Face to Face(published 07.11.07)
Middlebury painter Doug Lazarus makes an unusual claim: He says he’s often “bumped up against” Edgar Allan Poe during his eclectic career. These encounters with the gothic storyteller, whom Lazarus describes as “the prototype of a certain American persona,” have perhaps not been coincidental. Lazarus admires Poe’s refusal to conform to bourgeois norms as much as he enjoys the 19th-century romantic’s macabre tales. “Poe understood he lived in a country of businessmen,” Lazarus says, “but he never changed who he was.”
It appears to be a case of one artist seeing himself in the life experiences of another. Lazarus is currently illustrating a book about a leading collector of Poe editions and ephemera. It was an indirect connection to Poe that brought him to Vermont 23 years ago. That move from Manhattan, where Lazarus was born in 1944, paved the way for him to assume his current role as the guiding force behind the Great Falls Gallery, located beside Otter Creek in downtown Middlebury.
One day, while working in New York as an illustrator and audio-visual presenter, Lazarus heard from a friend in Vermont that a weekly newspaper in Vergennes was for sale — “for next to nothing,” he recalls. Bored with his commercial gigs, Lazarus seized the opportunity to become a publisher-editor-illustrator. He moved north and spent the next two years overseeing the 16-page Vergennes Citizen, for which he also composed a dozen pen-and-ink drawings each week.
The Poe connection? Founded in 1798 as the Vergennes Gazette, the paper was purchased 40 years later by editor and literary anthologist Rufus Griswold — who happened to be Poe’s arch-enemy. It was primarily due to Griswold’s slanders that Poe is widely portrayed as an opium addict, Lazarus notes.
The newspaper business was volatile in Poe’s era — and it proved so for Lazarus, too. An “insane expansion plan” caused the Vermont Citizen to collapse and sent the owner careening into what he remembers as a period of “violent floundering.” He worked as a publicist for Vermont’s bicentennial celebrations in 1991, then commuted to a job in Troy, New York, from a home near Bennington. In 2000, Lazarus returned to Addison County, setting himself up as a portrait painter and not-for-profit entrepreneur.
Three years ago, he had to find a new work space after losing the lease on a Middlebury studio he shared with a couple of other artists. Enter Cornwall radiologist Peter Holm — “a patron of rebels,” Lazarus calls him. “He likes the fact thatwe’re all miscreants,” the artist adds, referring to the 18 painters and sculptors who occasionally work and show at the gallery while collectively covering the rent and keeping the coffee pot brewing.
Holm agreed to charge $700 a month for the spectacularly situated, 1500-square-foot space that became the Great Falls Gallery. It’s a steal, considering that the waterfall sprays and thunders right outside a row of windows along an exposed brick wall. There’s no more mesmerizing gallery site in all of Vermont — which means that some potential purchasers have trouble keeping their eyes on the art. Indeed, the locale is “terrible for retail,” Lazarus laments. The Great Falls Gallery stands at the end of an alley in Frog Hollow that attracts few browsers between Christmas and June.
During more shopping-friendly seasons, many of the gallery’s artists do make sales. One of them is John Clarke, a New Haven woodworker who became a sculptor with Lazarus’ encouragement. “I have sold a few things at Great Falls,” Clarke says, “but I go there mainly to be part of a community.”
Besides serving as a hang-out for artists, the gallery is morphing into a performance space, at Lazarus’ instigation. Several musical events were staged there last year, with the adjoining alleyway hosting summer-evening cookouts. Lazarus and fellow free spirits practice a 1960s Digger ethic of giving away food and drink to anyone who shows up. It’s a uniquely bohemian scene in buttoned-down Middlebury. “This town is really resistant to change,” observes Mary Swanson, a stall-holder in the Great Falls stable. “Middlebury’s just dead.”
Like his New Testament namesake, however, Lazarus finds himself at the center of a resurrection. Great Falls has been pumping night life into a commercial strip that turns eerily empty as daylight departs.
“Doug’s almost a force of nature,” says Swanson — quite a compliment, coming from someone who holds a day job as a clairvoyant. “He’s the unsung hero of Middlebury.”
Standing 5’9” and toting a late-middle-age paunch, Lazarus doesn’t look like a force of nature. But he does have kindly, sparkling eyes — the facial feature he considers most important in portrait painting — and he converses with wit and animation.
Lazarus has been painting since he was a kid and learned the rudiments from his father, a professional portraitist. He remains dedicated to his art, turning out several landscapes and an average of half a dozen commissioned portraits per year. Multiple organizational tasks cut into his painting time, but Lazarus doesn’t really mind. He affirms that he’s as much an event planner as an artist.
Right now, for example, he’s orchestrating a juried show that will feature scores of scenes of Lake Champlain. Lazarus invited about 1000 Vermont artists to submit work to be considered for inclusion in a proposed traveling exhibit of 50 paintings. That show, with envisioned stops in Boston, New York and Washington, would hit the road in 2009 — the 400th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain’s voyage into Vermont.
“I knew I could make this happen,” Lazarus declares, though he’s quick to acknowledge receiving help from several sources, including Senator Patrick Leahy and the Vermont Arts Council.
One of his own lake-scapes may well appear in the quadricentennial show. Lazarus says he gets excited about the light effects he can produce when painting scenes from nature. The genre also affords him greater freedom of technique than is possible in portraiture. His brush moves more loosely as it depicts Vermont settings, Lazarus says, contrasting these less inhibited strokes with the “marksmanship” that portrait painting requires._ “You either hit it or you don’t,” he explains.
But Lazarus almost always does nail his subjects’ features. He’s never had a dissatisfied sitter return a work, though on one occasion, he recalls, he himself ripped apart a canvas and started over because the face wasn’t right.
It takes Lazarus a week or two to complete a portrait, for which he charges between $1500 and $5000, depending on size and complexity. He works from photos rather than life because, he observes, “Most people don’t have the time to sit for a portrait these days.” The work cannot proceed, however, until artist and subject have gotten acquainted. Lazarus says he discusses possible poses, but mostly it’s a matter of his gleaning insights into the person’s character.
“A lot of portrait painting is about understanding someone’s psychology,” he explains. “You have to be honest when you’re painting a person. You can’t try to invent a personality.”_
Lazarus’ charming portrait of a pre-teen girl sitting in a field illustrates his insistence that the mouth as well as the eyes must be painted just so. “The eyes tell you a lot about the emotional make-up of a person,” he says. “And the mouth is so idiosyncratic that, if you lose it, you’ve lost the person.”
Hands are important, too, as is dramatically evident in his painting of a young woman bowing her violin. “Anatomically,” Lazurus notes, “the hand is very complicated. But I don’t have a problem with it.”
That may sound boastful, but Lazarus doesn’t take himself — or his trade — all that seriously. “What’s the difference between painting a picture and sweeping the floor?” he asks at one point. The answer: “The size of the brush.”
“I was raised with the notion that there’s nothing more profound about painting than about sweeping,” Lazarus explains. Both activities are hands-on, and both, he suggests, offer dignity and fulfillment.
The New England bard who penned “The Raven” couldn’t have put it better.
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