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WATERY MUSE
JANUARY 14, 1998The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript |
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Essayist Jim Fisher of the Kansas City Star examines the work of artist Gary Lucy.
JIM FISHER: The pictures of that art auction at Christie's in New York recently were familiar. Bidders, lookers-on, and of course the glitteratti. The draw was the work of some of the most famous names in modern art: Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg. Sales topped 206 million bucks. That's fine, if you've got it, love modern art, or are more interested in the name than what's on the canvas, or can talk a museum or corporation board into ponying up the cash. But here in the Midwest, where old Tom Benton railed that his art would look better in saloons and bordellos than any old museum, $206 million is very serious money. But then Christie's isn't the old courthouse here in St. Louis, and the artists weren't Gary Lucy.
If Lucy's name is unfamiliar, think 19th century historical realism. Steamboats and sidewheelers, the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and the Western fur trade. A subset of Western art collectors consider Lucy the best thing since sliced bread and are willing to pop $49,000 a painting, not exactly the millions at Christie's, but then not exactly chump change. Lucy has a two-year backlog of commissions. His early works have quadrupled in price. What Lucy paints are marvels of light and color: the eternal dusk and dawn on the big rivers; placid waters beneath the rising moon; boats with names like "Desmet," "Omaha," and "Far West." Flat boatmen in trailers, all part of a brief golden age when men who were masters of the river were masters of a new world. And there's more: the Civil War, St. Louis's revolutionary Eads Bridge; the white cliffs along the Missouri and Montana; Manuel Lisa on the Upper Missouri; Lewis and Clark's corps of discovery, cordelling their boat against the Missouri's current; realism; links to Bingham, Benton, Bierstadt, Miller, and Russell. Rather than the slashing brush strokes, the splatters of pain, the monochromatic canvases, Lucy seeks the exquisite detail, the period clothing, the exact dimensions of a certain boat, even the correct style of beard.
The art is created 50 miles up river in a studio converted from an old bank building overlooking the Missouri. The structure is also his research center, sales gallery, a frame shop, and home for his Web site. Lucy knows marketing. He's 47. His father was a truck driver. He wasn't a child prodigy.
GARY LUCY, Artist: You know, whenever you're a kiddo, you don't want to let the other kids know that you're interested in art ‘cause you could kind of get hurt a little bit being interested in art when everybody else is interested in football.
JIM FISHER: Lucy struck out on his own, living hand to mouth for a time, eventually doing duck stamps, then wildlife studies, always making a living. But in the early 80's, it seemed, every artist was into wildlife. Lucy switched to what he really loved all along: the human figure, history, and water. Since then, the rivers have been a muse to Lucy, albeit one forever changed by man and his works, yet, ones where the subtleties of life are surely kindred now to when the sidewheelers riled the waters, where the color still materializes magically, with the morning light, and the water still flows to the sea, which for Lucy seems to be enough to imagine what once was, to put oil to canvas, and to create.
I'm Jim Fisher.
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