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Arthur Egeli’s movie, “The Art of Passion,” shot in Provincetown in 1993, is now out on DVD. |
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Egeli’s painterly film explores ‘The Art of Passion’
Shot in Provincetown, the 1993 film is now available on DVD
By Reva Blau
banner Correspondent
The naked human eye, just like a movie camera, cannot perceive an object except by recording the light bouncing off it. Arthur Egeli has been studying the way the light affects Provincetown at different times of the day his entire adult life.
Egeli is a full-time painter, painting teacher and portraitist in the tradition of Monet and Charles Hawthorne. He is also a Hollywood filmmaker living in Pasadena, catching what is as fleeting as the dawn light in the harbor: the notice of Hollywood producers. In shooting a movie where he once studied oils, Egeli had the rare opportunity to capture the famous light in Provincetown in celluloid.
Egeli’s movie, “The Art of Passion,” shot in Provincetown in 1993, was released in 1994 under the title “Unconditional Love.” It won the Jury Prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival and a Gold Medal at the Houston Film Festival. Genius Products is now releasing the film on DVD, making its beautiful and compelling homage to Provincetown accessible to an even larger audience.
It tells the story of Steve Buchanan, a talented portraitist who falls in love with plein-air painting while studying with Robert Hoffman, the greatest impressionist painter working in America.
Steve, like many young artists turning the corner on their adolescence, paints at the fount of his own vitality and libido. He encounters three women, who swarm to this vitality like bees to honey and who love him, or lust after him, with plucky resolve. They swoon without thinking first and this daring love teaches him, eventually, how to be daring with paint.
Talking to Egeli, one can see how he could create a character in Steve, a painter who flawlessly renders the vicissitudes of nature and yet is so careful and circumspect to toe the line as he commits himself as Hensche’s disciple.
Arthur Egeli grew up in a family in which painting was not only respectable, it was in fact an expected career. To do something besides portrait painting for Egeli was like choosing to be a poet for most kids. In fact, when he expressed interest in movies, like most parents, his parents put pressure on him to do something respectable and practical. Unlike most parents, they meant oil painting.
Starting at the age of 15, Egeli studied portraiture with his grandfather, the renowned portrait artist Bjorn Egeli, who painted presidential portraits, among many others. And, in fact, both his parents are two of the country’s most prominent portrait painters. They continue to this day the family’s great legacy in realist portraiture — in this age of video iChats, one can commission a portrait of a family member from no less than five of Arthur’s immediate family members. Turn-around time is the time of most big budget film productions: three months.
Robert Hoffman in the movie is not modeled after the abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, as one might expect. Rather, Egeli bases Hoffman’s character on Henry Hensche, who, while the younger of the two painters, reviled the school of abstract painting that Hofmann represented in Provincetown.
Hensche, who had inherited the Cape Cod School of Art from Charles Hawthorne in 1930, worked zealously to maintain the tradition of realism against what he felt was the dangerous mood swings of abstraction that betrayed nature’s blessings with its self-indulgent preoccupation with the subconscious.
Yet to realist painters, and adherents of the impressionist way of seeing, Hensche is himself described as revolutionary because of two innovations within realism: the use of color blocks to underlay the painting, instead of pencil, and draftsmanship, and the insistence that most painting be done outside in natural light.
Egeli’s father, who was attracted to the impressionist techniques that freed the realist painter from long studies inside, recommended that Arthur go to Provincetown to study with the painter of consummate skill and maestro of color.
The young man Egeli traveled from his home in Maryland to Provincetown to what he describes as painting boot camp. He continued going back every summer until he was 25, and every summer he painted dusk until dawn.
“Studying in Provincetown was a magical experience,” said Egeli on the phone from his home in California. “I was honestly dreading becoming a portrait painter, painting for clients. When I went to study with Hensche, I was out in the sun doing what I wanted to do. Painting in color as opposed to drawing is a sensory experience. When you’re drawing someone, it’s more cerebral.”
The film begins with Hoffman using the technique that Hensche used to edit a student’s work when he felt that they were relying too much on line to build their subject and not enough on the light that refracts from it. He would come up behind them as they worked at the easel and simply smudge out the line.
In the film, what plein-air painting does for the young Hensche prodigy is to provide him opportunity for the painting date. Hensche himself was never satisfied with painting boats in the harbor and pushed his students to paint everything under the sun. Steve takes that to mean naked women on the flats. He is dating Teresa (Jessica Bryant Flannery), his model. In a couple of scenes, when she is posing for him, she wants to get horizontal on the beach, to connect with him, but he wants her to hold the vertical pose, preferably before the light changes too much.
Steve meets his match, however, in Mary (Aleksandra Kaniak). She is his married neighbor, a painter who enjoys her outdoor shower that abuts his property. (They live on Pearl Street.) She paints not only inside her house but also in the complete dark at three in the morning. Mary applies paint with hedonistic abandon, offering her work not at Apollo’s altar, but Dionysus’. The highly charged scenes between her and Steve as they heatedly argue the merits of realism and abstraction are fabulous for their intellectual content. Yet, like all good enemies of the cerebral bent, they of course have great sex.
The film holds a dear relationship to painting on all levels that can only be achieved by a serious practitioner. In the midst of being romantic, plein-air painting as portrayed in the film is no longer a gentlemanly activity. It is far grittier, sexier and harder work than the casual observer imagines it to be.
The indoor and outdoor scenes in the movie form gorgeous contrasts with one another and are equally stunning aesthetically, especially considering that Egeli produced the film on a tiny budget. The indoor scenes between Steve and Mary have moody, high-contrast lighting that both shrouds and reveals the naked human body with what amount to Hans Hofmann’s push-and-pull values. The outdoor scenes unveil the exquisite relationships of sky, sea and earth, like Hensche’s best oil paintings of Provincetown. It is as if Egeli had learned how to see from his painting predecessors and applied the lessons of light, color and line to the media of the moving image.
Hoffman is, as Hensche was, an exacting teacher, providing a father figure whose rigid authority Steve can then overturn. Steve, having internalized the Dionysian force of Mary, ends up painting six paintings so successfully that he is granted the prized solo show at a high-end gallery. (Local viewers will enjoy figuring out which gallery it is.) The paintings on the wall in this gallery are both landscapes done in plein air and portraits done specifically in the light of the unconscious mind during a sleepless night spent with another human body. They portray both Nature and the contradictory emotions locked up in a young man too long in the pose of a good boy. In the end, two loyal assistants serve painting: good, strong, natural light and a healthy dose of passionate human fervor.
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Deveau performs in Wellfleet
Provincetown Banner Gallery Guide
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Apr 19th, 2007