D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
January 2012
Arts Exposure
Passion for Portraiture
Brad Simms labors to put life onto the canvas.
by Marjorie Lilly
Deming artist Brad Simms says that portrait painting is looked down on by some people in the contemporary arts scene.
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Artist Brad Simms. (Photo by Marjorie Lilly) |
"That's the problem with realism," he says. "The art establishment sees it as illustration with delusions of grandeur."
Simms appears to be out to defy the art establishment. Black-and-white head sketches cover the walls of his art studio at home. He draws mostly young boys from his wife's elementary-school classes and a few adults. It's of supreme importance for him to keep practicing his drawing skills.
But he's a public school teacher himself, and gets almost no time to do finished works.
About the only full-blown portrait he's done in the last 10 years is the "New Me" painting on this issue's cover. He and his wife Gina figure it took him 400 to 450 hours to complete. (He paid the model the minimum wage to sit that long.) It's a lavishly and lovingly executed epitome of his painting skills.
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Detail from one of Simms’ nudes. |
School and family obligations jostle for attention in his life. Simms says, "I come home and get tired." He has one son with Gina at home, her grandchildren drop by often, and her parents live in the same house with them.
An August show at the Deming Arts Council was Simms' debut onto the local arts scene, after living here for 20 years in artistic anonymity. The DAC hosted an exhibit of public school teachers' own art works, which had an exceptional vigor and quality, and Simms' paintings stood out in that show.
Simms grew up in Manhattan and absorbed the art influences that were in the air. Several of his art teachers moonlighted at the Art Students League, where he studied later.
He and his elementary-school friends could ride the buses for free to the Metropolitan Museum of Art after school. "We loved to play in the Met," he recalls. They'd do their homework at the seldom-visited Egyptian Temple of Dendur, "a cool immense dark space." They sometimes brought their sketchbooks and drew.
After graduating from the University of Vermont, Simms went to the Art Students League back in New York. The League has produced a long list of famous artists such as Georgia O'Keefe and Jackson Pollock.
Between 1995 and 1997 he got a Master of Fine Arts at the Instituto Allende in Guanajuato, Mexico. He still owns a few works he did there, including two fully-executed female nude portraits that still hang in his house. "I love human anatomy," he says. "I love to paint nudes."
He still enthuses over classes taken over the past three years from prominent portrait artist Nelson Shanks in Pennsylvania. Shanks has painted subjects including Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul and Princess Diana.
Simms pulls down a couple of large books from his bookshelf to show works by his two favorite artists, Diego Velazquez and John Singer Sargent, whose style he echoes. He sighs over Sargent's portrait of four white-pinafored girls from the Boit family.
Simms first came to New Mexico in 1991 — not to paint, but to work with famous falconer Peter Jungemann in Las Cruces (see "Raptor Attention," April 2005). They trained and bred Cooper's hawks and Harris hawks.
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| “Daniel” |
"I wanted to have a relationship with a wild creature — he's with you because he wants to be," Simms says. "It's action unencumbered by thought. It teaches you to paint from your gut."
Simms talks over and over about getting some life into his paintings. As he interprets Shanks' teachings, it's essential to paint from live models. "If the model is moving, and the artist is moving, you get to see around the forms slightly," Simms says. "When the model moves around, you can see her profile. With a photo it's just one slice."
Another critical part of Shanks' teaching, he says, is to leave some rough brush strokes to give the painting more life. In contrast, in paintings by such French Academy artists Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jean-Léon Gerome or William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the "surface is like glass."
Simms says one of the most important lessons he learned from Shanks is to start with "gesture," to simplify the position of the body and limbs of the figure into a few rough lines. Some portrait artists draw the whole picture first and then add paint. Shanks insists on sketching the gesture only.
While working with the model for "New Me," Simms struggled to keep the "gesture" of his model consistent over the year or so that he worked on the painting.
"The feet were hell to manage — the feet depend on the knees, and the knees depend on the buttocks," he says. "It was hard to get her head in the right place. The left eye anchored the whole body somehow."
He adds, "She had so much patience. What I liked about her was that self-possession."
In "New Me," Simms makes visual quotes from "El Jaleo," a Sargent painting of a female flamenco dancer. The orange at the girl's feet copies an orange on a chair in "El Jaleo," and Simms imitated the "rhythmic nature of the folds in the skirt." His wife's mother shadowing the doorway echoes the Sargent painting of the four sisters.
He calls the painting "an homage to Sargent."
Despite his obvious talent, Simms has always struggled to fit art into his life. "I've done everything," he says. "I've driven taxi cabs, been a bicycle messenger, driven a limousine, and been a janitor in the Sculpture Center School in Manhattan."
He adds, "I tried to make a go at being an artist. You had your fingers in 10 different pots. You made $100 here, $75 there. I hated it."
Now with a wife and the rest of their family, being a public school teacher is a necessity. But he says, "If I could just do art, I'd be as happy as a pig in poop."
There are some nationally known portrait painters in New Mexico, in Santa Fe, including Tony Ryder and David Leffel. Simms doesn't think he's prepared to compete with those giants, but feels ready to take his portrait career more seriously now.
Brad Simms' passion for portraiture, you might say, burns slowly but very brightly.
Marjorie Lilly writes the Borderlines column.