Minor Artist

Minor Artist

2:30 am Thursday night (Friday morning) while driving home, I was woken by a report on the BBC.  A painting by the seventeenth century Spanish artist, Diego Velasquez was discovered by the British auction house Bonhams.  The work had previously being attributed to the “insignificant” nineteenth Century British artist Matthew Shepperson.  I can’t be certain that the descriptive “insignificant” is correct, however I’m determined to put it in quotes, because I am certain that the adjective used by the BBC reporter carried the same weight and condemnation as whatever cocky slur he may have actually used.  I was tired, but of sound enough mind to tell you that what I had heard, and what I’m reporting back to you, is accurate enough in spirit to be taken as true.  I hadn’t been drinking but rather mixing drinks and pulling beers, at what might be remembered in history as a minor cocktail bar in Inman Square; a lesser neighborhood just outside the somewhat significant city of Boston, a secondary metropolis to it’s much more important neighbor; New York.

The next morning over coffee, with my two and a half-year-old son watching Super Grover 2.0 move an ominous iceberg for some dancing penguins from Brooklyn in the next room, I navigated the Internet via the information shredder Google.  First in an attempt to find a transcript of the BBC report I had heard earlier that morning, next to find out the dirt on the “new” Velasquez painting, and lastly to find out who the hell Matthew Shepperson was.  Velasquez had been one of my early heroes of painting, particularly his non-court paintings.  His Aesop and Menippus were benchmarks to strive for in my own early work, and they inspired my first trip to Spain.  At the Prado Museum in Madrid I really caught on to what Velasquez was about.  There was possibly the largest room I had ever been in on the second floor, which cleverly housed a mass of his works in chronological order.  As a student at the time, I couldn’t have imagined anything better than to see his work this way.  Velasquez is one of the few, and maybe the only old master that I know of, who after achieving success and notoriety (not to mention a court appointment), continued to develop and evolve as a painter.  So many of the “greats” sat on their accolades and masturbated.  Diego Velasquez was no one trick pony.  Had the BBC reported that a work by virtually any other old master had been discovered, my curiosity would not have been so piqued. 

It was easy to uncover the story of the lost Velasquez.  Where there are millions of dollars and pounds at stake, there are storehouses of words, pictures and quotes from experts.  The short of it is that some descendant who was cleaning his basement cupboard, hoping to get a few hundred pounds for his ancestors minor attempts at painting, is in fact going to be a millionaire.  I won’t bore you with the “keen-eyed experts at Bonhams’” tweedie-bow-tie details.  You can Google “Matthew Shepperson/Velasquez painting” and read what the self-conscious, academic, “expert” historians have determined for yourself.  But please don’t miss the irony, and it’s not that this fucker is gonna to be rich; It’s that, had the exact canvas in question been attributed to Shepperson and not Velasquez, as it had originally been, it would have been considered relatively worthless. 

Do you understand what I’m telling you? 

The exact same physical object, paint, and subject, owns a completely different value, both monetarily and aesthetically, not based on it being any different at all, but only based on what someone or ones tells us to think of it.  I’m not claiming to be some kind of an authority on Diego Velasquez or anything, but to be honest with you, between you and me, I might think that a painter does inherently have access to some insight that isn’t available to some academic who has never picked up a brush.  Regardless, I have no clue weather or not it is in fact a “true” Velasquez, but quite frankly, who cares?  It’s still the same painting it was before it was a Velasquez.  Right?

But more interesting to me… Matthew Shepperson, the “minor artist” as the UK newspaper “The Guardian” referred to him, or a “Largely forgotten” artist as CNN has stamped him.  You’ll find little information on the 19^th Century painter; save a scarce few images and a couple of old auction sale records.  Clearly nothing important, Two-hundred-year-old dust collectors’ selling for a few hundred pounds a piece.  But let me tell you the real history of the “minor” artist.  I’ve got the story that hasn’t been published on his Wikipedia page yet (if it existed)… because I am Matthew Shepperson. 

