Show Notes:
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To kick off season 9, we sat down with Thomas Torak, an oil painter who embraces the long held principles of classical painting. Thomas shares his journey into classical painting, inspired by a life-changing experience seeing Rubens' painting of The Prometheus. He discusses his mentors, Frank Mason and Robert Beverly Hale, and their influence on his approach to painting focused on light, space, and form. Thomas explains his technique of building up opacity and transparency to create luminous, dynamic paintings and therefore breathing life into the canvas. He emphasizes the importance of understanding anatomy and the human form to make art more relatable. He also advises aspiring artists to study the old masters, especially through copying drawings. Our conversation highlights the joy and privilege of the creative process and the goal of connecting with viewers through impactful, emotive paintings.
Thomas' FASO site:
https://www.thomastorak.com/
Thomas' Blog:
https://dammiicolori.blogspot.com/
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Transcript:
Thomas Torak: 0:00
I said, here's the best part. I said the last day of the creation story. God takes dirt from the earth, and He breathes into it, and he breathes life into it. Said, what we're painting with is dirt from the earth. All of our pigments are dirt from the earth, and we mix a little bit of oil into it, so our job is to breathe life into it on the canvas.
Laura Arango Baier: 0:28
Welcome to the bold brush show where we believe that fortune favors the bold brush. My name is Laura Arango Baier, and I'm your host. For those of you who are new to the podcast, we are a podcast that covers art, marketing techniques and all sorts of business tips specifically to help artists learn to better sell their work. We interview artists at all stages of their careers, as well as others who are in careers tied to the art world, in order to hear their advice and insights to kick off season nine, we sat down with Thomas Torak, an oil painter who embraces the long held principles of classical painting. Thomas shares his journey into classical painting inspired by life changing experience seeing Rubin's painting of the Prometheus. He discusses his mentors, Frank Mason and Robert Beverly Hale, and their influence on his approach to painting focused on light, space and form. Thomas explains his technique of building up opacity and transparency to create luminous, dynamic paintings, and therefore breathing life into the canvas. He emphasizes the importance of understanding anatomy and the human form to make art more relatable. He also advises aspiring artists to study the old masters, especially through copying drawings. Our conversation highlights the joy and privilege of the creative process and the goal of connecting with viewers through impactful, emotive paintings. Welcome Thomas to the BoldBrush show. How are you today?
Thomas Torak: 1:46
I'm just great. Thank you so much for having me. It's pleasure to come in here and chat with you. It's not what I normally do. I should be at my easel painting and but this, this is going to be great.
Laura Arango Baier: 2:00
Yes, yes. And I'm very grateful that you're, you were convinced to do this. I know that you had some, uh, some uh worries about it, and you're not a big fan of doing this. So I'm very grateful that you changed your mind, because I think that despite you wanting to be painting in front of your your easel, you are going to be painting with your words right now, because I think you are probably someone who is not, probably definitely someone who is full of a lot of wisdom, a lot of experience, and I think, in my opinion, it's going to help a lot of artists who are listening to the podcast, who are maybe looking for a little bit more of that inspiration in terms of the creative act of painting and finding their voice and all of these things that I think a lot of us go through and struggle with and doubt ourselves over. I think you can, I guess, help us commiserate.
Thomas Torak: 2:59
No pressure at all. Thank you so much.
Laura Arango Baier: 3:03
You're gonna do amazing. Amazing because, of course, we were just talking before we were recording, and I think just from hearing you talk for the past, I don't know how long we were chatting, you're amazing. You're amazing. And I'm excited to talk to you about everything creative, everything in the creative act. This episode is a little bit different, of course, because we're not going to be talking marketing. But obviously you can't have marketing, and you can't have business without the art itself, right? So I think this episode is going to be dedicated to that, the creative act, the the womb of everything that, you know, we do as artists that ends up, you know, becoming, quote, unquote, a business or, you know, marketing, yeah, it, you
Thomas Torak: 3:53
know, marketing is fine, but if you have a masterpiece that you're trying to market, so much the better,
Laura Arango Baier: 4:03
exactly, exactly. You can't you can't do anything without the art. You can intellectualize things, but it's not
Thomas Torak: 4:09
the same. Marketing is so much easier when you really have something that people want exactly,
Laura Arango Baier: 4:14
exactly, which is why I've got you here. Alright. So, so, yeah, yeah.
Thomas Torak: 4:19
Where should we start?
Laura Arango Baier: 4:20
Well, we should start with telling us a bit about who you are and what you do, who
Thomas Torak: 4:26
I am. Well, I was born in a very, very, very, very different time than we are living in. I was born in 1953 I was the third of six children in a middle class family, and it was an absolutely lovely way to grow up and nowhere, you know, I was safe, I was secure. I had lots and lots and lots of family, you know, friends. I did well at school, everything was great. And then I graduated from. School, and all of my friends went away to college, and I decided not to go. It wasn't for I didn't even take the SATs. It was not for me. And even though I was a good student, I was not interested in any academic subject to the degree that I wanted to go into 10s of 1000s of dollars of debt to to, you know, to further that. But what I did is it gave me all of this time to think about who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. Was it, you know, up until then, I was living the dream, but it was my parents dream. It wasn't my dream. And so I had always loved drawing as a kid, and my family had no knowledge of the art world. Somebody once told me I had a culturally deprived childhood, which I thought was, it was kind of a sweet way of putting it. But they, you know, I would draw and and, you know, very little reaction, very little encouragement, but I love doing it. And after all my friends went to college, I bought a few paints, and I started to paint a little bit, and realized I knew nothing about it, and and so I decided I should learn something about painting. And because I had this this culturally deprived childhood, I had never been to a museum. My parents had never been to a museum. None of my friends had ever been to a museum. So I decided I'm going to go to a museum, and I took myself to Philadelphia, which was about in little over an hour from where I lived. And do you know the Philadelphia Museum at all? Laura,
Laura Arango Baier: 7:06
I don't, unfortunately. Oh, well, have you? Have
Thomas Torak: 7:09
you seen the movie Rocky? I have when rocky goes up this big, big staircase and he stands at the top and looks out over the the entire city and triumphant, yes, that's the staircase leading up to the Philadelphia Museum. So you can I'll let you try and make a mental image of this that I was a skinny little kid. I was always the smallest kid in my class. I was no wider than a twig, but it was, well, by then, it was the early 70s, had blonde hair down to my shoulders, so imagine this skinny little kid getting to the drove myself to the Philadelphia Museum, and there's this incredible staircase In front of me, and I start climbing these stairs, and it's almost like I'm at Mount Olympus and and I am making my way up to where the gods live. And it literally turned out to be that for me, you know, I was literally going to a place where I would meet my gods. And as I got to the top, and I paid, and I went in, and the first room, there were some, some small Renaissance pieces, little an altar piece. I was an altar boy. I'd seen many, many altars in my life that didn't interest me. And then I turned the corner and went in the next room, and literally, the first painting I ever saw in my life was Ruben's Prometheus, and it is a life size painting of Rubens tumbling upside down out of the canvas and the eagle coming in on the other side of the canvas and pecking out his liver. And I was stunned, you know, I call it my Saint Paul moment, I felt like I had been struck by lightning, and I was seeing this incredible thing, and I must have gone into a trance, you know, I was standing there. God knows how long, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, I have no idea, until I realized people were staring at me. And, you know, at that point, I snapped out of it, and but I almost felt like I was there at the scene, and this was happening, and I got to witness this. This this great punishment for Prometheus. And it was so astonishing. It was so amazing. And I decided at that moment, I said, this is what I'm going to do with my. Life, I'm going to draw and paint like this. And I didn't mean I was going to try and be Rubens. I wasn't going to paint like Rubens, but I wanted to paint with that kind of power and that kind of authority, so that when people look at my paintings, you know, maybe they'll stop for a minute and and their life will be, you know, affected a little bit. And, you know, I love it when I have, at one point, last summer, I had somebody come in my studio, and they were looking at paintings and and they had their back turned to me, I had a still life on the floor, and they were looking at the still life, and they were crying, and I didn't know, I just I was talking to somebody else, and and finally I looked over, I said, you know, are you okay? It's just so beautiful. And you know, that's the greatest reward you can get as an artist is that somebody has moved to tears by your work. So it so that was a, you know, a great moment for me, and that's when I started this great journey. And then when I got back from the museum, I said, Okay, how do I do this? No, I had no idea. I didn't have any guidance. There was no guidance counselor, and there was my parents didn't know anything. And how do I do this? And I just I wrote to every art school in the country that I could find, and I got brochure after brochure after brochure, and they were all pretty much the same that, you know, it's a four year course, and it costs a lot of money, and you have to