Washington
D.C.
_ Foreign dignitaries, government
officials and national and international visitors entering the White House this
holiday season will view two exquisite and enormous paintings of our national
parks.
The paintings of the Grand Canyon in Arizona
and ZionPark in
Utah by
Downingtown,
Pennsylvania, artist Adrian
Martinez are located in the main hallway of the first floor of the White House.
The White House unveiled the paintings to the public on November 29, 2007.
Installation took place earlier in the week.
This article details Adrian Martinez's creative process and adventures as the
work progressed. The five-month project began with a phone call from Washington in mid-May,
2007. The call was from Ken Blasingame, interior designer for the President and
First Lady.
Adrian
had previously completed two paintings for the Bush White House, the
2001
Christmas card and an 8-foot by 16-foot mural, and a number of drawings for Camp David.
Adrian
called the most recent project his largest and most challenging work yet.
“I was extremely excited,” Adrian
said. “I felt great enthusiasm for this opportunity and it was a tremendous
honor.”
Adrian
recalls suffering a “high anxiety attack” early in the process. Adrian had agreed to paint two large alcoves
12-feet-high and 58-inches-wide. Flattened out each painting would be a
twelve-by-eight-foot mural. That is almost 200 square feet of canvas. “It was a
large project,” Adrian said. “I thought of
the old saying: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Because of
commissions for several portraits and a one- man show, Adrian knew he would have to start work
immediately. “My time was going to be very tight,” he said.
Adrian
began numerous pencil sketches and ultimately four oil studies in full color. He
said at the time, “This starts with a technical difficulty. I never painted a
curved surface before let alone one twelve feet high, but this can be a great
opportunity as well. It could read like a panoramic view of a vast world. I'll
have to work out all my ideas for color and design here in Pennsylvania so I can hit the ground running
when I arrive at the White House.”
As
Adrian worked on
his sketches, Leah Martinez, his wife and manager, passed on a list of materials
and other specific needs her husband had. She said, “Adrian is very low maintenance when he is
working but there are certain things he needs. First of all obviously, light and
lots of it. Second, he will be pushing around a great deal of paint and working
with mineral spirits. That requires a lot of ventilation.
They told us he could have all the time
he wanted, as long as it was dry by November 30th! We discussed his various commitments
coming up this year and next. He will be
busy, so in typical Adrian
fashion he announced he would do two huge paintings in two weeks.”
By late May Adrian
was deep in research. He had been poring over books borrowed from the Chester
County Library in Exton, Pennsylvania. He hadn't visited the parks he
would be painting. “The last thing I need to do at this point is take a trip,”
he said. “I would be too overwhelmed with information. If I had three years I'd
be on a plane right now. But considering the time frame I can't afford to chase
rabbits. I have to have a laser beam mentality.”
It was around this time that Adrian
re-thought his supply order. After a conversation with Leah they decided it
would be a good idea to double the amount of paint requested. As his ideas began
to gel Adrian
turned to some reproductions he keeps pinned to his studio wall in Downingtown.
“I keep many prints and photographs on the walls surrounding me where I work,”
he said. “It is like lining my nest with artistically stimulating images.
Posters from past shows, work of painters I admire, etc. For example there are
two particularly useful right now. One is by Fredrick Church, a great American
landscape painter from the last half of the 19th century. This particular
painting is of the Acropolis in Athens
at sunset. His color scheme has the afternoon light turning the white marble
orange gold with a dark purple evening sky behind. The intensity produced by
those saturated contrasting colors is just the effect I need for my Grand Canyon painting. A second reproduction on the wall
is by an English painter of the coastline in Wales. This is all turquoise and
cobalt blue. One alcove will be hot orange and the other will be a cool evening
light. You will experience each in a different way. One is more grandiose, hot,
vast, the other cool, poetic, a secret place.”
Adrian
decided to use three bands of color across each mural. “That’s an artists'
decision,” he said. “They won't read like steps receding in space as you might
expect with an aerial perspective but diagonally across from bottom left to top
right in the alcove on the left and the reverse in the one on the right. The
colors will be exaggerated so even from 100 feet away across the hall at the
main entrance of the White House you will immediately grasp the image and get
the impact of its broad abstract composition. Hopefully, it will then pull you
across the room so you will experience a feeling of light, atmosphere and
ultimately a feeling of vertigo.” He then takes a breath and with a smile adds,
“At least that’s the plan.”
First Adrian began his drawings. In the studio he had a brand new drawing tablet
and half dozen pencils. “I'll start with some quick sketches,” he said, “some
from photographs and others from my head.I'm just drawing stuff
at this point. Some of the mountains and trees may not originate from the parks
designated but at this point I'm just cutting and pasting. I'm not thinking
about alcoves or anything final. I'm emotionally submerging myself in these
large vistas. They are the ones I grew up looking at in John Ford movies. I'm
not discriminating at this point; I'm just letting my pencil do the thinking.”
One beautiful photograph of a painted desert is reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe
paintings. To Adrian
this will be a delicious passage of painting for his mural. Re-imagining Hopi
Point in the Grand Canyon, Adrian
is compelled to add a scrubby pine tree. “I want to paint a tree; I don't have
to, but I want to. It's a necessary self-indulgence. In 16th and 17th century
Europe it was common to paint trees in the foreground to give the spectator a
sense of scale and space, Claude Lorrain in the Grand Canyon,” Adrian said.
On June 25 Leah reports Adrian’s
oil sketches are complete and she is in the process of photographing the whole
series to date.Adrian won't be painting at the White House as
no space large enough is available. Instead he will be working at a government
facility outside of Washington.
