Printed in Southwest Art Magazine, March 1984
(Carole's notes: I had never heard of Ray Vinella until the Plein Air Painters of America's panel discussion at the PAPA Colorado workshop. Then when I learned that he had played an important role in teaching some of the PAPA painters that were at this event, I had to do my research to find out more. Below is a copy of an article I had found that was printed in '84. He is still painting and teaching today.)
Inside the little café on Taos’ main street the aroma of fresh brewed coffee commingles with the sweetness of freshly made bread, piping hot, permeating the air, steaming the windows. As usual, Ray Vinella is having breakfast here with his friends- an Indian from the nearby pueblo, a local rancher, a Game and Fish Bureau officer and a former painting student. Three women visiting from Los Angeles stop by the table to say hello. The little wood-paneled coffee shop is charged with the congeniality of friends and business acquaintances beginning the day together.
"Taos is still the trading center it was many, many years ago," Vinella asserts." A lot of important business is conducted right here, in this room."
Ray Vinella is a likeable man of 67 years. Born in Bari, Italy, he was raised in New York City’s "Little Italy". ( "They wrote books and movies about my neighborhood," Vinella says. "The real godfather took place where I grew up.") His reflections of childhood days on New York’s lower east side are colorful: handpainting ties in Greenwich Village; finding his way about Manhattan, afoot or by bus, with a baby brother tagging along; having fist fights every day of his life until he was eighteen years old.
One listens, enraptured, to tales from Vinella’s life and his travels to Europe, Los Angeles and Taos. How can one person have so much to say about so many things and places? Gesturing exuberantly, he seems to draw pictures in the air. His dark eyes sparkle. His enthusiasm is contagious.
Vinella is genuinely interested in life. An insatiable curiosity leads him to notice both the overall mood and the most minute details of his milieu: autumn’s afternoon sunlight resting on yellow leaves, or winter’s ghostlike trees silhouetted against a deep purple sky.
They all become paintings.
In his modest adobe home, Vinella points to masks and statues carved by African artisans. Those objets d’art stand amidst paintings by contemporary Taos artists, an aquatint by Doel Reed and engravings by his artist wife Leslie Crespin’s great-great grandfather. A brightly colored Pennsylvania Amish weaving covers the dinning room table.
If you ask him his opinions about art and artists today, Vinella may surprise you with a veritable cascade of commentary. He is disturbed about the misapplication or elimination of the fundamentals of painting in much contemporary artwork. He laments the reluctance of aspiring artists to share their knowledge and expertise with each other and detest their tendency to do paintings by formula. High prices demanded by artists with little expertise and galleries which promote work which is not of professional quality are anathema to him.
To see art, Vinella will take you on a leisurely tour in his Ford Expedition. Rocking up a high country road around Taos, he points out myriad abstract shapes and designs what was, only moments before, evergreens and mountain peaks. All the while he stresses the significance of abstraction in realistic painting. Afterwards, Vinella takes you to his studio, where he welcomes the opportunity to explain why he works in a variety of media, including egg tempera, watercolor, oil and model wax. His subject matter, he points out, spans from nudes to mountain streams, still lifes and portraits.
Vinella lives and breathes art and has done so since childhood. "I used to play hooky at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," he recalls. A hint of nostalgia sifts into the conversation as he relates the story of being chastised by a history teacher who believed he was skipping school to attend Sinatra performances at the Paramount.
"I told him all about the museum," Vinella recounts. "When you walk in, go to the right, you’ll see this, and on the left, such and such. He couldn’t believe it! He recognized that I really was interested in art and had me do a drawing of him. From then on I got passing grades."
By the time Vinella was fifteen years old, he had his heart set on becoming a successful illustrator. He was fascinated by newspaper illustrations and could easily picture himself creating black-and-white drawings of raincoats and shampoo bottles. He studied art for four years in high school, learning the mechanics of rendering: "we painted exactly what we saw-the textures of glass, skin, fur. It was an invaluable experience. But it also hurt me. I had to change some habits when I started doing fine art. I had to find my outlet, my way of saying, 'this is a painting and I don’t have to render every little thing.'"
Finding his creative outlet came slowly for Vinella. A four-year European tour of duty with the US Air Force, two degrees from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, (1959), and an eleven-year career in advertising art in New York City, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, preceded his desion to become a fine artist. In Los Angeles, his illustrative skills were honed at Walt Disney Productions, in his own free lance business, and in fine art done during his leisure hours.