study photography and painting and etching and print making and all these you have to do all of these different things. I just wanted to paint. I didn't want to do all these other things. I just wanted to paint. And I got the catalog from the Art Students League, and I looked at it, and you can go whenever you want. It was incredibly affordable. And I looked at the instructors, and they were 100 times better than anybody teaching at any of the other schools. And, you know, I happened to come across Frank Mason in a magazine that I had read, and Frank Mason was at the school. And I said, Okay, that's where I'm going. And I I just, you know, I was working in a factory at the time, and I worked for one more year, literally, one year from the day I saw the Rubens and and then I quit, and I sold my car, and I moved to New York, and I knew nobody. I I literally had $2,000 in my pocket, and I had two big suitcases, and I didn't know anybody. I didn't I had no friends, no relatives. I didn't know a soul in the city. I had no place to stay. I just went to New York, literally just went to New York. And first thing I did was go to the Art Students League with my suitcases and sign up to take a class. And then I went to the 63rd Street YMCA. And and from there, I found my way. And, you know, it was a great way to start, but I I promised you a story from Rubin's letters. And there, there's one of my favorite letters he went, of course, Rubens was somebody who did incredibly well with his paint. He was not the starving artist. He did incredibly well and built a beautiful, beautiful home in Antwerp, which you can still go to. And as he was building that, he wanted to have some marble busts to put, I think, around the the courtyard. He wanted some marble busts around the top. And, you know, emperors in various great figures from history and and he wrote a letter. I think it was trying to remember, I think it was somebody named like, like Dudley Carlton or something. And so he wrote to this fellow, and he said, I want to buy the bus that you have, and I would like to trade paintings for them. And he gave him said, here's a list of paintings that are in my studio that are available right now, and we could make a trade. And it was just such a wonderful list, because I knew all the paintings, one was the Prometheus, and he said the Prometheus, the the figure was painted by my hand, entirely by me. The eagle was by French Schneiders. And so there you already have. I. Dave how his studio worked, and he had other paintings. Some were painted by the best of my students. Some were by the best of my students, but retouched by my own hand. Some were were painted entirely by me. And the last one was Daniel and the lion's den, and which is in Washington, and it's a fabulous painting, big, beautiful, big painting. And he said it was painted entirely by my own hand. And then the part I love the best, he said the lions were painted from life. No, yeah, can you imagine? And knowing Rubens, he probably had somebody bring lions to his studio so he could study them and just let them walk around. But I thought, what a incredible thing. You know, the lions were painted from life. And you know, how can you not love somebody like this? So this was, this was my goal, to learn to paint with the kind of power and the kind of authority that Rubens had, and I've spent the last 50 years studying his paintings and his technique try and figure out what made his paintings so different from so many others, and he did. He was also a diplomat. On one trip, he went to Spain on a peacekeeping mission and and while he was there, he met the last the young Velasquez, and Velasquez spent time with him. He was there for several months, and and one of the things Rubens did while he was there, he copied every Titian that was in the king's collection, and it was the rape of Europa and Susanna at her mirror. And, you know, various tremendous things. And it was so fascinating because he didn't copy them so that he could make them look exactly like Titian, but he was learning from Titian, and yet painting with his own hand. And so that's, that's what I wanted to do as a young, 20 year old, when I landed in New York, I wanted to paint like Rubens, but I wanted to paint with my own hand. I, you know, I did not want to be a little tiny Rubens, you know, 400 years later. But it's astonishing that, you know, to think that you can do a painting and some young person will come along 400 years from now and have that painting change their life as a pretty powerful thing. It's pretty astonishing.
Laura Arango Baier: 17:52
It is, it
Thomas Torak: 17:52
is so, so that's how I got to that's how I started painting
Laura Arango Baier: 17:57
that I love, that that was, wow. That was a beautiful anecdote, you know, to hear how you went through everything. And then, of course, if I can relate deeply to that, because one of my first loves, aside from Da Vinci, because I feel like a lot of us, you know, Da Vinci is amazing, but definitely Rubens was one of the most you you just look at a Rubens, and it blows your mind. And then I actually got the the opportunity to visit his house in Antwerp, and it's incredible. His studio is massive, and I can imagine, you know, if he did have those lines there, he definitely had more than enough space. Yeah, that can assure you, amazing, amazing. And, yeah, he's
Thomas Torak: 18:42
well, I did read some place where, when he was painting in his studio, of course, it was so big, the students were also working on things at the same time. But when he had the Duke of Buckingham, where somebody would come for their portrait sitting, they would sit for one hour. And the way it worked was they would come in and the students would get them all set up, and Rubens would come in, and the students had their job was to prepare the palette for him to grind all the paint fresh. And so he's there with a fresh palette on the balk. If you remember, there's a balcony in his studio, and on the balcony was a string quartet that was going to play as they were painting. And on the other side of the room was somebody reading Cicero. And this is the way Rubens would paint. He would he would have the music, he would have Cicero. He would be concentrating on his painting. He'd be having a conversation with the person. And all of these things would be going on at the same time. It's, I mean, I like to listen to music when I paint, but if somebody comes in and starts the conversation, I have to put my brush down.
Laura Arango Baier: 19:59
Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm the same way. That goes to show too, how, you know, first off, that's kind of crazy that he had someone reading Cicero and the music, because it's kind of like artists today who maybe have music playing and like a podcast going in the background, or an audiobook, yeah, yeah. And then to talk about talking to the sitter. Wow, that. It goes to show that he probably had so much muscle memory, you know, to be able to multitask in that way. Because his work
Thomas Torak: 20:31
is just Yeah, his facility is beyond anybody, yes, anybody, not, not, you know, I, I I apologize to every artist listening to this, but Rubens was better than you. Rubens had this facility that was just so astonishing. I remember seeing a a small painting that he did. It was ahead of Medusa, and it was on a table. It was just already had been cut off, and it was on a table. And there were snakes, of course, around the brown the head. And they were painted with such astonishing facility. I could see the the ground of the canvas. I could see the drawing of the snake. I could see the form and the character and all these things. And it was probably something that he dashed off in no time,
Laura Arango Baier: 21:26
yeah, yeah.
Thomas Torak: 21:28
And there, there is a painting maybe in, might be in the louver of figures in a landscape, dancing big painting, you know, of course, and it's figures dancing in a circle. It's called the Flemish kermice. And they're, they're all dancing and and there's, you can find some preliminary drawings that he had done for some of the figures, probably from life. And so there's this whole thing is going on, there's landscape, there's figures, there's a dog doing something in the corner, and all kinds of stuff going on. He painted that in one day or so I've read, but with his facility, was so incredible that I believe it.
Laura Arango Baier: 22:23
I believe it too. I believe it. Yeah,
Thomas Torak: 22:28
everything looks fresh. Everything looks like you painted it in one shot. And yeah, a true slice of life too. Meanwhile, I'm spending four days on a tiny little bowl of grapes, but I'm doing the best I can. Yeah, yeah.
Laura Arango Baier: 22:44
Sometimes it's really funny, because when I when I hear all this, right? And it was in a time when they didn't have the luxury of photography that we have today, it blows my mind, and it sometimes makes it feel like we're almost in the Dark Ages. Because especially, you know, in the 20th century, so much of realism was almost lost. And you know, one of your teachers, you know, Frank Mason, he was definitely one of the torch bearers of so much information that, in my opinion, there's so much more that we probably lost or haven't, you know, been able to recover, and probably sitting somewhere, maybe in a book in a flea market in the middle of nowhere. And it just amazes me so much that he was able,
Thomas Torak: 23:31
yeah, he was one of a handful of people who kept the traditions alive, you know, through, I mean, the poor guy was trying to paint classical paintings the same time as Warhol and Jasper Johns and all these people were, you know, making millions and millions and millions and and he said, Well, you know, he said, when Peggy Guggenheim wanted her portrait painted, she came to me. She didn't, she didn't go to those guys,
Laura Arango Baier: 24:00
yep. So that's how it is. He
Thomas Torak: 24:03
said, you know, portrait painting is, is always something that that you can do to to make a living. And he said, as long as there are two people left on the face of the earth, one is going to want the other one to paint his portrait. Yeah. So he said that that's something that can sustain you. Meanwhile, you can, you can paint your, your Daniel and the lion's den and all the other things you want to paint. And but he was, he, really, he, he hung in there, you know, through this, this, you know, really modern period where everything, everything changed. And gradually, you know, he starts coming back in favor again. And, and he knew, he just, he said, I knew. But you just, you just wait for that, for the moment to come and, and you'll come back in favor. Said, it's like clothing. Don't throw anything out. Whatever you wore in the 60s will. Back in the 90s, and you'll be ahead of the curve, because it will have already been broken in it won't look like you just bought it. It's great.