On July 20 Adrian
make his final preparations as he was to depart the next Monday, July 23. “I
have additional art decisions to make but there is nothing more to do before I
go to D.C. I could always do more sketches but I've reached a point of
diminishing returns with them. It’s time for the next step."
Upon his arrival in Washington Adrian was taken to where he will work for the
next few weeks.
“I saw all the preparations that had been made for the first time,” he said.
“The White House niches were gigantic white monoliths. My excitement turned to
panic. I suspected that I might have that reaction. Examining what the White
House carpenters had built I saw that the craftsmanship was absolutely
extraordinary. The backs were an intricate latticework of welded
one-quarter-inch steel bar. On the front were formed thin sheets of plywood
covered with primed ready to paint canvas. As a painting surface it was absolute
perfection. Standing with several people who were responsible for all this I
said, `You have given everything I need, everything is perfect, so now the only
limitations I have are mine.’ Now the pressure was on me.”
Adrian
is anxious to start painting. He's already finished the under-drawing for both
paintings. This put him well ahead of schedule, a good start. On the morning
before he was involved in a meeting at the White House with various people
responsible for the overall
look of the White House during the Christmas season. “My part, the particular
work I'm doing, relates to all the other aspects of this complex project. I can
see that the whole environment will be stunning. In that sense it will be a very
exciting and inspiring collaboration."
On Friday of the first week Adrian
believed he had a major problem. “It was a disaster,” he said. “The work was
coming apart in my hands. I thought to myself that failure was not an option. I
talked with Leah that night on the phone. I told her my painting was just
horrible and she said, ‘Adrian you always start a big project with great
enthusiasm then early on you implode and claim the work is terrible, but in the
end you always come through..’ I had to admit that was true in the past but
under the circumstances it did not make me feel much better.”
Adrian
would have another surprise the next day and it was a big one; he, along with
Leah and their son Sebastian, were invited to spend the weekend at
Camp David. “I know plans can always change,” he said. In the world
today anything can happen at a moments notice.” As it turned out there was no
world crisis that particular weekend and the Camp David
trip did take place. “It was an extraordinary time,” he said, “beyond
imagining.”
That weekend visit was followed by an invitation to visit the Oval office for
Adrian and his family, including his parents. “My whole family was completely
stunned. None of us will ever forget meeting the President that day and we got
to share it as a family, it doesn't get any better than that.”
Adrian
then went back to work for another intense week of painting. The large curved
surfaces he was working on proved a mixed blessing. “I was shocked when I
realized that because of the shape I would only be able to see one third of the
painting standing in any one position. Because of the months of preparation I
arrived with the painting entirely in my head, but never being able to see the
murals completely in reality was unnerving.It meant that my comprehensive vision had to stay in my head. It required
a great deal of emotional energy to stay on track. Plus the physical strain of
painting from the tops of ladders, or scaffolding and then scurrying down to
take a look, or painting on my knees. On the other hand the very problem of the
curved surface meant you could only experience them in time and space as you
walked by. This I found very exciting.”
But
Adrian had a
more immediate concern. The First Lady and a number of other people were going
to visit that Wednesday to see his progress.
Adrian
said, “The Friday before I had crashed and burned, but by Tuesday night I was
back on track. But one thing was clear; I was not going to make my self imposed
two week deadline.”
The big day arrived and as it turned out
much to Adrian’s
relief everyone including the First Lady was satisfied. His stay had been
extended and he felt that his work had turned the corner but there was one more
difficulty in store for him. Because of the large bank of lights, the size of
the work and the curvature of the surface, certain colors created a bright
reflective surface when wet. “No matter how I adjusted the lights in certain
situations all I could see was a dazzling shiny surface. I would mix the color I
thought I needed on my pallet and put it where I thought it should go but I
could not know for sure until the next day when it was dry.”
Sometimes when Adrian
returned to the hotel at night he shocked the doorman with his outrageous
appearance. “Sweaty and covered with paint I'm sure I looked like I'd spent the
night under a bridge somewhere,” he said. “To make matters worse I had lost 40
pounds a few months before so my clothes fit like I fished them out of a trash
can. I don't think the hotel employees had any idea what I was doing.”
A typical workday had Adrian
awake by 5:00 a.m. or 6:00 a.m. at the latest. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said.
“Some days I was up at four. “I was at work by seven or eight in the morning.
For lunch I would grab a piece of lunchmeat two pieces of bread and a bottle of
water from a refrigerator. Then I would walk back to my office chair in front of
the paintings and try to figure out my next move.”
The last weekend in Washington Adrian spent at the National Gallery. He had just
a few days left and many questions that he hoped the paintings in the museum
could answer. “I was sitting by the door when the National opened first thing in
the morning and six hours later my back was sore and I was faint from hunger. I
thought it was lunch
time but it was way past noon. All the paintings I had grown up with
when I lived in D.C. opened up and gave me all their secrets. It was an
epiphany. I was a human sponge. I had that experience before but never to that
extent and not in front of those particular paintings for many years. I went to
the still life section of the Dutch Masters. It was pure joy being there. It was
like they were happy to see me.”
With his work completed Adrian arrived home completely exhausted but proud of
what he had accomplished in a few weeks.
”I love challenging situations, projects that stretch me as an artist. Of course
I like to be in my comfort zone as much as anyone, but I can't find out how good
I can be unless I’m thrown into a situation where I have to be better today than
I was yesterday. Artistically it's my moment of truth. I'm more excited by art
now than at any time of my life.”
Adrian
then glanced out the dining room window. He's already thinking about his next
paintings.
ust
a few days left and many
questions that he hoped the paintings in the museum
could answer. “I was sitting by the door when the National opened first thing in
the morning and six hours later my back was sore and I was faint from hunger. I
thought it was lunch
time but it was way past noon. All the paintings I had grown up with