Painter Tim Sanchez can tell you how hot it was this summer.
For the past four months he has been painting in his un-air conditioned garage – fitted out as an art studio – in the beach side house that he shares with his husband, Jim Haigney.
“It was an intense four months. I painted all day long, every day,” he says.
And while the conditions under which he labored were hardly ideal, Sanchez says he gets so involved in the work at hand that he “really doesn’t care too much.”
Nevertheless, such prolonged slaving over a hot easel can only mean one thing. Sanchez was working toward a show.
Titled “Interior Spaces,” the solo exhibition will debut Sanchez’s new series of representational paintings at the Center for Spiritual Care in Vero Beach.
Carol Ludwig, the center’s executive director, saw a couple of the early works in the series last spring.
“It reminded me of our emotional and psychological interior spaces,” says Ludwig, who immediately scheduled Sanchez for a show.
Located in what was once a modest house north of downtown, the Center for Spiritual Care aims to be a welcoming place for people seeking deeper meaning in their lives and relationships. Its programs include classes, meditation and prayer group meetings, and pastoral counseling, among many other activities.
The center presents four or five art exhibitions a year. A regular change of scenery in the center’s program is a good thing, Ludwig says. She believes that the changing art displays help people not to fear change and to take risks in their own lives.
For Sanchez, Ludwig’s invitation to exhibit his work at the center came at an appropriate time. His Vero first interiors were seen by only a few people before they were sold.
“None of them are left – they flew out of here,” he says. “I thought, this is nice, this is encouraging. So now how do I get to enjoy it?”
In other words, sales are terrific and very welcome, but it’s nice for a wider public to have the chance to see his work before it becomes privately owned.
Sanchez’s new work is representational, and that is a change for him.
“I’m an abstractionist,” he says.
But there was something about the cool, dark interiors of the Spanish Colonial houses that he and Haigney stayed in on trips to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, that intrigued Sanchez and stuck with him. He took snapshots in the houses over the course of five annual visits before deciding to use them as jumping-off points for a painting series.
Sanchez’s past abstractions have made the most of vigorous brushwork and vivid color, and have sometimes included off-beat collaged-on elements. By contrast, the interiors series features large, virtually empty rooms and details of rooms, painted in a monochromatic palette. Where the former come off as aggressive, complicated and full of painterly pyrotechnics, the latter are clear, calm and contemplative.
As in his abstract work, “making the paint the most important part” is central to Sanchez’s representational paintings.
Gesturing toward a group of the new paintings, Sanchez avers that nothing about his brushwork or techniques for applying paint to canvas has changed.
“It was easier than I thought. I had something to hang onto in terms of format, but then I could just paint the way I paint abstractly. I didn’t want to polish these up with glazes or varnish. I wanted the way I paint to be evident.”
That’s where John Singer Sargent, the American painter who enjoyed artistic success in Europe, helped out.
That maestro gained fame and fortune painting dashing portraits of the wealthy and the notable. As far as Sanchez is concerned, Sargent has a lot to teach contemporary abstract artists.
Sanchez is particularly inspired by Sargent’s genre painting, “Venetian Bead Stringers.” It shows three women (two seated, one standing) grouped in the foreground of a cavernous interior. The painting’s dark gray-green, black and brown palette is punctuated by a white burst of light coming from an arched doorway in the back of the room.
“To me, it’s the composition in that particular painting that I felt was so avant-garde,” Sanchez says. “I looked at the way that he painted it. He would eliminate any unnecessary brush strokes. He was just very efficient. The least amount of detail that he could use to get the story across, is what he tried to do.
There is a little of “The Bead Stringers” in all of Sanchez’s recent work.
One of these, an interior with deep green walls against which a white-mantled fireplace stands, features an expanse of dark, glossy floor on which daylight from the room’s tall windows shines.
“This one was the bedroom in San Miguel,” says Sanchez, who painted the room empty of furniture.
“I was much more interested in the space – in the floor and the un-doneness of it.”
Another of Sanchez’s paintings that is just about the space features a dark composition in which blade-shaped wedges of light, defined by the heavy drapes on either side of them, push their way into the room.
An arch-shaped opening in the back wall of this painting is a twin of the one in Sargent’s “Bead Stringers.”
“You know, that it is just a glob of white. It’s not rendered, it’s not polished, it’s not under-painted, it’s just there. I admire that kind of painting,” Sanchez says.
And while he is very happy with his new work, Sanchez, an artist who has demonstrated his love of unadulterated color in many an abstract painting, worries that “I’ve got myself into a corner” by relying on a monochrome palette.
And yet, he is willing to be seduced by the absence of color for just a little while longer.
“I was about to start adding color to this one,” he says of a black and white composition that features a linen-draped dining table on which a bouquet of white flowers rests.
“I was going to start adding glazes (of color) – and I just couldn’t do it,” he says. “I said to myself, ‘When is enough, enough? It works!’ ”
Sanchez’ works will be on display Nov. 7 through Jan. 5. A reception for the artist will be held Friday, Nov. 7 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. To RSVP for the reception, call 567-1233.
The Center for Spiritual Care is at 1550 24th St., Vero Beach.