Laura Arango Baier: 25:09
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think it's very commendable to to have, you know, lived through the 20th century as a realist painter, because I feel like the the only realist painters who really did really well for themselves in terms of, you know, being more accepted. Were illustrators, in my opinion, who also were torch bearers in their own way, but the true to itself, classical painter, I find, struggled the most. They were definitely starving artists in the 20th century compared to, like you said, like the the Warhol people and the Picasso people and the more modern movement. So it's, it's not
Thomas Torak: 25:53
to disparage them, you know, of course, you know, I, I, you know, I owe a lot of my brush work to the abstract expressionists. Exactly, yes. And, you know, even though I'm I'm painting light and shade and space and all these other things. You know, I learned color from the impressionists. I mean, they had colors that Rubens didn't have. Imagine Rubens with cadmiums, oh, my god, yeah, or Titian, you know, with, with, with a low green, I mean, just it, you know, they just didn't have anything, they didn't have any yellows to paint a landscape, you Know. And, yeah, I mean, it's just astonishing. So, so there are still things to be learned from everybody. And I, you know, I appreciate every school of painting, but, but classical painting is what I love, yes, and yeah. You know, it's nice that Pavarotti wants to have concerts with, with whoever, all the pop singers that that come along, but, you know, put him on a stage with Morella Franey, and have them do BOEM, and my heart breaks, yeah, and it doesn't When, when, when he's singing with Bono or somebody, you know, I there's no thrill for me. Well, it's just the world I live in. It's just, it's just my choice, you know, my taste, my choice. Yes,
Laura Arango Baier: 27:29
yeah. And I completely agree with that. You know, I do find that everything has a right to exist, right? Everyone has a right to enjoy what they enjoy. And of course, for I'm referencing, of course, the starving artists in the 20th century, classical painter, because that's how it was, regardless of whether or not it was good or bad or etc, because that is exactly what happened. And also that, like I mentioned earlier, that loss of information, that loss of teaching, that happened it, it does feel like a bit of dark ages for classical painting itself, right? Of course, all painting is derivative, right? So all of these modernists, they were derivatives of classical painting as well. So there's value in it. Um, without, like you said, this disparaging other forms of art that can exist and will continue to exist, because that's how it is. And I actually wanted to ask you, because you have years of experience doing this and you've had a lot of time to create your process and recreate it many times over. What is your process like, from idea to finished painting.
Thomas Torak: 28:43
Well, that you know, because I have a philosophy of painting, it was a great help to me. There's, I think one of the problems that most artists have is they, they don't know what they want to paint, or how they want to paint it. And I knew from the time I saw the Prometheus how I wanted to paint. And I was fortunate that when I went to the Art Students League, I had these two great mentors. One was Robert Beverly Hale, I got to hear his his lectures, maybe just a couple of years before he passed away. But I, you know, I learned a tremendous amount, not just about anatomy, but well, you know, I don't have anything to say about marketing, but I will give some advice to young artists that are out there. There's only one book in the world that I recommend anybody, and it's the drawing lessons from the great masters by Robert Beverly Hale. And you know, I love it, because what he does. In that book is he teaches you how to think like an artist. And he would often say during his lectures, a lay person will see the, you know, this part of the anatomy this way. An artist will see it as as a form. He'll see it as an egg, or he'll see, you know, and he'll and he'll light it that way and and I love that idea of thinking like an artist. So so I had Robert Beverly Hale, and then shortly after that, Frank Mason and I kind of married the two together just by instinct. And what most people do is they want to learn to draw first until they feel like they've mastered drawing, and then move on to painting. And it probably works for some people, but Frank's teacher fellow named Frank Vincent Dumond, got very frustrated. And Frank told me these stories. You know, I used to work in his studio, so he would tell me these stories. And he said Dumont would get very frustrated, because people would be in George bridgeman's class, and they could draw like anybody said. They were master draftsmen. And then they come up to my class, and they put these beautiful drawings down, and they start to color them in. And he said, That's not painting, that's coloring and and he said, there's a difference. And he and he had to to walk them back before he could get them to go forward again. And just sort of by instinct, I I did not master drawing before I started painting, and I and I got to learn the two, and I got to marry the two together in a very organic way. So, so that was a great thing. And one of the other things about Frank Mason is that he not only taught painting, but he also taught the craft. So he would teach you how to prepare canvas, and he would teach you how to prepare mediums. And most people wouldn't do it. Most people would just, you know, they'd run down to the store, they'd buy a canvas, and they'd come up and start painting, and, you know, I I said, Well, imagine, imagine you're a violinist, and you're playing at Carnegie Hall. I said, you don't want to run down to the pawn shop just before your concert and grab a violin to play at Carnegie Hall. And if you're going to do a masterpiece, you should do it on a piece of canvas that is worthy of the masterpiece. And so, so frank taught me all that, and I worked in his studio. And, you know, at the league, we were all painting all the time. It was great. And but when I worked in his studio, I would help him prepare canvas, and I would help him frame things for shows and and create them. So I was learning how to do all of these different things. And I I even helped him when he had clients come to the studio. When I first started with started going down to his studio. He would paint upstairs. He lived upstairs on the top, and he had a beautiful big. He made his own skylight. He punched a hole through the ceiling and made a skylight. And downstairs was the storage and and where we did the framing, and we made all the noise and made all the sawdust and did all the bad things, and, but he had a lot of his paintings stacked down there, and they were just stacked against the wall. And and my job, as as he was talking to the client and telling them stories and and being very romantic, my job was to to move the paintings that were in the stacks so that the poor client could see them, and they're stacked. I thought, this is just awful. And I said, this is a terrible way to look at paintings. And so a few years later, I got together with a friend of mine, who was a brilliant Carpenter, and we built big hanging racks. So now, when you go into the studio, there's a big wall. It's it's maybe five by 10 feet, and it's just pegboard stacked with paintings, and you pull it out, and then you look on the other side, and it's, it's really beautiful, yeah, but it's, but I got to be with him while he was with clients, and that was such an education, you know, to to to understand that, you know, Yes, you're the painter, but you talk about marketing and sales, and how do you sell? And he lived on the fourth floor of a building in Little Italy with no elevator, so you had to climb stairs. There are 90 stairs, 89 stairs. I counted them once. There are 89 stairs to get. It to his studio. And Frank also played the piano when he was young. He was a child prodigy, and he had to give up music because he was dyslexic and he had a hard time reading the music, so he would mostly just, you know, improvise. And so when he had a client come. They would ring the bell and and he would send me downstairs to open the door for them, and I'd go down and meet them and greet them. And we'd start climbing up the stairs. And as we're climbing in the distance, you hear this piano playing, and you know. So we go up, we're at the second floor, and the and the music gets a little bit louder and louder and and finally we get to the top, and I, I open the door to the loft, and there's the artist himself sitting at the piano playing something that sounds somewhere between drums and rock on and off, and he's just making it up as he goes along. And his studio, he had some old cast things that were cast from the original. He had the Venus de Milo cast from the original, and that was in one side of his studio. And on the other side, he had the wing victory from from the louver, the big Nike, and that was behind the piano. So you walk into this loft, beautiful brick walls, gorgeous paintings everywhere, the artist sitting at the piano, the winged victory behind. And I could just see the money flowing out of them. It's like, I want to be a part of this. And, and he created this, this atmosphere where, you know, he had completely brought the client into his world. And, you know, I, I just thought, what an amazing thing. And, you know, it brought somebody up once. This is kind of a side story, but I like it because it involves me. So I brought the client up and and next to the front door, he had these tables, these drawers for for drawings, and they were stacked up quite high, about six feet high. And on the top he had a photograph of of Frank Dumont. You know, he revered his teacher and and so the clients there, and we're standing by the door, chatting and, and the client sees the picture. He says, Oh, is that your father? And Mason says, No, that was my teacher. That was Frank Vincent Dumont. He was, he was my teacher. And then, then he put his arm around me and he said, and it was Tom's grand teacher. Oh, so, so I've always thought of Dumont as my grand teacher, and and anybody who studied with him was an aunt or an uncle. So So you know, uncle, Norman Rockwell and and all these, these, these great everybody studied with Dumont. He taught for 50 years, yeah, but literally. He taught for 59 years, literally. And poor Frank was disappointed when he had to stop teaching because he had only taught for 57 he said I wanted to teach as long as Dumont, and I, I can't do it, but wow. But that was, you know, a great part of of what I learned. So at the league, I was learning