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March 27, 1917 - November 9, 2006  March 24, 2007 At his studio 128 Grange Avenue Fair Haven New Jersey Dear Friends, Sorry to have been so dilatory, but I was afraid to hurt your feelings by begging off from your kindly meant invitation. At my age, the first thing I do in the morning is assemble my bones, getting them in the right sockets and so forth, which I can now do almost by feel. But it is necessary to put on my spectacles before I can sort out the bags of muscle and attach them all neatly with little hooks and eyes; fit my teeth in place once they have been rinsed, heave up the whole mass and roll it down the stairs. By that time it is well past breakfast. Since, as I am sure you realize, my life expectancy in these years is just about until lunch, I tend to put that off as long as I can, generally by taking a nap. In any case, it would be quite impractical to do all of this in time to catch the trolley to the train station to my own memorial celebration, even if I could snatch a short snooze on the train.
STANLEY MELTZOFF 1917-2006  SNAPPER, SPOTS, STRIPERS AT ELBERON The Father of Marine Nature Art, Stanley Meltzoff, died on November 9th in Red Bank, New Jersey. He was 89 years old. Meltzoff's subdued pallette and unnerving compositions combined to lend an unmistakable and authentic look to his paintings. His skill at transferring the movements of fish, both schooling and alone, to the canvas has never been equalled. He was inducted into the Society of Illustrators' Hall of Fame, and was twice awarded the Society of Animal Artists' Award of Excellence. The following biographical data were lifted from his New York Times obituary: Born in Harlem on March 27, 1917, Mr. Meltzoff was a son of Nathan and Sadie Marcus Meltzoff. Mr. Meltzoff graduated from City College in 1937 and earned a master’s degree in fine art from New York University in 1940. During World War II, he was an artist for Stars and Stripes in Europe. He taught painting and art history at City College from 1939 to 1941, and taught there again after the war until 1950, when he began a five-year stint at Pratt Institute. But even as a child in the 1920s, Mr. Meltzoff had been an avid skin diver, mainly off the New Jersey coast. By the 1940s, he was keen on spear fishing and scuba diving, he added underwater photography when it became available. He first combined his passions for the sea, photography and art in the 1960s, when he painted several series on particular fish species for Sports Illustrated, National Geographic and Field & Stream. Mr. Meltzoff’s art was not limited to marine life. He did illustrations, including landscapes and historical subjects, for Life and The Saturday Evening Post. In 1976, he was commissioned by AT&T to paint a whimsical telephone book cover celebrating the nation’s bicentennial and the company’s centennial. The cover, on 187 million phone books distributed nationwide, included an American Indian bewildered by smoke signals rising from a telephone receiver. But Mr. Meltzoff always returned to the sea, “a place without horizons,” he wrote, where he could dive “through the surface into the looking-glass world where I flew down into the deeper blue, until I fell back up into the air, exhausted with delight.” posted by cpbvk on Rigorvitae PAINTING WATER: THE MARRIAGE OF FREEDOM AND CONTROL by David Apatoff
Sometimes it takes the greatest amount of self-discipline to capture the things that are most free and elusive. You might think that painting water-- that most fluid, shimmering substance-- would permit an illustrator to indulge in the wildest excesses. But I was surprised to discover that some of the painters who are best at capturing the freedom of water can only do so using the most exacting self-discipline and control. Stanley Meltzoff described to me a similar process for painting water: “So far as I can tell, depicting water depends on following the complex rules of illumination, refraction, reflection, color absorption, distortions of all these by the shape of the waves and the color of the bottom and supended particles, all in perspective. The How To books in art stores have simple sets of instructions for painting water which, even if incomplete, are illuminating. So are the comments of John Ruskin in Stones of Venice, even Gombrich in Art and Illusion. Current water painters do better analysing photographs and reconstructing the fluids in accord with the rules for making illusion, once they have spent some time looking at that particular structure of fluids in motion. I suppose mystics can do this by prayer or meditation, but the picture makers I am acquainted with are practical craftsmen, among whom there are some who can tell a story better than others. I suppose Moses could make water flow from a rock, but Meltzoff needs to use paint on gesso panels to create the illusion of water and wetness for others to contemplate.”
“Let me say that painting underwater light and space involve more and other optical rules than water seen from above. The source of light is from above through the water surface. It is as if the waves seen from above were emiting light from beneath. The undersurface reflects in more complex ways than the surface above. Moreover the light is not in a continuous flow as in day-light, but is in distinct bands of focused light surrounded by large volumes of diminished and unfocussed light, in motion and overlapping. Atmospheric perspective and color absorption are more varied and affect varying wave lengths according to the optical processes and physics of water rather than those in air. The movement of bands of light underwater is quite unlike anything above water. With the exception of the under-surface and the bottom when visible, the rules of vanishing point perspective in air are useless underwater, except for single objects. It is not at all like painting en plein air. The same is true for the effect of gravity on vertical and horizontal structures which is so marked above water and clearly seen in vanishing point perspective.”
Reflecting on Meltzoff's approach, I was struck by how hard he works to convey an evanescent, shimmering freedom and how successful he is at doing so. It shows how much you can achieve at the intersection where freedom and control come together. MELTZOFF'S PAINTINGS OF ANCIENT GREECE
In 1963, Life Magazine commissioned artist Stanley Meltzoff to illustrate an article about ancient Greece. The result was a set of glowing masterpieces that brought ancient Greece vividly to life. In addition to the beauty of the
images, Meltzoff labored long and hard to make his paintings
historically accurate. A meticulous craftsman, he even distinguished
the uniforms of the Persians from the uniforms of the Scythians
and the Medes.