At a young age, the artist knew he was driven to do something different than the other kids he had kicked the footie around with.  He knew he didn’t fit into the same crumpet mold that his schoolmates comfortably nestled their ass’s into.  At a mere fifteen years old he found himself unable to sleep.  He stayed up through the night long after all of his family had gone to sleep, pouring himself into reproductions of old master paintings that he had admired.  Trying to figure out how they did what they had done.  Closely scrutinizing their drawing technique, brushwork, and design.  He had read both of Harold Speed’s books on drawing and painting again and again, ear marking each page that might help him further his own work.  He knew that the emerging French artists were on to something with their Japanese sense of composition, but he was subconsciously reared in the conservative, proper, crown-style of the UK, and just couldn’t push himself far enough to take a risk.

He would hang a mirror on his bedroom wall and try to draw and paint his own image over and over again, never getting it just quite right.  He would marinate in the frustration of his lack of ability.  He’d occasionally see glimpses of success, and only these small hopes would push him to continue.  It’s like my friend Beau once told me about the game of golf.  The game fucking sucks and just when your ready to heave your bag of clubs into the drink, you hit a beautiful shot, and that one in a hundred shot keeps you playing. 

Eventually Matthew would complete the mandatory studies required by the state, and he quickly left home in search of a school or mentor that could train him in the ways of drawing and painting.  He was buckling under the weight of his ideas and ambitions, and he needed to find a source for the technique he was lacking to properly express himself.  At age seventeen or eighteen he settled into the Atelier of an accomplished painter of his day.  He thought the master’s aesthetic antiquated and conservative, but his technique he admired above all others.  He labored for five, maybe six years.  First copying the works of the great masters he admired, then making to-scale drawings from antique sculptures, picking over them, each day being told by his chosen mentor that they weren’t quite right.  That this value was too dark, this proportion too wide, and so on and so forth.  But eventually his determination paid off and he got it right, and he could now count drawing as one of the weapons in his little arsenal.

It would be the same with his painting and design studies, failing and failing until finally at the age of twenty-one he would get it.

Matthew spent the next years of his life trying to marry his newly acquired technique with the raw creativity and drive of his youth.  Wrapped in the reality of needing to provide for his food, clothes, and housing, he picked up odd jobs.  He painted the occasional dreaded portrait of some bourgeois’s snot nose kid.  He peddled what he could of the small, trite, easel paintings that he had made, which he sold before ever really being able to judge them properly for himself.  He cultivated contacts and attempted to build relationships with a handful of art dealers, who proved to be not much more than street pimps.  They robbed him of most of what he earned, and abused him if he didn’t turn the tricks that were expected of him.  He soon had to navigate the awful truth that he had not become the artist he had dreamed of becoming.  The struggles of daily life had never allowed him the luxury of figuring out what his art should be or could be.  He never moved to Paris, Rome, or New York.  He never forged friendships with the “in” crowd who were pioneering the new movements that would change the course of art history forever.  He sat alone in his little studio, lit by the ambient North light so prized by the painters of his day, consistent and almost ethereal from dawn until dusk; and admired the little portrait of the man with the strange facial hair that he had acquired from a friend who failed to pay him for an enormous work he had helped him with.  A work he hoped his significant contribution to might further his own career… and he, Matthew Shepperson, silently slipped into obscurity.

Men with passion, ambition, and even just an inkling of talent, especially young men, can be cocky mother-fuckers.  I know; I was.  In My twenties I would’ve been the first to refer to Matt as a minor artist at best.  To be honest, the little I’ve seen of his work superficially reveals an imitator’s aesthetic, little imagination, and average technique for the day.  I would have given Matt the casual sidelong glance and written him off as shit.  Back then, before carrying the heavy maturity that a totem pole of failures will bring, I would not have had the compassion, insight, nor experience to speculate on what his day-to-day could have been like.  I wouldn’t have had experience enough to show compassion or even a little pity, for the likely possibility that he may have spent his entire fucking life pursuing his dream, working his ass off, only do die a nobody.  Back then, I would not have been able to conclude that if the portrait in question in fact was not a Shepperson, and was indeed proven to be the work of Diego Velasquez; that circumstance alone tells us that Matt had something.  I’m pretty sure Shepperson had no Idea that what he had acquired was a Velasquez, however I’m certain that he had a sharp enough eye to decipher good from great. 