to paint. I was learning to be a painter, and working from the model, and doing all these great things. And then when I was in Mason studio, I was learning what it was like to live the life of an artist. And you know, the the way Frank would teach was by example. So when, when he was giving critiques in the classroom, he would just work on your painting. He would, he would take the brush, and there was the model in front of you, and he would use your palette and and he would say, you know, this is you need to go here, and you need to go there and do this. And then he would start telling stories, and he would continue painting. And you just watched him paint. And I did the same thing in his studio. I would just watch him live. And you know what it's like to to live the life of an artist is something that you don't get out of art school. You know? What is it like when you know, how do you get up in the morning? How do you get started? How do you do this? How do you get clients? How do you do all these different things? And so I was really incredibly lucky that I, you know, I had these, these two incredible mentors. And now at some point, I left the class. I kept working at Frank studio, but I left the classroom and he said, You're earning. Class today, I said, Frank, I've got to, you know, I have things I want to paint. I said, I don't want to just paint whoever the office sends up to be the model that week. I have things I want to paint. And he said, great, he got it. He said, that's, you know, that's what he wants me to do. He wants you to be an artist. And he was, I think he was kind of pleased that, that I didn't want to just stay there forever. And so then I, you know, started my own journey. And, and you start thinking, you know, what do I want to paint? How do I want to paint it? And, you know, I, I was given all these skills. Now, what do I do with them? And I, you know, I sort of love that time. Some of my favorite paintings are from that time. And I, you know, not that they're the best paintings, but, you know, I can remember thinking I set up a still life, and I said, How can I do a painting of essentially dark objects in rim light? You know, it was a challenge for myself. How do I do that without making just this horrible dark painting? And I always loved that painting. And, you know, I did it, and I learned something. And so you're always learning all the time as an artist, but one of the things that Frank did was the craft. So, so he taught me. So this is how I do a painting. I said, my painting starts with, I pick out a piece of linen. And you know, I have some things that people gave me. I have some leftover scraps from Frank studio when he passed away. And, you know, I have all kinds of things. I have a linen from Utrecht. It's just, you know, your basic commercial Utrecht art supplies linen, which I like it. It. My brush reacts very nicely to it. So I find a piece of linen that you like, and then I prepared it the way the old masters did with the rabbit skin glue and the white lead. And fortunately, I live in Vermont, so I have a bar and I can do it outdoors. It's much harder when you live in New York City. You know you can't prepare 80 canvases with white lead and leave them in your apartment while you're sleeping.
Laura Arango Baier: 42:25
That's true. That's dangerous.
Thomas Torak: 42:29
No, it's instant lead poisoning. But I, you know, I always found a way, when I did live in New York, I always found a way to get out of the city for a month and rent a house upstate somewhere, and prepare the canvases while I was upstate and do some landscape painting. And you can always find a way, but that's how I started, is preparing my own canvas. And one of the things that I love doing is putting a ground on the painting. And a lot of artists like to paint on a white canvas. A lot of people say you should never do anything but work on a white canvas. And if you go to the the Tate in London, and you look at the Turners, the Turners were all started on white grounds. And I happen to like a toned ground, because a big part of what I'm doing is is painting luminosity. And in order to do that on a white ground, you have to cover up the white ground with paint so that you can then get to the luminosity when you have a middle tone, you can within the first minute or two, I generally start out just by finding the rhythm of my composition and then going right into the light and the luminosity and and the canvas starts to bloom right from the beginning. And you're, you know, you're not waiting till the end to put the highlight on, you know, I, if I want to put the highlight on the first stroke, I can do that. And so you can do all of these really amazing things. And when I moved to Vermont, one of the things I discovered was moonlight, you know, I lived in New York City. I lived in New York City for 20 years, and when I came to Vermont, there's no street lights, you know, I can't see my neighbors houses unless I really struggle, you know. And far off in the distance, you know, about maybe, maybe half a mile up the road is the next house and and when I take the dog out at night, there's the moon. And I I love painting the moon so much. I did an entire show of just Nocturnes. I did 21 Nocturnes as a tribute to to Chopin. Chopin wrote 21 knock. So I thought, I'll paint 21 Nocturnes and do a show. And it was great. I've never seen anything like it. But one of the things I learned as I was doing that, when I would start doing the nocturnes, I generally start, I like to use an umber ground and I just mix it with some rabbit skin glue after I after the lead is dry, I sand a little bit so the glue will grab it, and I just sprinkle a little bit of dry color on the canvas, and then put the glue on and spread it out, and it makes this beautiful tone. It's the kind of thing you can see in Rubens. Rubens used to use a raw sienna, and you see it in a lot of his studies. For big paintings, you can see the ground and I like umber. I like something just almost a little bit more neutral. The Sienna is just a little too yellow for my taste. And when I was doing in the nocturnes, I couldn't get them to sing. I was, you know, I'd go out at night and I would look and I would make mental notes, and I'd come down the next morning in my studio, and then I would paint what I remembered, and I couldn't get it to sing. And I kept thinking, Why? Why is this not worth see? This is part of the beauty of growing. And I realized that when I'm doing my still lifes or my portraits or some other things, the liveliness is all in the painting itself. It's all on the top, all the richness of the color, all the intensity, everything is there on top. So the neutral ground works great because it's not competing. But when I was doing the nocturnes, I you know, you're using very muted tones. It's dark blues and and dark violets and dark greens in the trees and everything is very, very low in in in pitch, and also in intensity. And the whole painting sort of looked dead. And then you had this, this sort of whitish moon, it just looked awful. And I said, there's no liveliness. Said, Where's, where's, you know, I need to get liveliness. And just on a whim, I decided to tone a canvas with phthalo green, very intense color, very, very intense color. And and then I started painting on that. And when I started letting some of that phthalo green come through the darks of the trees. It just worked like a charm. And first one I did was a painting of fireflies. And so it's just a dark mass of of trees with just a few little fireflies glowing in front. But I painted the trees in a way where I let some of that green come through, and not so much that that it looks like an intense thalo green, but just enough to make the dark look lively. And it was great. It was just great. So I so from there, I, you know, I've painted lots and lots and lots of of nocturnes, and I've, I've tried phthalo blue, and I've tried all different kinds of things. But, you know, for the Vermont landscape, the phthalo green works great. And so, so this is my, my process is to do, prepare the canvas and and put it, put the ground on, and each of these things is a part of the painting. And I did a little demo at at my gallery, and they they filmed it, and they made a little five minute clip of it. And I noticed that as I was talking and introducing what I was doing to the audience, I was also rubbing my hand on my canvas, you know, unconsciously in the background, I was just making a connection to this canvas. And I, I have done it in my studio. I didn't realize I was doing it in public, but I was just making a connection so that when I started the painting, there was already a connection between myself and the canvas itself. And, you know, I wasn't just pulling out some thing that was on the shelf and taking off the plastic and starting painting, you know, I had, I knew this canvas already. I had raised it from being a raw linen, you know, to adulthood, where it was a canvas ready for a painting. And I love that idea of having the connection between yourself and the painting, you know. And I often you. Uh, grind I have, you see behind me, there's tons of dry collar I often grind my own paints so that you have fresh paint every day. And, you know, so it takes a little while, but, you know, it's a way to to meditate, and it's a way to think about what I'm going to be painting. And you know, again, you're you're becoming one with your color. So everything becomes very organic. You you have a connection to your paints. You have a connection to your canvas. And you know, you're all working together to create this, this great masterpiece. And you know, there are companies now that make some very good paints. There are some, some very good there weren't when I was a child. It was all commercial paint for for Aunt Betty. And not that I don't love Aunt Betty, but, but she doesn't really need hand ground paints. But now they make some, some very good quality paints. But, you know, I have enough dry collar here for probably four lifetimes. So this is all before I even start painting. And I did a demo at the league they had was, it was a very odd experience. They they needed my studio. I had a skylight studio at the league, and they had somebody from a department store that wanted to do a photo shoot in there for some ungodly reason. And the director of the league, who was a very good friend of mine, came up and he said, you know, they're offering us so much money, I've got to let them do this. And I said, I need your studio for two days. He said, can you take your your class up to the museum and do a talk or something. And I, I had just been to the museum, like, a month ago, there was a big show of somebody, somebody from the ash can school, I think, bellows. And we had