...to the grand sweep of the world's largest army storming across the Hellespont to invade Greece.
These are works of enduring value. They appeared for one brief moment in a 25 cent weekly magazine, then disappeared as Life moved on to a different topic the following week. They aren't displayed in a museum or gallery for the public to admire.
And yet, having appeared once, they are not gone. I can personally attest that these dramatic images were seared permanently into the memories and imaginations of ten year old boys of that time. I am reproducing them here in the hope that there is another generation out there watching. by David Apatoff AN ARTIST A few days ago I posted a segment on Stanley Meltzoff's paintings of ancient Greece. I always wanted to meet the artist behind those glorious paintings, but now I never will. As I was posting my blog, Mr. Meltzoff was lying ill in a hospital. Today he passed away.
Meltzoff was a gifted author, teacher and artist who painted images from science for Scientific American, historical illustrations for National Geographic and Life, and science fiction covers for a host of publishers. Like thousands of others, I was enriched by his beautiful work. But I was most inspired by his astonishing intellectual curiosity and his deep artistic purpose. Meltzoff wrote about surviving in the years when the bottom dropped out of the illustration market. My wife was ill, my children needed college money and I was almost 60 years old. I stood on the corner of 56th and Lexington Avenue in the rain with a soggy portfolio in my hands and improvised a sad little song about defeat, flat feet and flat broke while I tried to think of something to do. Meltzoff responded to adversity with great artistic potency. He single handedly created a new market for paintings of seascapes and gamefish, which enabled him to combine his expertise in diving with his passion for art. In his spare time he compiled an art reliquarium and wrote a major scholarly treatise, Botticelli, Signorelli and Savanorola, Theologica Poetica from Boccacio to Poliziano. The book is a marvelous work of history, written with great lucidity, insight and humor-- the kind of epic accomplishment that would have capped an entire career for most historians. I recommend it to you. Please join me in sending thoughts and prayers to Mr. Meltzoff's family. We can look forward to a book about Meltzoff from publisher Donald Grant books; I will be first in line. Most people who gamble on earning a living from their creativity have those moments of standing in the rain with a soggy portfolio. William Hazlitt wrote that, "In the end, all that is worth remembering of life is the poetry of it." Whatever else happened in his life, Mr.
Meltzoff's gamble paid off royally. One only has to look at his
art to know that his life was rich with poetry. FOR CHILDREN AT THE CONEY ISLAND AQUARIUM By Stanley Meltzoff, age 75 Number 1: My first real reason is I think the children who live at the Coney Island Aquarium would be neat to know and maybe I can get to live at the Aquarium myself but there are some other reasons: Number 2: If I get on the Jury I can get into the Aquarium for free on that day. Number 3: When I was in the sixth grade I got a medal for drawing animals from the ASPCA. It was a airedale puppy throwing up. It was sick. Number 4: When I was in the fourth grade and also the sixth at PS 82 my Grandpa took me to see the fish in the Aquarium at the Battery where there were a lot of fish in the tanks. Number 5: In the summer when I was very little at Belmar in New Jersey I was diving and looking at crabs and fishes. Once I found a live seahorse. Number 6: I am very fair and honest and I like anything good no matter what, if I like it. I already know how to tell the time from a clock with hand on it. Number 7: There is a club of people who make illustrations and they gave me a lot of awards and medals and things. Number 8: A long time ago I taught how to paint and about art and all that at City College in New York and Pratt, but I had to travel to see things and work at home to make pictures and so I had to stop. Number 9: I was on a real jury once and on picture juries maybe a million times, but I don’t remember exactly. Number 10: A magazine called National Geographic sent me to a lot of places to make pictures of things, specially fish like bluefin tuna. So did some other magazines the names of which I think were Life, Scientific American, Sports Illustrated and Field & Stream. I only did animals and fish for some of them but mostly pictures of famous people and people in stories for other magazines. Number 11: Because I really like fish I made another club with some other people and we called it the American Littoral Society. It got to be a very big club. Number 12: Once when I was in a big war I made pictures for the other soldiers for our bulletin board which we called Stars & Stripes. Number 13: Once I went all the way around the world for six years just to swim underwater with all the marlins and billfishes, but I enjoyed it more another time because I got to spend two whole summers everyday in the water near a place called Peggy’s Cove I think it is near Canada or Nova Scotia and what I like was that it was a bluefin tuna ranch and they let me pet them and feed them and ride them everyday until they got turned into a lot of sashimi which was very sad. Number 14: I like to visit museums and places because a lot of people have my pictures there. Mr Alfred King III gives me money sometimes when he sells my pictures but sometimes I give them away. Number 15: When I get to be an old man I write a book called “Botticelli, Signorelli, and Savonarola: theologia poetica and painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano.” I got a prize for that because they said it was the best book about art history in that year which was in 1989. Number 16: I am trying to write about how to make pictures with an English Nobleman called Professor Sir Ernst H. Gombrich, O.M. (I think that stands for Oh My but I am not sure) and also a book about how I made all those fish pictures which are altogether in a book with pictures of fish which I painted underwater, but not the painting part the fish part. Seeing how other people paint fish will help me a lot. (typed by his son Stanley Meltzoff II from what the too twee old man mumbled, Jan 11, 1992) Stanley Meltzoff in Umbria, May 1977 Much less do I, then I try. More will be less, until I die. But you, I think, I shall surprise By truth entangled in my lies. Diverse intricate varieties, Velleities, felicities and universities. Did I too much, or too often fall? Did I go too far, or not at all? Humor the odd way I behave, Pleasure the fancies I believe Honor the fictions I retrieve. n. pl. vel-le-i-ties |