Like so many others, Vinella was eventually faced with the decision to maintain his lucrative career or strike out on his own as a fine artist. With a wife and three small sons to consider, the move would have to be made responsibly.
The confidence of his close friend and former Art Center roommate, artist James Pilatos, of Carmel, California, was encouragement for Vinella to try his wings. The work of Nicolai Fechin (Russian, 1881-1955) also had a profound impact on him. " I saw Fechin’s work for the first time while I was going to school. You can imagine what went through my mind. I almost quit painting. It was ridiculous," Vinella chuckles. " His technique the way he used color, composed shapes. It was new to me. And his subjects intrigued me: mountains, goats, burros, Indians. Where was this place? I was in LA and didn’t even know such a place existed.
"Finally I got enough courage to go to Taos. I put some paintings in a gallery on the plaza and didn’t hear a thing until I went back a year later and found that all my paintings had sold."
Ray Vinella fondly remembers the inevitable lean years. "I rented a house in Taos for $75 a month in December 1969. There was a bunch of us [artists] who arrived in Taos about the same time. We’d meet on the street and introduce ourselves: Julian Robles, Walt Gonske, Rod Goebel, Ron Barsano, Robert Daughters. We met for coffee in the mornings and talked and argued art. We learned from each other."
The camaraderie the artists felt eventually led to the formation of a group called "The Taos Six" (SWA Oct 74). Their works, depicting southwestern themes, particularly of the Taos, Santa Fe and northern New Mexico area, were shown in galleries and museums across the country.
"Like the French Impressionists," says Vinella, "we just came to Taos and did what we wanted to do, very quietly. We each painted differently, and in time we found out how well we were accepted around the country. Our art was pure and professional."
Within a few years the group disbanded and each artist built his own successful fine art career. Life took on some exciting new dimensions for Vinella. Always an eager and willing student, he soon found himself with students of his own. For Vinella, teaching became an opportunity which he grabbed with gusto.
Eventually the joy of teaching led Vinella to establish a series of painting workshops, which he conducts several times a year in the Taos Area. Also at the T.I.A, Fredricksburg Texas, And Colorado springs. It is not uncommon to find his yard full of painters at their easels, carefully applying pigments to canvas in the quiet grandeur of the surrounding Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Further expansion if his artistic vision came in 1982 with a commission from the American Express Company to sculpt four bronzes depicting the American Indian, and in the same year, the invitation to sculpt four bronzes of endangered species for the World Wildlife Federation. In 1983, he accepted an invitation to join the newly formed Society of American Impressionists (SWA Aug 83). S.A.I
Of his work and evolution it has undergone throughout the years, Vinella traces his steps back to when he first began experimenting in fine art.
"I had a hard time with oil paint because I’d been using fast-drying designer’s colors. I used to paint real loose, but real loose don’t mean anything. There must be a reason, a philosophy behind it. It’s a shorthand and so it’s much more exciting than photographic art."
Vinella continues, "I like to jump around. I use different media for different problems and to express what I want to say. For example, I use egg tempera, an exacting medium, for quiet scenes. Loose watercolor works better for landscapes. There’s got to be a good reason to do a painting-a certain type of light, fascinating shapes, cool crisp air. You select your medium to convey that reason, to communicate what you see and what you feel about the subject."
"I could paint a blue sky and white clouds and everybody would agree that it’s a blue sky with white clouds. But the serious painter, who has been studying and looking at nature a long time, incorporates the different hues and reflections of light bouncing from the earth up into the sky. He say’s ‘what’s the edge doing? What’s really happening, and how can I interpret it?’"
"You have to find the right color, the right value, and put it in the right place, with the right brushstroke and direction. Hopefully you will describe a small area, which is a part of a whole."
Vinellan has strong opinions about the definitions of good and bad art. "The public has been looking at bad art for so long that they think it’s good art," he maintains, explaining that the general art-buying public is satisfied with mediocrity. "An artist has to be willing to go all the way with a painting and not be lazy. Drawing (I don’t mean mechanical drawing) is the language of painting. Only when you understand drawing can you distort, take shortcuts, and be creative. A good artist can make anything into a painting."
Visit Ray Vinella's website to continue reading this artice: www.rayvinella.com/RayVinellaArticle01.html
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