gone, and we had looked at the show. And I said, you know, Ira, we, you know, we just went up. I said, What if I do a demo in the gallery? And I went down to the league Gallery, and he said, Great, we'll open it up to the whole school. Anybody who wants to come, can come? I said, Fine. I said, Can I do it for two days? I said, I've never done a two day demo before. And he said, absolutely. So. I set up, and one of the students posed for me, and I started talking, and again, my hand is rubbing on the canvas. And I start talking, and I start explaining. I said, before I start painting, you need to know how I'm thinking. And I said, when I before I start my painting, I know I want to do something with light and space and form. I want to paint something that is an illusion in space. So in my mind, what I do before I start painting, I imagine my canvas as an empty space. Said, most artists will imagine it as a flat surface, because it is a flat surface. But I start, you know, with my imagination before I even touch the palette. So my canvas is an empty space, and instead of building on a flat surface, what many, many artists will do, and this comes out of a lot of the commercial schools of painting, and they do some beautiful work. What they do is they start on a flat surface, and they start to build on the surface and and they they start to create form in that way. And then gradually, as they start painting tonally, they start going into space, they start creating aerial perspective. And I said, I I don't do that. I I start out in space, so I'm I'm doing exactly the opposite of what many other artists are doing. I'm starting out in space, and I'm having my figure emerge out of that space, almost like Birth of Venus. You know, there, there she is fully formed, coming out of the sea, and until she's presented before you. And I kind of love that idea. It just slowly emerges and you. Uh, it for it's it works great for me. You know, for other people, they need a step by step process. I don't have a step by step process. I i Let the figure emerge. Some people need to have a step by step process in order to get from beginning to end. And that's fine. You can do a beautiful painting that way. It it's not for me. So, you know, I everybody has to find their own way of how they create a masterpiece, and so this is my way. And where was I going with this? I was moving from beginning to end, and it just and people say, when do you know a painting is finished? So when do you when do you know a painting is finished? And my, my general answer is, when you say everything you've had to say about the subject. If you say it in one hour, then it's done. You know, if it takes you a very, very long time to express everything you have to say about that particular subject, then that's how long it takes. And you know, when you're doing landscape painting, you can't stay out there for six hours and copy the landscape. It just doesn't happen, especially sunrise. You know, you've got maybe 20 minutes before the sun is up and you're in full morning light. And you know, so there are times when you you paint fast by necessity, but there are other times when you just paint quickly. And I had one painting many, many, many years ago, I had bought an earthenware pot with some braided something around it. It's like braided reeds or something, something soft and and it's a it was just a wonderful thing. I just wanted to buy it, and I brought it home, and I I wanted to paint it, but I didn't have a painting in mind. And I just happened to have some peaches in the kitchen, and I grabbed a white cloth and and I and I threw them together, and I did this painting. And it happened to be a time where everything was just right, you know, the Canvas was right. The paint was right. The paint was fresh, the humidity was just right. You know, everything was there working together. And it's only happened to me three or four times in my life where I'm painting with such ease. Because everything you know, I remember thinking in the middle of the painting, I'm just going to grab some weird color and put it on here and see if it works. Because everything is working so beautifully. I didn't do it but, but everything just just flowed so beautifully and so easily. I finished the painting in four hours, and that was all I needed. You know, I may have come back the next day and put a little glaze on a peach or something, but, you know, I was able to say what I wanted to say easily. And luckily, I did, because the next day I started another painting, and the humidity was different, and some of the paint was a day old. And, you know, everything was different, and, and, and, you know, I the it would have made a different painting out of what I had started
Laura Arango Baier: 58:56
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Thomas Torak: 1:00:38
you know I, I like the idea. So kind of you, let me just ramble on like this. Oh,
Laura Arango Baier: 1:00:44
I'm but you are. You are leading this little boat. You are the navigator,
Thomas Torak: 1:00:50
but, but I remember a student once talking to me, and she was painting in the back of the room, and she had this same problem. She she started the painting on Monday and Tuesday. She said everything was different, and I came in on Thursday. I used to teach on Monday and Thursday, and the students would paint all five days. And so she said, Every day when I came in, everything looked different, and the paint felt different. Everything was different. How do you deal with that? And I said, that's such a brilliant observation. And I said, everything is different. I said, when you were painting on Monday, and you put everything away, you went out and you had dinner with somebody, you had conversations. You did this, and you did that. The model had a life. They went out and they did things. And each time you do that, you're a little bit changed by by your experience. You know, every moment of every day you're you're a little bit different. So by the time you came in on Tuesday, you had had different experiences and and you were happier or sad because of what had happened, and the model was different because of what they had gone through, and the air was different because weather changes. And I said the light might have been different if it's a cloudy even though you have a skylight, if it's a cloudy day or a clear day, the quality of the light is different. And I said this, you know, such a profound thing to know about your painting. And I said, you you have to make a decision. See, this is why you don't copy what you're looking at. Is because everything is different. And I said, when you start a painting, you have to have some vision of what you want it to be at the end. And I said, when I'm painting a still life and I have fruit in it, I have some grapes, and the first day you set it up, and the grapes are all juicy and they're fresh and they're new, and the highlights are crisp and they're they almost have some moisture to them. Each day that grape dies a little bit, and it dies a little bit, and by the third or fourth day you're working on your still life, the highlights are quite dull and everything is just a little sadder. And I said, if you just copy it, you're going to end up with a very sad still life every time. Because these things are, you know, unless you're Morandi and you're just painting jugs and things that don't die, but if you're painting anything that's alive, you know you're trying to paint flowers. I tried doing tulips once, and I set them up the first day, and there they were, all beautiful and moving. And I came back the next day, the entire still life had turned to my window. All, every one of the flowers had turned as if they were all turning their head to get to the light and what I had to go back to where I was the first day. So I so when I'm doing that, I said, when you're painting, you have to remember what it is you want to paint. And if you were excited the first day, paint the grapes the way they were. The first day, don't paint them the way they are. The fourth day. And you know, you'll you'll find some things will happen. And I did another painting with some nasturtium. And nasturtium is not the kind of thing you normally put in a vase. But I, you know, we grow a lot. We have a lot of land here, so we plant some flowers and fruit and various things and and I, I clipped off some nasturtium, and they were beautiful, flowing, wonderful, fabulous. They also go towards the light. But each of the flowers. Hours only lives for one day. So even if it's turning toward the light, that one's going to die and another one will open up. And so as I was painting, there would be a beautiful red nasturtium here on one day. The next day, it would be gone, and a beautiful golden nasturtium would be open another place, and the whole still life kept evolving as I was painting, and it was the most wonderful thing in the world. And so I, I, you know, I just followed it where, where it was going, and it turned out to be a wonderful painting. And so I, I love that kind of thing. I did some restoration in the morning when I was a student, I worked for a restorer. My job was to do the in painting where paint had flaked off, and there was a painting once of irises, purple irises, small painting, not very big. And as I was looking at it, I realized the artist only had one flower, and he painted it at each different stage of its development, each day, over five days. And, you know, because I could see where he was painting over things and and so there he was. He was sitting in a studio with one little flower, and he made this beautiful little bouquet out of it. And it was beautiful because it was the entire story from from, you know, being a little bud, to opening up and developing and becoming this, this full flower. It was a whole life story of of this flower. And it was, it was a beautiful thing. So, so, this is my process. I, you know, I develop things and I let them open up. Oh, so I was, I started out with the demo I was doing at the league. So, so I started out on the first day, and I'm I'm explaining how I start, and I start talking about the Canvas being an empty space, and I had the model leave, and I turned out it was downstairs, so we had to use an electric light. I turned the light off, and I said, this is how your painting develops. This is how your subject matter develops. Said, first you have this empty space. I said, it's very much like the creation story in the Bible. You start out with a void. You start out with nothing, and it's not a flat void, it's, it's, it's a void, it's an empty space. So if you think of your canvas as this big empty space, and then God separates the light in the darkness, and you turn the light on, and there's light flowing into that space. And I said, now