“In Quiet Hours”

Since childhood I have painted pictures. I distinctly remember, much to my late mother’s surprise an incident where I showed her a rendering of a rescue helicopter pulling survivors from a plane crash at sea I had created when I was not much older than three. She didn’t believe that I had done it, so she asked me to do another. She was amazed when I completed it and it seemed to make her happy. So, I kept on doing it. 

My elementary school art teacher, Francis Robinson, encouraged me to no end. I remember drawing a room with tables and chairs and how excited she got that I had a “perfect sense of perspective.” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but it seemed like a good thing. She awarded me with the Class Artist Award when I graduated elementary school. 

It was about the same time that I became enamored with landscape painting. My dad had a friend named, Steve. On his wall was a print of a painting entitled, “Autumn Bronze” by Robert Wood. I thought that piece of cardboard was the most amazing 24x48 inches I had ever seen. Every artist has that incident that kicks him or her in motion…that was mine. I think in retrospect I was searching for some sort of harmony that was lacking in my childhood. The quietude of trees and gentle streams, a combination of what is and what could be seemed to be the perfect panacea. 

I know of no better way to cleanse a soul than painting plein aire landscapes. Whereas people can deceive charm and flirt, nature, as my departed Dad used to say, “Is what it is.” It is my personal love, respect and awe of the sheer unyielding natural beauty of what lies around us that I am trying to bring forward in these works. It is impossible for me to stand before a mountain and not be completely aware of my mortality. It will be here long after I am gone, but at the moment in time that we meet I feel the need to not only recognize its beauty, but let others know that I tipped my hat to its glory. 

I was fortunate to have fate play a hand in my development as an artist at several key times. First off, and totally by chance, I discovered that an unimposing gray building next to my junior high school was the place where paintings by both old and modern masters were made into prints for the mass market. I can’t tell you the impact this had on me. A man named, Sal Gottarolla, and a woman named, Pauline, let me spend countless afternoons there inside the Donald Art Company, studying paintings. It is there, seeing the actual oil paintings up close where I developed a love for the texture of paint.  

After receiving the Class Artist Award, this time after graduating high school, I looked into the abyss of adulthood. The things that made me the most happy where now becoming my Albatross. Painting, movies and music were my loves and frankly my reasons for being alive. It was with a great deal of self-examination that I knew I would be very unhappy if I couldn’t somehow make this the stuff of my livelihood. I also had the internal nagging of about one million loose ends of information concerning painting in my head.  

I began taking trips into New York City from Westchester on a regular basis. I wandered into Grand Central Art Galleries and met a wonderful man named, John Evans. He was a salesman at the gallery and he introduced me to the work of the Pennsylvania impressionists. Edward Redfield’s large, dynamic snow scenes filled with huge smacks of paint were the most amazing canvases I had ever seen. John Evans gave me stacks of 4x5 transparencies of Redfield’s work which I studied endlessly.  

Around the same time I met landscape painter, George Cherepov. He and I became fast friends. I visited him at his house in Vermont, where, when he wasn’t tricking me into doing wallpapering or taking down hornet’s nests in his garage, we would visit places like Smuggler’s Notch and Mount Mansfield, armed with our sketch boxes. It is there that I think some of the loose ends started to come together. He would scold me that my clouds looked like “flying rocks,” that “everything reflected the sky” and that I just wasn’t “looking hard enough.”  

After moving to Los Angles to pursue my screenwriting and directing career, I shied away from painting for nearly eight years. I picked up the brushes again after the success of my screenplay, “Midnight Run.” I painted several canvases and called John Evans in New York, who was now the manager of Grand Central Art Galleries. He was pleased with my progress and gave me a one-man show. One of the paintings I entered into the “Arts for the Parks” contest received the Top 100 Award. I was thrilled to say the least, but I still felt as if I really didn’t know what I was doing.  

Fate played a hand again when actor, John Ashton, who played, “Dorfler” in “Midnight Run,” told me his neighbor was an artist. “So what?” I thought. “He’s supposed to be pretty good,” said John. “What’s his name?” I asked. John replied, “Richard Schmid.” After I collected my jaw from the pavement, I asked John if he could introduce me to his neighbor. He did and Richard and I became friends via telephone and letters. I sent Richard several transparencies of my work and he sent me back beautifully detailed critiques on how to improve color, value, edges and design. To me, this was like shaking hands with God and getting to ask him a question or two about the universe. It had a major impact on my work and got me thinking in entirely new directions. 

My time with Richard led me to understanding that simplicity is everything in design. His lessons on edges shook the foundations of everything I thought I knew and I can thank him for the crows feet that have formed around my eyes from teaching me to squint. 

A wonderful sense of mystery that had been missing from my work suddenly began to appear. I would step back and look at what I was doing and almost wonder, “Who just painted that?” With this new knowledge doors are opening in my thinking process and I feel liberated as the shackles of ignorance and just plain dumb ideas are left behind. 

It seems now, that when I first started out on this journey I had it all wrong. When I was responding to a clever flick of a brush, what I was responding to was not technique, but truth. When you really look at something and finally understand it’s nature and how it relates to everything around it, that is when you can throw that fleck of paint with assuredness.  

When you understand the very simple lesson I have just stated, then I believe you are not only on your way to painting masterpieces, you’re also on your way to a far deeper understanding of the universe. Not the universe of science, but the universe of the soul. It is in these quiet hours that you will get as close to God as you can here on earth and with a little luck and a lot of patience, come as close to happiness as you’re ever likely to know.  

- George Gallo