AllOtsego.com: A Love Story: Of Art, And Of Each Other

A Love Story: Of Art, And Of Each Other

12/4/09

A Love Story: Of Art And Of Each Other

By JIM KEVLIN

‘Alan, I hate Playboy magazine,” artist Jack Beal told his agent while visiting Chicago in 1972.
He’d just been told that Art Paul, Playboy’s art director, had invited him to a party.
“Go to the party,” his agent said. “Have a drink, thank the guy and leave.”
So he went to the party, had a drink, thanked the guy and was about to leave when Art Paul asked him, “Can I pose Bunnies in front of one of your nudes?”
All Jack’s nudes were of his wife, artist Sondra Freckelton, and he flatly refused.
“I have not made a nude painting from then to this day,” Beal harrumphed the other day during an interview in the couple’s cozy, secluded home on

Franklin Mountain.
Jack and Sondra were talking in anticipation of a show opening 4-8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 12, at the B. Sharp Gallery, Route 28, also on Franklin Mountain.
But what they were actually relating was a love story between two creative people who have been married for some 55 years now.
“She touched me on the shoulder and it was as if she touched a button,” Beal said, recalling the moment – both were students at

the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1950s – when he knew.
Their original meeting was happenstance. He’d been raised around Norfolk, Va.; she in Dearborn, Mich.
He was five years older than she and had rediscovered his vocation on attending an art class because a couple of buddies had. Sondra had been sculpting since she was a little girl, claiming the family’s root cellar as her studio.
Her parents brought her to Chicago. A year ahead, he was superintendent of a building near the institute, and the family knocked on his door, waking him up, looking for a room for the daughter.
“He was this tall, blonde kid, sleepy and barefoot,” Sondra recalled. “I just thought he was cute.”
No vacancies, he told them. But, by coincidence, he soon moved into the same apartment building she had discovered.
They were married within a year, honeymooned in New York City, and Jack wanted to move there immediately. Sondra, stimulated by her first year of art studies, talked him back to Chicago.
But a year later they were ensconced in a loft on the Lower East Side. (“Our first job was at Macy’s, at $1 an hour,” Sandra said.)
Today, artists and Soho lofts – the term, “South of Houston” street, was coined in their living room – are synonymous. Then, city zoning officials considered loft living dangerous, and routed out the artists whenever they were found.

Young, single, with nothing to lose, the Beals agreed to be the Artist Tenants Association’s test case to overturn the zoning restrictions, a case that was eventually successful.
At one point, a visiting zoning inspector asked Jack, “How many artists are living in this district? Two or three?”
Jack replied, “I can take you to one building that has 30. There were about 1,200 artists in Soho at the time.” (If you’re down there and see an “A-I-R” sign outside an industrial building, it means “Artist In Residence,” alerting firefighters 60 years ago that people were living there.)

Abstract Expressionism held sway in the art community at the time, but Jack, and later Sondra, were dissatisfied with the limits of abstract art.
The prestigious Martha Jackson Gallery asked him to show, but “he refused because he wasn’t comfortable with what he was doing,” said Sondra.
“They said we were crazy,” Jack recalled. “They said we were nuts.” But, “I just didn’t believe in the work that strongly.”
About that time, the Beals – Sondra resumed her maiden name when she switched from sculpture to watercolors – discovered Black Lake on St. Lawrence County’s Oswegatchie River, up near the Canadian border.
They rented a summer cottage, and immersed themselves in abundant nature.
As his abstract days were winding down, Jack had sketched a whole notebook of ideas to pursue. Now, he rediscovered, “real life has much more interest than stuff I can make up out of my head.”
About the same time, Sondra embraced watercolors: “I discovered I could create a whole illusion of a world on a piece of paper.”
Previously, most watercolors were “a second sister,” often sketches for oils, but she pioneered its emergence as a vibrant modern genre of its own.
Sondra was advised by an artist friend, “If you can’t make it good, make it big and make it red,” she said. “I decided I would make it good as well.”
Her discoveries were later documented in “Dynamic Still Lives in Watercolor,” by M. Stephen Doherty, which spread her influence nationwide.
These years – the ‘60s, ferrying between mysterious Black Lake and the vibrant New York art scene – were exciting ones for the young couple.
“I’ve chosen never to make paintings about ugliness,” said Jack, crediting an unhappy childhood. “I’ve chosen only to make paintings about beauty.”
Thus, his favorite painting, “The Second Danae,” based on the myth of Perseus, thus depicts Sondra twice, as both the nude declining on the sofa and her maid.
Once, energized Jack painted 44 paintings in 44 days, just to prove he could. (Later, he tightened his style – one painting could take nine months – but has a looser style again, an unexpected benefit of keeping his hand from shaking.)
Jack acknowledges being influenced by Matisse, Bonnard and Gorky; Sondra, by Degas, Gorky and Brancusi.
They frequented the Remington Memorial in Ogdensburg, not because they particularly liked the paintings, but to drink in the atmosphere.
“We’d make a block of money” – she in marketing, he in plumbing and electrical work – “and take that money and buy a block of time,” said Sondra.
“We were doing the most wonderful thing we could do. It was such a luxury to be able to follow our dreams.”
The move to Delaware County – they live in the Town of Franklin, but close enough to town to be in the Oneonta zip code – was simply a recognition that the 8-hour commute from urban to country life was just too long.
They discovered an old building along Ouleout Creek with an iron bridge and stone dam – both, regrettably, washed out in the 2006 floods. Sondra designed the expansion into a warm, welcoming home and studio. By the early ’70s, the move was complete.
At the time, the couple went back and forth to New York frequently. For the past 15 years, rarely.
At the time, Jack also did “a stupid thing” – he won a commission to do a mural, “The History of American Labor,” at the then-new Department of Labor building in Washington, D.C.
“It was a career breaker,” he said. “Three years when I couldn’t show. But I wouldn’t have passed it up for anything.”
With four artists helping him out in the studio along the Ouleout, he and Sondra figured out the $150,000 commission earned them about 58 cents an hour.
“I chose for my models people” – local people like Franklin dairyman Don Schriver and the late Harry Graves, the building contractor – “who were hard workers,” said Beal. “I was trying to show them as the epitome of musculature.”
And there were the bureaucratic battles. The process started during the Johnson Administration and didn’t end until Carter’s.
When the mural was done, the building superintendent in D.C. refused to let anyone drill into the pristine Tennessee marble walls.
Jack asked his contact, “What’s the life of this building?”
Thirty years, was the reply.
“Kirby,” said Beal, “I’m not going to glue my paintings on the walls of your temporary structure.”
He called the office of Vice President Walter Mondale’s wife, and told the secretary to tell Joan Mondale the ribbon-cutting had been cancelled the following night.
Why? she asked. Jack told her.
A few minutes later, the building superintendent was called to the phone, emerging red-faced: The murals would hang and the ribbon-cutting was back on.
Another notable commission was mosaics for the Times Square subway station, dedicated on Sept. 14, 2001, three days after 911.
Today, Jack and Sondra continue to create.
“You have to respect one another as well as love one another,” is how she explained the longevity.
“We’re each other’s best critics,” said her husband. “And our severest critics.”
They’ve chosen a range of works – and range of prices – for the B. Sharp show. What can exhibit-goers expect?
“Light,” said Sondra.
“Beauty and love,” said Jack.

Labels: 12-11-09, Frontpage

posted by The Freeman's Journal @ 12:00 AM

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