Catalog. Places, 1998. 27 graphite drawings with introduction by Ronald H. Bayes. France, Ireland, Norway, Scotland and the United States. Available at St.Andrews College Press, (dulgarpe@tartan.sapc.edu) or Raleigh Contemporary Gallery (rcgallery@mindspring.com).

I am neither a draughtsman nor a painter. I am not a critic. I work with words-poetry. I have known Marvin Saltzman and his work since 1962. I was on the faculty of Eastern Oregon College when the Saltzman family arrived in the isolated Grande Ronde valley at the conjunction of the Blue and Wallowa Mountains.

When Saltzman came to La Grande, he arrived with a visual vocabulary derived from the School of Paris and German Expressionism. When he left four years later, he had begun to use a vocabulary which concentrated on the natural landscape.

In Long Beach, California, ships, sailboats, oil wells, refineries, beaches and an amusement zone all existed for a painter. A young Marvin, although embarrassed, helped carry his sister Florence’s materials when she went outdoors to paint. Today it amuses him to sit without embarrassment on street corners, at roadsides and in great buildings drawing as tourists comment and snap photos of him.

After Saltzman graduated from high school in 1949, he drifted. 1954 brought his discharge from the army, his marriage to Jacquelyn (Jackie) and his enrollment in the School of the Art Institute n Chicago.

Marvin Saltzman is a product of the 30’s and 40’s. In those decades, the American avant-garde looked to Picasso, Matisse and Rouault – to European Modernism. We who were not painters thought Monet and Van Gogh were the “Moderns” – cubism and its ilk were beyond our understanding. Marvin’s love for the landscape came into conflict with the teaching style found in America’s formal educational instutitions. The still life and the figure were the tools of trainers and teachers of art. In Chicago and later at the University of Southern California, they wouldn’t look at the paintings he created outside of the classroom – paintings from nature.

After college, Marvin and a group of artists drew twice a week from life. In his paintings, figures existed in environments. While it was continuity that demanded the figure be central to his early Oregon work, in this church-dominated community nude models were taboo. The still life held no interest. Saltzman began again to look at the landscape; eastern Oregon began to appear in his work. I watched the transformation and the subsequent changes in his work with interest.

Marvin Saltzman does not take vacations. He goes places to look and to draw. I had discovered Pawley’s Island, South Carolina. The Saltzmans joined me in an island cottage looking across the wetlands to the mainland. Marvin would spend the mornings observing with paper and graphite. The first trip resulted in drawings of scenery, telling in the work much about the literal action of what was happening. Later stays, always in a house facing the mainland, followed a similar working pattern. However, the drawings changed. A symbolic content created by nervous gestural marks appeared. While violent as “nature is violent”, there is a hypnotic serenity to these graphic images. One can look at a drawing and recognize a particular tree – a configuration of trees – the view across the seagrass. He had learned its imagery – its placeness.

It was a surprise when Marvin announced that he would not return to the island. After a decade of trips, he “had nothing more to draw”. Any new drawings would “be artificial and would be changed in style for the sake of change, not because what was seen would be seen differently and so need to be drawn differently”. This philosophy became a foundation of his view of drawing and of painting.

After 1970, Jackie and Marvin were able to travel to Europe, and after 1980 they lived there for periods of time. Marvin would complete on-site large-scale landscape and architectural drawings. He had no plan for the drawings to affect his painting. Only in retrospect did he recognize that these trips had awakened a memory of his own past which led to paintings he was to call mapscapes – his visual history … Paris, eastern Oregon, the Los Angeles basin, and the North Carolina wetlands, to name but a few. It was also in the 80’s, with Marvin no longer absorbed with administrative duties, that he would attempt to rediscover himself as a painter and re-enter the exhibiting art world.

Unknown forces often bring about interesting change. Marvin and Jackie were on a one-week English canal boat trip in Oxfordshire. For the first time a series of site-specific drawings, thumbnail sketches, led directly to a painting series – The Oxford Canal. Elements of the drawings became evident in the visuals of the paintings. This continues to be part of his working process.

On these trips, Marvin draws on-site in the mornings when his senses are fresh. During the afternoon he edits – completing drawings. The Saltzmans drive and on occasion travel on water. Marvin now works on an 11 x 14” sheet of paper, which is easily portable. He can draw his initial impressions standing, sitting in a car, in sunshine, snow or rain. He has done all. What he seeks is a suitable compositional configuration. It must fit his criteria. He claims all painters have different visual “turn-ons”, and his may only be satisfied by “moving two feet to the right or the left – looking up or down”. Nature must fall into the view that interests him. He will not invent.

A sketch will be executed on Rives paper with a #2 solid graphite pencil. From a moving vessel, the visual notes may be four or five lines and a few tonal indications. Or a drawing may be more complex – a car allows time and contemplation – a moving boat demands instant decisions. Some drawings return to Chapel Hill and are finished in his studio environment. He has concerns about the time lapse, but has no answer to the question.

I have watched Marvin edit drawings. He has consummate patience and will work for hours making subtle controlled marks. In conversations he has decried the word artist. He prefers painter. I would amend this to artisan. He has the ability to repeat texture and pattern as does a weaver or woodworker …to keep going until “it is done”. Yet, it is more. What he does is his. It is not teachable nor for others learnable. Works from each location are unique, bound together by their sites. Marvin’s marks will differ from series to series, because although his methods and the appearance may have constants, his artistic ego “does not get in the way” of where and what he has drawn. Today, drawings from a specific place might lead to a painting series.

From one 1996 drawing trip to France, he completed paintings of the Gorges du Fier and French Alps and the Rte. Des Glaciers. The Fier closed, undulating, tortured and claustrophobic; the Alps soft, viewed from a distance, graceful and expressed with soft color variables; and the Rte. Des Glaciers open, clearly defined shapes, rich strong color, rugged rock formations, isolated boulders and trees. The places were vastly different.

These drawings are about places – Saltzman cannot paint about nothing. His days of arranging nonobjective shapes and marks in pleasant or non-pleasant configuration no longer exist; he needs the constant visual bombardment that the drawing trips afford. Today, even a series, nonobjective in the end, is rooted in a landscape source.

The finished drawings fall into two groups. One is “information from an experience”. These drawings never are exhibited, but the execution is needed as part of his visual absorption process. Others, he says are “simply better”. They work and can be seen as works of art, able to stand on their own.

This collection represents over 500 landscape drawings. Even without the subsequent paintings this would a remarkable achievement.

Ronald H. Bayes
Distinguished Professor of Writing
St. Andrews College