escape yourself, your experience, your context, your culture. This is when I began grasping Gates' instruction to "paint what you see:" to look as intently as possible and not be distracted by what one might have heard about styles and fashions, and all the other expectations of the commercial and academic art world.
I remember a time I was struggling with my painting of a still life and had it leaning up at the end of a corridor so I could take a good, long look. Gates stopped and spent 10 minutes standing next to me in silence. Finally he said, "a little red," and continued on his way. He didn't pick up a brush and make corrections on my canvas. He wasn't telling me to use more or less red. Instead, I took his three words to suggest I might consider red with all its optical and emotional potential as I struggled to translate my understanding of the world into paint on canvas. He encouraged me to see the world my way, and to paint that world.
Gates retired from American University as professor emeritus in 1975, the same semester I finished my MFA. His students subsequently learned he had been suffering from the onset of arteriosclerosis, and his increased reticence was a symptom of the progression of his disease. Over the previous five years he had made and exhibited paintings that were some of his most original and transcendent. They were the culmination of a long and prolific career that wound its way from Regionalist-inspired impressionist watercolors, through paintings of figures and landscapes informed by the influence of abstract expressionism, to the masterful classicism of his late, outsized, and timeless still lifes and landscapes. The progression of Gates' disease finally ended his journey. He died in 1982 at the age of 76. |