West Side Canvas: Elephants on the Upper West Side

By Robert Beck

There is a lot to like about elephants. They are pretty much a stand-alone species. We can start with the ears. Evolution took a lot of animals in a binaural direction, but nobody got a pair of head-slappers like the elephant. And they have a trunk—essentially a nose that’s a hand. Wouldn’t that be great? Certainly helpful when you have a couple of bags of groceries in your arms and the door is locked. Tusks are a useful set of kit as well. Elephants are known for being smart and even playful. They’d make great neighbors, especially if you needed to move a bunch of logs or something.

My favorite room in the American Museum of Natural History is the one with the herd of elephants in the middle. I have long wanted to paint in there and asked them how to make it happen, but my request wasn’t well-received, so I took the project into my studio.

That changes the painting. When I work from life, I respond to what’s in front of me, describing how it feels to encounter my subject and be in that spot for hours. In this case, that painting would have reflected the cavernous room and employed visitors for scale. I’m not feeling that environment when I’m not there.

There’s another difference between painting from life and in the studio. On-site, I am locked into the specific reality of my subject, and the rest of the world disappears. But a studio painting, being mostly free of time constraints, is affected by a wide range of outside influences. The subject is the same, but I’m looking through a wider lens, and the world filters in, including how what’s going on out there relates to what I’m doing. In this image, titled Natural History, the elephants move through the picture plane from left edge to right while a visitor sits looking at her phone. I saw the woman doing that when I was there, and it stuck in my head. I might not have included it in the narrative if I worked from life in the museum; she would have been one of many people who came and went. It likely would have been just about the room.

I once did a studio painting called Love’s Notions and Novelties, which many people said reminded them of Hopper’s Nighthawks. Mine was a night cityscape with a turn-of-the-century brick building and a lit store window, and it didn’t look anything like Hopper’s image, yet there was something that took you there. This painting did that association thing to me while I was building it. Hopper’s “New York Movie” kept coming into my mind, although there is no similarity other than two women lost in their thoughts. It shows how wide a light Hopper cast on our culture with paintings that didn’t just show you things but made you feel something as well. Not just about what’s on the canvas but what is inside the viewer. Designed not only to describe but to elicit.

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See more of Robert Beck’s work and visit his UWS studio at www.robertbeck.net. Let him know if you have a connection to an archetypical UWS place or event that would make a good West Side Canvas subject. Thank you!

Note: Before Robert Beck started West Side Canvas, his essays and paintings were featured in Weekend Column. See Robert Beck’s earlier columns here and here.

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