Recent News

Courtesy of ABQJournal and Kate McGraw.

Friday, June 15, 2007

Dick H. Stroud Will Bring His Watercolors of Women to Santa Fe

By Kate McGraw

For the Journal

When longtime friend Eli Levin asked Boston-area artist Dick H. Stroud to share the last

week of Levin's current show at Argos Etchings and Paintings, he also asked for a specific

subject.

"Eli knows I do watercolors kind of in-between my larger paintings, and he asked especially

for figurative work with women, so that's what I'm bringing to Santa Fe this trip," Stroud said.

"These are watercolors that have come up in between other work. I have a skylight in my

studio and in late afternoon, the light coming through the skylight is perfect. I sit at my

drawing table and I do watercolors."

Stroud shares a background training not only with Levin, whom he has known since they

met in classes at New York City's High School of Music and Art, but also with Paul Shapiro

and David Barbero. The four attended the Boston Museum School concurrently and studied

in the atelier of Jan Cox, who tutored them in the patterns and aesthetics of Matissean

modernism and the School of Paris. In fact, Stroud was Cox's star pupil in the fourth year,

winning first prize in painting.

Barbero and Shapiro brought the aesthetic to Santa Fe by the early '80s and had evolved

it into a recognizable regional landscape style. Levin, of course, also paints as Jo Basiste,

and has kept an art salon going in Santa Fe for decades. Of the four, Stroud stayed in the

Boston area, where he paints, exhibits and also teaches at schools as varied as the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Charles River Creative Arts Program, Concord

Academy and Massachusetts Bay Community College. He is no stranger to Santa Fe,

though, having visited several times. There are few things more valuable than the decades-

long friendship he and Levin have shared, he said.

A few bears, too

Stroud acquiesced to Levin's request, and is showing a variety of Matissean-style femmes

that show the aesthetic lineage of a Jan Cox student, even decades later. He's sneaking a

few small examples of his signature color-washed paintings of bears into the exhibit, too, he

said. "Goya said he had three masters— nature, Rembrandt and Velasquez," Stroud said.

"Bears are nature to me. The bear is a particular creature, something strong and protective."

Told that Native Americans have similar feelings and stories about bears, Stroud laughed

gently. "On both my paternal grandparents' lineage, there are Native Americans. Maybe it's

coming out in my love of bears," he said.

A general influence on his work has been a longtime passion for the Japanese self-

defense art of aikido. Stroud is a sixth-degree black belt in the art, and second-level teacher,

or sensei, for the MIT Aikido Club, which he started in 1998. He said his interest in the art

began with studies in Eastern philosophy at the New School for Social Research in his native

New York. "It is a great way to counteract sedentary habits, and to allow personal expression

to flow through my body," he said.

"Aikido requires that you be present and real. Like art, it is a situation where something

done cannot be undone. In my work, the subject matter is figurative— but it has to have

reality to ring true. Aikido says that what is there is life, right there. In painting, that's what I

strive for— that sense that there is life and truth on the page, beyond just the paint itself.

"I paint for an hour or two; I go do aikido for an hour, and come back and paint for the rest

of the day," he said. "It's like breathing in and out to me; I really don't think about it any more.

It's all a part of the whole."

A special trip

This trip to Santa Fe will be of special significance to Stroud, beyond the chance to show

his recent work and visit with old friends. On Saturday, Stroud and his fiancée, Martha LaBell

(of Boston's Peabody Museum) will marry in the city, with his 22-year-old son attending as

best man.

"It's great to be able to share that with him. It's great to be able to share that with friends,"

Stroud said.

The Argos show will run for a week. Stroud has shown at galleries in and around Boston,

plus the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American

Artists, Boston; Brandeis University Art Gallery, Boston; Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Studio

Museum in New York and MIT. He is the recipient of awards and scholarships from the

Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design, New York.

If you go

WHAT: Dick H. Stroud, Figurative Watercolors

WHEN: Today-June 21; reception 5-8 p.m. today.

WHERE: Argos Etchings and Paintings, 821 Canyon

MORE INFORMATION: 986-8071