The art of illusion

How Michael Newberry rediscovered the role of color in creating the illusion of depth and space.

Michael Newberry — Denouement — 5 ft x 7 ft (1988)

The Grizzly Professor

Edgar Ewing came through the door. The students beheld a tweed suit topped with a grizzly gray mustache and sparkling blue eyes. He moved with the melody of confidence and the whimsy of delight. He set down his case on the table, spread his arms, and smiled at the the classroom of freshman students. “Making art,” he announced “is like making love.”

The students looked at one another with sidelong smiles, most of them inexperienced with one or the other part of the metaphor, and certainly not fathoming the connection between the two. It was the first day of a fundamentals of oil painting class at USC. The year was 1974.

In the 1970’s, the art department at USC was dominated by abstract expressionism. Ewing was the exception in the department, he was an artist with technical skill and a deep passion for art. Representational art, that is — the kind that depicts the world around us (figures, landscapes, still lifes) in a way that reflects how our sense organs experience the world.

While other professors taught classes on conceptual or found-object art, Ewing taught his students how to paint. Never having had a classical training, Ewing was an experimental modernist who floated between realism and cubism. His colors were intense, subtle, and always moving.

In the piece Bugler’s Table, a vivid red cloth emerges from a textured cool background. Objects on the table float in various layers of transparency and shadow.

Edgar Ewing, The Bugler’s Table

Whatever the technique or style, whatever the period of his work, Ewing didn’t paint unless he felt something. He had an infectious, childlike excitement about painting.

One student, Michael Newberry, took to him instantly.

Newberry, who had fallen in love with Rembrandt at an early age, had spent every spare moment of his teenage years drawing and painting, challenging himself to capture highlights and reflections. He was also an excellent tennis player and had received a full scholarship from USC.

From the first weeks of his freshman year, Newberry seemed to understand that the professors at USC were not looking for skill or emotion, they were not teaching art. He knew what art felt like; it was a universe of emotion, it was the sparkle and magic of Rembrandt. Whatever this was, was not that. Until Ewing walked through the door.

In class, Ewing would walk around looking over the shoulders of his students. Once, while Newberry was painting a still life of bones, Ewing reached over his shoulder, thrust his thumb in the white paint, and scraped a highlight across a bone in front.

Suddenly, the bone popped forward in space.

Something clicked. Newberry had spent years lovingly contemplating Rembrandt, who was a master of achieving a realness in the depth and space created by the forms.

For example, in Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, there is a slow gradation of brightness as an arm, draped with golden folds, creates a triangle in space between the shoulder, elbow, and wrist. Each point has a sharpness that suspends it at a point in space that has a clear triangulated relationship to everything else in the painting — Aristotle’s nose, Homer’s forehead, the corner of the table. The golden folds of the arm bend to follow the shape of the arm, melting into the deep umber of the background as it recedes from our view.

Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer

In Rembrandt’s world of browns and golds, the gold brought an object forward in space, and the local intensity of the contrasts between the shadows and highlights locked a point in space. The effect became a caressing sense of depth that the eye, and the soul, could feel.

Ewing didn’t tell Newberry what color combinations to use, or how to start. He didn’t even express the idea verbally. It was all about making the vibrations of color work with one another, letting your eye and heart lead you. He taught by example. And, by occasionally sticking his finger in the paint.