A Walpole Artist at Work

From The Walpole Gazette, A Weekly Social, Historical and Literary Review
for New England Readers

Volume 7, No. 21, February 19, 1993.

By Faith Cathin

Edward Gordon of Walpole has built a tree house for himself near Carpenter Hill, down by Scoville Road. From his perch there he can see Mount Monadnock and the Sunapee range - a whole horizon, in fact, of New England hills and mountains, with a foreground of infinite rural detail and change. His furniture in the tree house consists of a single notched board, on which he records the direction of the rising of each full moon.

His time high in the tree may be pleasant, but it is not idle. He uses this special vantage point to sharpen the artistic vision which he carries his Drewville studio, to be applied to a work in process - and, perhaps, all his future work. The endless study of the New England scene is a natural subject for a local artist; and in a unique way, it is the continuing theme of Edward Gordon's exquisite paintings.

The interiors of old buildings are the focus of many of Gordon's studies; hills and fields and forest may seem, at first glance, as secondary background concerns. But as one looks at a Gordon painting there comes a feeling that light is the real subject, the light of a certain season at a certain time of day, as it exists in one particular old house in New England.

There are no people in a typical Gordon painting - but here again, with continued viewing, human presence becomes dominant in the scene. The room or rooms may be empty and immaculate, but they carry the spirit of the people who live there. And the rooms are waiting for someone to return - waiting in a special moment in time, with a beam of setting sun perhaps, just at a certain place on a finely-finished doorframe.

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In producing such intimate and tranquil renderings of household interiors, Gordon carries on a tradition of Dutch genre works for which painters such as Vermeer were famous in the 1600's. The thrill of beautiful architecture is fundamental to such works; windows throw a brilliant light on dwelling spaces, and tools and furniture of everyday life, as they are recorded for one special instant of intimacy and serenity. Architecture becomes enhanced by the dignity of the human lives that it serves.

These are my feelings about Edward Gordon's paintings; this kind of analysis doesn't come from him. He lets his work speak for itself. What he will talk about is the practical side of being an artist. A self-taught man who relies on selling paintings for a livelihood, he is concerned with techniques and the best use of time. His best works take up to four or five months to execute, and Edward has to be conscious of other artists, competing in the art market, who can turn out sixty paintings a year; one popular artist is said to produce as many as two hundred works a year.

Edward Gordon has to resist trying to compete with such numerical output. He can speed up in one way, by doing smaller works, and he has in fact said that he can say everything in a small work that he might say in a larger one. And sometimes, he claims, a smaller work simply "feels better." Still a small work takes several weeks - less than several months, but still making for a low yearly output.

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His alkyd paintings involve painstaking workmanship in addition to artist's skills. He works on masonite, applying four or five coats of "gesso" to both sides, and sanding each coat to a smooth finish. A base coat of gray is then applied, giving a sort of jump-start to all color values. The art work follows, being established, or anchored down finally with protective coats of varnish.

But there is an important step in between that accounts for some of the special quality of a Gordon painting. He aims for a luminous, magic kind of light streaming upon his subjects. So after laying in the composition, he pours a coating of "liquin" over the entire work, letting it spill over around the edges. It adds a bright, reflective layer to the work, which is at this point more than half-finished. Still to come are three or four more sessions of retouching and highlighting, before the final varnish is applied.