you have light and space. And then I had the model come. I said, God created the animals and the trees. And I had the model take the model stand. And I said, this is what happens those light, you know, as the model invades that space, it occupies that space and moves all the molecules around, and the light falls on the model that this is what you're painting. You're painting light on a form in space. You're painting those three things. You're not just painting, you know, Walter's portrait. You're painting these, these things that happen. And then I said, I said, Here, here's the best part, I said, the last day of the creation story. God takes dirt from the earth, and He breathes into it, and he breathes life into it. Said, what we're painting with is dirt from the earth. All of our pigments are dirt from the earth, and we mix a little bit of oil into it. So our job is to breathe life into it on the canvas. And you know this, this is what our our mission is, is to take this dirt from the earth, and so every day that you paint, you're recreating the creation story. And I said, if you can breathe life into it on the canvas, people will react. If it's a portrait, they'll start talking to it. You know, if it's if it's a still life, they're going to want to pick it up and eat it. If it's a landscape, they're going to want to walk through it. And it will be something that that the viewer can have a connection to. So I was talking like this for 45 minutes before I ever touched the campus. And they sat there listening. And there must have been 200 students, and some of them were from my class, but some were from other parts of the league and and, you know, I started just after. Lunch. So I thought, well, they'll, they'll listen to five minutes, and they'll go back to their their and they didn't. They all sat and watched. And then I started working on the portrait and letting it evolve and and then I came back the next day and I said, you know, this is how you develop a painting now, now that you have, you know, a sense of the character. This is how you develop it. And spent the second day developing the character. And I, you know, I was just sort of lost in the painting. And at some point came up, somebody came up to me and said, you know, you need to stop, because we have to do the evening class. We have to set up the chairs for a lecture tonight. And and so, so I stopped painting, and I turned around, and I got this tremendous ovation. And all the students had stayed. They had given up two days of their own painting to watch this. And you know, it was, it was a joy to do it. And so I went down, I told IRA. I said, Ira, it worked out. Okay. I said, Now, can I have my studio back? I want my skylight back? Yes, but, but that idea of of light and form in space is so powerful and it's, it's the, you know, it's the one thing that I found most difficult about teaching was to teach people how to see because they they think they see somebody wearing a red sweater, and they want They start painting somebody wearing a red sweater, and they've taken no notice of the light. They've taken no notice of the space. They're only seeing the form. And I said, you're seeing the easiest thing. The form is easy to see because the the light is is is exposing the form. For you, you're seeing the light in the shade it. It tells you what the form is, but the light is so incredible, it has a a character of its own. I said, Imagine if we had the same model, and we stayed here for 24 hours, and we painted here with the skylight until it got dark. And then we decided, Oh, we want to keep painting through the evening. And you turn on an electric light, even if it's coming from the same direction, it's a different kind of light. It has a different quality, a different character. And then, you know, we it would get into the late night, and I turn out all the lights, and we paint by moonlight, and it's the same model, the same person in the same pose. We're in the same costume. Now we're painting moonlight, and it has another quality of its own. So you know, the model has a character, the light has a character. And then I said, we haven't even gotten to the space yet, and the space has a character of its own. And, you know, it makes a huge difference if we're painting in New York City in in the winter, and the heat is on and it's very dry, or we're painting in New Orleans in the summer, and it's very sultry and very hot. The air has a lot more water in it. The air is very different. You can see this when you do landscape painting so easily. You know, when you start out, you know, there were many times I went out and I couldn't see anything. It was just mist, you know it so there was just nothing but water in the air. And then as the sun started to rise, the mist starts to lift, and the quality of the space changes. And then finally, when you have the full sunlight, it's just a totally wild, different thing than it was when you started out in the mist. And it's it's not that the subject has changed, you know, the light has changed, yes, but the air has changed tremendously. And so now that the air in the room, the air in your painting has a character and a personality, and you know, so now you're painting the all three things that you're seeing. You know, when you look at the model you're seeing, seeing the model sitting at certain distance in front of the wall. So if, if she's three feet in front of the wall, then you see the light passing behind and coming out on the shadow side of the head. And it's quite beautiful. She moves back a little bit, and there's less light coming behind her head, and then she presses all the way against the wall. There is no light and the shadow is direct. Against the shadow side of the head, and they mass into this great dark and that space, if you don't explain it to the viewer, then, then you haven't explained what you're seeing. So when? So you know, when somebody says, I I want to paint what I see. I said, What do you see? You know, I see all when I saw the Prometheus, you know, I saw his his head coming forward, his feet kicking, you know, up into the air in the back, and I saw the landscape going off in the distance, and the the eagle flying in and and turning its head to peck out the liver. And, you know, the eagle was flying in space. And there was such this thing I love about Rubens is that he paints luminosity. And, you know, painting luminosity is different than painting light tones and shadow tones. You know, light and shade are wonderful. They're tones. So you're painting light and shade. So you're painting literally what falls on the model. So, so you're doing a painting of light and shade. Luminosity is different. You know, we always say the moon is so luminous and the moon is is doesn't have any light at all. You know, you have the sun falling on the moon, and if you just paint that, then you're painting the light on the moon. But it's luminous because the light comes back to your eye, and the fact that the light comes back to your eye is what makes Rubens so much different than the entire 19th century. And they did some beautiful things in the 19th century, but Rubens has the light bouncing off of the paint back to your eye. And I said, You can do this on your palette is it? Just take some white paint and make a little square on your palette with the white paint. And do it, put a lot of medium in it so it looks transparent, so you can see the palette right through the white and then do another square next to it that's a little more opaque, so you can't see the palette anymore. And then put a third square next to that, where the pain is really thick and really heavy and really powerful. And then look at these three whites. It's the same white that you've used for all three. The one with the greatest opacity looks the most brilliant because the light is bouncing back to your eye, and that makes such even when you look at a Rubens, you know, his highlights are, you know, probably a foot thick. You know, they're not a foot but you know that's the greatest opacity in the painting. And and you know, when you're looking at the Prometheus, you can see these tones. And I love, once I understood this, he would paint from light to dark, and he would go from opacity to transparency. And I would look at some paintings, and I would just look at a forearm that he had of a figure. And he would go from this tremendous opacity where the light was and come back through the color of the middle tone and into the transparency of the shadow. And it was literally, as I said before, like he was breathing on the canvas. It, you know, I couldn't see the brush work going from one place to another. It was as if he just breathed on the canvas and and this thing appeared, and it's so astonishing and so powerful. And when I looked at it, I saw a human arm. You know, I didn't see any technique. I saw a human arm. But being a student, I I'm trying to analyze what I'm looking at, and it's such a powerful thing. And it disappeared for a long time. You know, he developed this idea of transparency in the shadows. Titian would do it with glazes on top. Rembrandt would do it with with some thinner paint on top. Rubens really developed this idea of using opacity and transparency. And, you know, my teacher sort of rediscovered it just before I came to New York. He had learned from dumani, had learned a tonal way of painting, and he did some beautiful, beautiful things. And as he was painting, he was doing the same thing I was doing. He was looking at the Rubens and saying, Why is this different? And this is why he was the right teacher. For me, because we were both thinking the same way. And it's not that I adopted his thinking, it's that we were both in sync right from the beginning, and in 1973 the self portrait where he he did, he was wearing a big beret. It was very romantic. And he did these big opacities in the light and let the shadows be transparent. And it was beautiful. And, and he continued playing with this idea all the time. And and we thought about it, and I thought about it. And after he passed away, I kept thinking about it, and as I started teaching and trying to explain it to the students, you know why? Why this is so important. And I finally realized one day that what he was doing, he was echoing what happens in nature. And as I was in the classroom, I was looking at the easel at the league, the student had their painting on the easel, and it had a wooden clamp and and it had a metal screw through it. And I said, the light is falling on this clamp, evenly on the wood and on the metal. Why is the metal have a bigger highlight than the wood does, and it was because of the the density of the the metal that it reflected the light back. And so he was doing the wood was softer, so it had less of a