Gretna Campbell

Sometimes, as individuals we are among the last to recognize our true selves, but art (or at least, a great art teacher) can provide a way to find out.

After being accepted to the Studio School in the spring of 1979, I nurtured a short lived (and utterly foolish) fantasy of becoming a New York Male Abstract Painter. You know, that whole tradition of de Kooning, Pollock, Johns, pushing painting forward into some imagined future, blah blah blah. My acceptance letter to the Studio School was my ticket out of small-town North Carolina. I figured the way to accomplish my ill-advised goal would be to study with Nick Carone, the tough-minded sage of Modernism. His students were making intellectual, strong charcoal drawings, but Program Director Don Kimes had other plans for me. After reviewing my slides (of somewhat finicky figure drawings in pencil and Cézanne-esque landscape paintings), he placed me in Gretna Campbell’s class. I admit at first, I felt a bit let down.

A few weeks into the autumn term Gretna proposed that we draw with ink and wash to create tones, using brushes instead of charcoal. A more painterly way to draw, if you will. We all know the Studio School “look”: angular, forceful (sometimes tortured) charcoal drawing passed down by Mercedes Matter, incorporating the formal approaches of both Giacometti and Matisse. I suspect Gretna’s proposal was presented as an alternative, if not even outright opposition to the severity of the “look.” Perhaps she saw that structured way of working could become a device, a potential trap. We fall into habits too easily, and we hide from our true selves in those habits.

She laid out several open books from the school library on the studio floor, kneeling to show us Rembrandt’s great brush drawings, and more important for me, Claude Lorrain’s sepia drawings done in Italy—to illustrate her proposal. To this day, those Claude drawings of land and water exert enormous influence over how I see nature, how tone can create atmosphere. And, I am still a landscape painter, forty-five years later. I discovered that was my true purpose, all along. My brief dalliance in non-objective painting produced dull results (despite my high aspirations, they were in fact academic). Every visit to the Met showed me how I should be getting on with it. At least then, the answers to my questions were not found in 20th century painting.

She ordered quick poses from the model so that we should find the arrangement of light and dark, without the architecture of the charcoal line and spatial planes. Gretna instructed us not to see the figure as a discrete object in space, but to try and see the overall play of light. The speed of the poses (two to five minutes) helped get past the urge to describe the model and objects around her, but just to see the whole space.
Something came over me as I worked with the ink. The liquid medium opened up my senses to form and gave a sense of freedom. It almost felt like someone else had taken over and was making the drawing. Not me.

After the session Gretna made her rounds to see the results. When she saw one of my drawings she smiled, her round apple cheeks glowing,

“It makes light!”

From that point, she seemed to take a personal interest in me. She had a nurturing personality, almost motherly. I eventually came to see that my brief macho art fantasy was poison, it was dumb—and most important, was in contradiction to my true self.

Gretna took a leave of absence in my first year at the Studio School, to receive treatments for cancer. She did not return to the classroom during my remaining time at the school.

I still find the best way of knowing if I’ve done something good is when it feels like I had very little to do with the making of it. I thank Gretna Campbell for that.