Diego Velasquez was very well known and admired in Eighteenth and Nineteenth century England.  Shortly after Shepperson died, the British artist R.A.M. Stevenson (brother to famous author Robert Louis) had written what would come to be considered in his time (and still today) the definitive book on Diego Velasquez; for no scholar whose never been in the trenches can truly compose a monograph on a painter the way a brother painter can.  You can be sure that if Shepperson had known what he had, so too would his descendents.  My guess is that he just had a heightened enough sense of aesthetics to know greatness when he saw it, even if he struggled to reproduce it in his own works…  And that totally sucks for him.  I think Matthew Shepperson fucking tried and tried but never could get it “just right” in his own work, but tragically, he knew what “just right” looked like.   It’s heartbreaking to recognize awesomeness, but not to be awesome yourself.  Matt… I feel you man. 

But like I was saying; It was easy back then as a young punk, soon to be “somebody” artist, to arrogantly judge what was good, and to bury with violent indignation what was bad, never considering the life or the person.  I’m not trying to come off like some god dammed hippie who thinks that anything someone creates is beautiful or some shit like that, it’s just that I know this fucker.  I know that he probably poured his heart and life into his work, and good or bad as it might be, it sucks for him that he ended up, in the eye of history, being a nobody.  And to add insult to injury, he’s even more insignificant because he’s only now being revived in relation to Velasquez, one of history’s handful elite.

It’s like the jackass who comes to the bar when you’re six deep on a Friday night and treats you like a servant, with no regard for the fact that you’re actually a living breathing human being.  Assuming that since you’re slinging drinks for a living, you’re not worthy of a please or thank you.  The fucker that you say hello to, or ask “how you doin’?” and they don’t even acknowledge your query, and proceed to bark the order of what they need.  And when you tell them you don’t have the “Stella” that they just ordered they groan and roll their eyes like you’re intentionally trying to fuck them and say “gimme a Heinekin then”; with no regard for the beer list that you offered them two times; that doesn’t list “Heinekin” as an option either.  They’ve got no care or clue about the hours and years you spent following your dream, and the struggle to hone your craft to an art; only to find yourself unable to do that which you thought you had been destined to do.  Arriving in a place where you’re required to be polite to someone who likely doesn’t have a sliver of the talent, drive, or intellect that you have.  On the other hand, I can’t blame the bastards for wanting a drink and thinking of me only as a vending machine; but fuck them anyway!

Being even less than minor myself, I now have sensitivity and compassion for all of those who tried, that I didn’t have when I thought I actually was or was going to be somebody. Those who spent their whole lives wrestling with their drive and vision, working jobs rather than perusing a family or career in order to realize their art; hoping that some day somebody else will get it.  I’m not talking about the money either; I’m talking about some kind of recognition of worth.  Maybe secretly some kind of nod to being special in a way that most are not.  We spend our youth in a drug like haze only to arrive at the sobriety of what you thought might happen to you because of all of your vision, hard work, and ambition didn’t.  Had Velasquez not been a Spanish court painter, but rather found himself having to decide at thirty-something years old if he wanted to live like a bum or pick up a shift here and there so that he could live a “normal” life with his wife and kids, his Aesop painting wouldn’t be less important; you just might not have known it existed.  I’ll go out on a limb and say if Aesop had been the only work Velasquez ever produced he would be no less important.

So, Matthew Shepperson, your work may or may not suck; who am I to fuckin’ judge?  Maybe you were nothing more than a minor artist, or maybe you could have been the genius of your time; but you just never made it to Paris.  I’ll never know, but bravo on the Velasquez.  I can only secretly for you, imagine that the experts at Bonhams auction house got it wrong, and that maybe it was you in fact who painted that little portrait of the man with the funny moustache.  Maybe it was your Aesop?