reflection coming back to the eye still had a highlight, but it wasn't anything like the metal. And I, you know, as I was doing that, I was realized he's echoing what nature does. So as you you make your paint denser, as you build it up and make this great opacity, what you're doing is creating a circumstance where the light can bounce off of the paint and back to your eye with more authority than it does on the less opaque areas, and then when you get to the shadows. So now I have to think, why is he using transparency in the shadows? And it made perfect sense, because a shadow is the absence of light. So in the absence of light, he also creates the absence of paint. And you have to put something, you need some tone on there in order just to so you don't just have the bare ground, because the light will bounce off of the ground back to your eye with a certain intensity too. But he he does it very transparently. So when you look at that arm, the light is bouncing back in a powerful way, off of the biggest light, and not bouncing back at all through the shadow and it. And he's, he's really, you know, echoing nature, but redoubling the effect of the of the light and the shade that you're putting on the painting. So, so he's creating this, this incredible dynamic. And it, it just seems, to me, it just seems so natural and so beautiful that I can't imagine any other way of painting anymore. And sometimes when you're doing landscape studies, you know, you've got 20 minutes to get the sunrise, and you just, you don't worry about all that stuff. You just get some color notes down there. But it's such a beautiful, such a powerful way of of of thinking. And as I was trying to explain space one day, you know, this is the beauty of teaching, is it? It forces you to verbalize everything. And you know, Mason just did it by having you watch him, and you you know, he would say, I paint, and you learn. And, you know, watch what I do, and then you'll learn. I felt like I had to explain it to people, you know, why I was doing this, and so I took the example of the easel again, and I said, as we're painting this, I said, you can put your hand over the back of the easel. You can put your hand in space. You can go right around it. And I started thinking about edges. And artists love edges. Edges is just, you know, a chapter in every book. People love edges. And, you know, I've always had a problem with it because I was having difficulty making things move in space when there was a sharp edge. On something, and I had to create for myself a way of thinking so that I wasn't just painting what I was seeing. I had to explain to myself what the edge of the easel was, and I developed the idea as I was doing floral painting. And I came up with the idea that even though, in the dictionary, an edge is where something disappears from your eye, and I've changed that definition for myself, and I made an an edge where two planes meet. So where two planes meet, there's an edge. So I looked at the front of the easel, and there was the top of the the the ledge where you put the painting, and then there was the front, and between the two there was planes meeting, and there was a little highlight where those planes were meeting. And that was then we went back to the, you know, across the the the ledge of the the easel, and we went behind the painting to where the ledge met the the upright of the easel. And I said, this is also an this is an interior edge. This is where two planes are meeting inside of a box. The other was two planes meeting on the outside of a box. One had a highlight, the other has kind of a dark accent to it. And where planes meet, wonderful things happen. But then what do you do when planes aren't meeting? What do you do when you're painting a flower and it's floating in space? And yes, the the flower stops, the color stops, the light stops, everything stops, and then there's space behind it. And I started referring to that as a turning plane, where you're where you're not just meeting another plane, but you're actually turning into space. And so as I was doing that, I could develop more of a spatial concept in my mind by doing that. So as I was mixing my colors, I was thinking that it's not just this color against that color, it's this color against the space behind it. And I started painting with more distance, and I realized that the only edge in this entire floral was where the vase was meeting the table. That was the only edge in the everything else was floating in space. You know, even the the stems and the leaves and everything, every, every part of the painting was moving in space. And if, when I thought to them as as moving from form to a turning plane, it, it just created a mental space for me to then not paint an edge. And if I I painted the two tones next to each other. You know, you start nailing that, that flower to the wall. You know, you you start once you create an edge. Now you have two planes meeting now. Now the the flower is meeting the plane behind it, and it was so helpful. And it's very hard to I can explain it to you, because you're, you're a great painter, you know what you're doing, you know? But that concept, it's just such a beautiful thing. And so I don't want to go on and on and on. We've probably been doing this for two hours already, but, but that's generally my approach to painting is, is light and space and air and and making things as absolutely beautiful and glorious and luminous as they can possibly be. And and, you know, when I see my paintings in shows with other paintings, I do a lot of jury shows, and I look and it, it's just, I feel like a freak of nature, you know, because it looks so different than the way everybody else is painting, not that there aren't other beautiful paintings in the show, and you know, other things are winning awards and doing, but it just looks so so so different. And one of my dreams is to go to a museum where they don't hang things chronologically, and you could see a Van Dyke next to a Whistler and a, you know, a Whistler next to a Fragonard, and Fragonard next to George Innis. And, no, it doesn't matter what it is. It could be anything. They just sort of hang them all up. And then you have, you know, next to George Innis, you have a frank. Mason, and you have somebody contemporary and, and you, you know, you boy, you could start to see, is the whole world moving. And I think it would be great just a huge fun event to see a museum show like that. And I don't think I ever will. Historians don't think that way, but I think it would be great fun.
Laura Arango Baier: 1:30:28
Yeah, yeah. It would be worth maybe convincing a museum to try that out one day, just just to see but, yeah, I think what I really love about how you described your process is one, one of the first things is obviously a continuation of a legacy that we are continuing as classical painters. That's the one part that I really love. The other part is how you described, almost like, you know, the microcosm of the macrocosm, sort of thing where we are repeating that creative process in the same way that it has happened in the past, right? We are just that echo
Thomas Torak: 1:31:11
creating thing has happened all the way back to the creation of the earth the universe. It's this
Laura Arango Baier: 1:31:17
echo that repeats itself and repeats itself.
Thomas Torak: 1:31:23
Different. It's always different. It's like sun rising, you know, you know? And I go out every night with a dog, and I watch the Moon and, and I've never seen the same moon twice, yeah, you know, it's the same thing. The moon rises, the moon goes down and, and sometimes it's cloudy and sometimes it's not, in some but it's different every night. Every night, it's different even though it's the same thing. And I like that idea that that we just keep, we're repeating these, these same incredible things, because they're just so extraordinary. And then, you know, each person will see it in their own way. I mean, my wife is a fabulous painter, and we look at each other's paintings, and we when we were younger, I would try and paint more like her, and she would try and paint more like me. And the more we did that, the more we separate it, and the more different we painted and and my paintings are now totally different from hers and and yet, you know, we can both see the greatness of the other. Yeah, and just great. There is no single way to paint, which is partly why I don't like a step by step process for myself, because it's if there's a step by step process, then at some point you get it right or you get it wrong. Yeah, and, you know, I don't like right and wrong in painting. I like either you've said what you wanted to say, and you've expressed it so beautifully that people were moved to tears, or you didn't, and then you have a successful painting, or you don't, and, but it, it's just such a beautiful world, you know, and feel so privileged to have been able to do this for 50 years. You know, I went to the Art Students League in 1973 and I've had a brush in my hand for 50 years, and you know, nothing can replace that. Nothing, no, no fame, no wealth, no there's nothing that's that's more important than just being able to get up in the morning and take a dog through the woods for a walk and come back and sit at your easel with a beautiful light falling on something, and pick up your brush and and just and watch the painting evolve as you mix your colors and apply them to the canvas. And this, this world opens up. And where you started with this blank space, you've you've brought this whole world into it. It's just so fabulous, very privileged. It's a privileged life
Laura Arango Baier: 1:34:08
so fascinating too, because it is, in my opinion, a very simple life in a really beautiful, in a in a poetic way, almost like a haiku. No word is so precise and so exact, and it's beautiful as it is, and it's very much living in the moment, because you know, like you're saying, Every moment is new, every day is new, every sunrise is different. And I feel like painting is how you're describing it is that. It is the eternal present, right, where we're just experiencing every everything as it is in its moment, and that moment just continues like there is no future, there's no past, there's just now, yeah, and yeah, yeah, that's. Very powerful, good stuff, yes, good stuff, very existential stuff, which actually it makes me wonder too, because you have had so much experience, like I said earlier, and you've had so many students study under you. And it makes me wonder, because earlier, you were telling me, before we were recording how your students each paint very differently, which I love. So it makes me wonder, how, what do you recommend? What advice would you give to an artist who wants to develop their personal voice?
