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R. Jean Vallieres - Eye's Poetry
County Times Allegheny Times - Entertainment - 06/13/2005 - R. Jean Vallieres - Eye's poetry
R. Jean Vallieres - Eye's poetry Patti Conley, Times Staff 06/13/2005
NEW BRIGHTON - The artist is sweating, as is his art.
The humidity on this Wednesday afternoon must be at a summer's high upstairs in the Merrick Art Gallery, where artist R. Jean Vallieres is hanging his oil paintings.
"This was as tight as a drum," Vallieres says, touching what looks like wet paint on the lush landscape. The painting is buckling because of the humidity in the canvas.
The McCandless Township resident doesn't seem especially concerned. When it dries out, the painting will tighten like a tympani, he says.
The 30-some landscapes, botanicals, still lifes and portraits he calls American Realism should fare well in this exhibit at the New Brighton gallery.
At least 20 of the paintings have never been on exhibit. Nine canvases depict the direness and despondency of the Great Depression. Another four are paintings of western Pennsylvania the Merrick recently acquired for its permanent collection.
All, he says, give the viewer a quiet opportunity to reflect, recall and experience the realities life offers.
Vallieres selects words to explain what and how and why he paints as if he were carefully choosing a color from the many on his palette.
Painting is "the eye's poetry," he says. It is a portrait into life and a reflection of the painter.
Vallieres began to feed the passion at age 13 when he painted his first portrait in the cellar of his parents' home in a mill town in Woonsocket, R.I.
For years he tended to his painting when time allowed, honing his technique and studying the works of the Great Masters in London, Paris and various European and American museums.
Then in 2001, he began devoting six and a half days a week, from early morning to early evening, to his art. That year, he quit a real job to do what he loves most.
The 50-something man in the casual shorts and shirt was a senior executive for a huge French company that sold all the cockpit gear for American fighter jets and commercial airlines.
Hi-tech had consumed more than 30 years of his life. His artwork will gladly take the rest and will end, he says, "when they find my legs dangling under an easel."
Until last year, Vallieres' artwork was mostly seen through sales and commission.
This public exhibit is his third and first at the Merrick, a museum he calls "a sleeping jewel" founded in 1880 by Edward Dempster Merrick, a man whose benevolence lives now. Merrick believed that art is not for the elite, Vallieres says, but for common men, women and children.
Many undoubtedly will be drawn to the landscapes, such as "Morning Myst" and "Mid-Afternoon Walk," as well as orchids and roses painted with subtle petals that look incredibly real. "Old Homestead Rocker" is a still life sketched from memory of a Shaker rocking chair and a pot of red geraniums from this late grandmother's porch in Connecticut.
The landscapes and botanicals are his living, his portraits are his love and what he hopes will be his legacy.
Four years ago, Vallieres began a research project for the Library of Congress called Reflections on the Great Depression. Throughout the 1930s, photographers traveled across the United States, documenting the land and its people for the Farm Security Administration. Their efforts produced more than 100,000 negatives and prints.
Vallieres was to take those negatives and prints and produce 26 paintings that were intended for the Library of Congress. The plan has changed, and now the works, when completed in 2006, will go to an undisclosed location in Washington, D.C.
So far, Vallieres has completed 13 of the 26, nine of which will be in the Merrick exhibit. Two of his Depression oil paintings are haunting tributes to photographer Dorothea Lange, including "Migrant Mother."
The portraits are most difficult, Vallieres says, because he had to put himself into the mind of that person.
The results are a West Virginia fiddler who smiles with simplicity and wonder; a coal miner from West Virginia and another from Pennsylvania, quiet Americans, Vallieres says, who didn't brag; a mother washing the feet of her two little girls; a family of four; and an American farmer with eyes that define the stoicism of the time.
His technique for the Depression paintings is to use a pallet with very subtle hues. "The idea is to make you think of the image, not to focus so much on the color, but more of the mood," he says.
Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and alternating Sundays. Artist's reception 2 to 4 p.m. today, open to public.
Patti Conley can be reached online at pconley@timesonline.com.