Thomas Torak: 1:35:39
Oh, I'm really, really bad at giving artists advice, because I only know my own experience and my experience, you know, may not work for the next person, but I would, you know, the one thing that I I would probably say, look to the old masters. I said, these there. You've had all of these incredible geniuses before you, you know, and, and they spent their lifetimes, you know, developing their ideas. And, you know, just look at, you know, the the early Renaissance, where they where there was so limited linear perspective, and then then it develops. And then later aerial perspective develops. And then new colors come in in the 19th century. And is always these great things and and each artist has to take, you know, all this new knowledge, and apply it to their work. And then they develop, they learn something else and and, you know, I think a lot of people will find it boring, you know, they don't really like del Sarto, but I said, copy is drawings. Copy is drawings. I said, don't, you know even more than the paintings. His paintings can often be paintings have a rough life, and sometimes conservatives don't treat them kindly and and it's not always what the artists intended. So what you're seeing is, you know the the birth, because you fit see and see the birth of Venus, and it looks exactly like the postcard, which I did with some I was there with some students, and we were and I was looking at it. I was explaining, you know, that's not what it's supposed to look like. And then in the center of the same room, there were two small paintings on copper by Botticelli that were untouched, and they had beautiful color and space, and they were incredible. And I said, that's what the big painting is supposed to look like. So, so instead of copying paintings, go to drawings, because conservators don't do anything to drawings and and they, they are always, you know, especially the old masters, they were never meant to be seen. You know, they didn't do drawings as as product for sale. They just did them to develop their ideas. So when you're copying a drawing, you're really getting into the head of the artist, and you're really have a chance to see how they think and how they move and and how they're they're hand move. You can copy every stroke of a drawing and really see how they're thinking. You know when, when you see these finished Titians that are so crisp and so beautiful and so finished. Then you look at the drawing for it, and you see the pen just moving back along the the arm in in little spirals as it's going around the form in the shadow. It's like, oh, that's what he's thinking and and I, you know, I, I'm not the biggest fan of of pontormos paintings, but his drawings, oh, my God, you know, they're so fabulous. And we've got to wrap this up. But let me give you one, one little story from Robert Beverly Hill. Go back to my student days and, and he was what he would do, would he would give a lecture, and it would go for maybe 45 minutes or so, and then he'd take a little break and have a little water and and then he come back and he teach again for another 45 minutes or so. And and then after that, he would go back into the back of the room, and the model would stay in the front. He said, those of you that want to draw, you can keep drawing, and those of you who want to watch come to the back of the room, and we were all drawing on big newsprint pads at that time. You know, big 18 by 24 newsprint pads, and you prop it up against the chair, and you're drawing with vine char. Call and and he didn't care whose drawing it was. He just said, Somebody put something up here for me. And so somebody did, and it was a full length standing figure. And Hal looked at it. He said, I noticed you put a bump on the flank of the of your figure. Why did you do that? And the student said, Well, I saw a bump there, so I drew it. And Hale said, Well, you drew a very good bump, and it looks like a bump. He said, As you develop as an artist, you'll realize that bump is actually the external oblique, and it runs from the from the rib cage down to the pelvis, and it has a form and a function. And he said, When you know that, you'll be able to to draw the external oblique with all of its character. And he said, The reason for doing that is not to show off how much in anatomy you know, or how smart you are or how much you've learned. The reason you do that is because it makes your figure look more human. And I thought, what a beautiful thought. What a beautiful thought. So, you know, the reason we're doing all of these things is to make, you know, our people look more human. You know, to make our, our, our still lifes look, you know, more delicious. Look. Make the grapes look like something that just came off the vine. You know, to do these things that bring out, you know, the character of each thing that we're painting. But I've always loved that idea. You know, the reason you do it is to make your figure look more human still. You know, that was 50 years ago. Still makes my heart be faster, yeah, you know, to make your look more human. How beautiful is that? And he just said it very quietly, and I don't know if anybody else remembers it, if anybody else heard it, you know, it may have been said just for me. You know, somebody may have been, you know, my guardian angel might have been behind, tapping me on the shoulder. He said, Listen to this. What? But I remember that, you know, 50 years and, boy, those things are powerful. And he would do that over and over again. I could give you another 20 examples, but he but he was just a beautiful man. It's a beautiful way of thinking. And he wasn't an artist, he was a historian, and he taught anatomy, but he was the curator at the Metropolitan Museum, and he's the one who brought in the modern paintings. He's the one who brought in the Jackson Pollocks and the and those things and and then he would come to the league and teach classical drawing. And for him, it was all, you know, part of the same as you were talking about this, this the same motion of time and all these different things happening together. It's just beautiful. So I was very lucky to have such people in my life,
Laura Arango Baier: 1:43:19
yes, yeah. And that his book, truly, I completely agree with you. It is a masterpiece of a book for anyone. Yeah, it's
Thomas Torak: 1:43:28
my Bible. Yeah? I mean, I must have bought 20 copies because I I wear them out and I spill wine on them, and I give them to suit, I give them to people and but I love I've copied every drawing in that book more than once, and I did it with the intent of trying to learn the lesson that he was talking about and but I can still hear His voice. You can, you can find him on YouTube. Somebody taped him. You know, they're black and old, old, black and white things that were made on tape. This was long before digital stuff and and you could still find some of his lectures online. And, yeah, it's and he would always end every every lecture. He would always end with a poem. So, so he'd be going along and going along and and talking about the structure of the the knee, and and then he would morph into how that would work in a painting. And, and then he would morph into a Kipling poem. You know when art's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried? Oh, it was fabulous. And then when he was finished with the poem, he knew the lecture was over. Every time every every lecture ended with a reciting poetry. Yeah, yeah.
Laura Arango Baier: 1:44:57
I'm speechless, yeah.
Thomas Torak: 1:44:59
We need more people. That we
Laura Arango Baier: 1:45:00
do, we do. I completely agree. I think right now, yeah, I thankfully we're having that revival more and more of the classical training. I mean, I'm an example of it, since I was also, you know, at these academies. But yeah, I think finding more people like you and like your teachers who are so passionate about this, and just talking to them like I'm talking to you, and how our listeners are listening. I think that really makes it so much more inspiring, and makes it so much more like we're not alone in our endeavor to create beautiful images that speak to people, right? Because I feel like that's most of our goal is to create images that speak to people. Yeah,
Thomas Torak: 1:45:51
you don't paint for yourself, no, you know, you you paint to communicate to whoever is is open, whoever is open to it, yeah, and you never, you never know where you're going to find that person. I mean, here, here. You are, you, you've just come along, you know, and the two of us are, are already best friends after just a couple of hours being together and and, you know, it's, it's because we share this, this commonality, this passion. And, you know, if, if I can get somebody else to feel that for 10 minutes, that's great. That's great. I, you know, I don't have to change their entire life. You know, maybe 400 years from now, somebody will see my, my still life and and have their life changed. But whether that happens or not, if you can, you know, bring some joy to somebody's life for 10 minutes. It's worth all 50 years.
Laura Arango Baier: 1:46:55
Yes, that human connection, yeah, yeah, that's at the foundation of it, yeah, yeah, yeah, beautiful and,
Thomas Torak: 1:47:05
oh, I think we've done it. I think we've said it.
Laura Arango Baier: 1:47:09
Oh, man. Well, thank you, Thomas, where can people see more of your work?
Thomas Torak: 1:47:16
Well, my website, fine art studios online. Thomastor art.com and from there, I started a blog, many, many, many years ago, when, when blogs were the thing nowadays, I would probably do a podcast, but I, you know, I just beyond that. But I, I did a blog for a while, and then, you know, there were 30 posts the first year, and then 20, and then 10, and then one, every now and then. But lately, I've started picking it up again and just, you know, just little thoughts about painting. Sometimes they're technical, sometimes they're about the subject and but it's kind of fun, and I call it Damico Lord, and that's, it's Italian for, you know, give me my palette. Give me my colors. Since you're an opera fan, I can explain to you that's from Tosca. In the beginning of Tosca, when Mario COVID, also, you know, says to the sacristan Tommy, give me my color so I can paint the Mary Magdalene. And so I love that. So that was the title of my my blog. Other than that, you've just got to go around and check things out. I often have things if you're in New York. I often have things at the Selma Gundy club. I've been a member of the Gundy club for a very, very long time, and and I like sending them paintings from time to time. And my gallery is main galleries here in Vermont, in Manchester, Vermont, but they're hard to find. You know, the best best place is my website. Best place is the website
Laura Arango Baier: 1:49:02
Awesome? Well, thank you so much, Thomas for painting with your words today instead of on your easel like you normally do. I really appreciate it.
Thomas Torak: 1:49:12
Some, some, sometimes you need language instead of paint. But yes, it's, you know, this was great. You're wonderful. And you know you, you just let me go wherever I want to go, which is rare.
Laura Arango Baier: 1:49:25
Oh, yes, I love it from walking through a forest.
Thomas Torak: 1:49:29
There you go. There you go. Yeah, beautiful. Great. Thank you, Laura,
Laura Arango Baier: 1:49:35
thank you. Bye.
