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 he reputation of Robert Hale Ives Gammell has been rising of late: an exhibit of his series of imaginative paintings, The Hound of Heaven, is touring the country; his writings are more widely read and his influence noted; and the tradition that he alone carried through the middle years of this century -- when there was almost no tolerance for representational painting -- continues to be handed on through his students and his students' students.
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Although Gammell began teaching in the 1930s, he didn't obtain serious students until the late '40s, after the publication of Twilight of Painting. Among these students were the late Bob Cummings, Richard Lack, Robert Douglas Hunter and Robert Cormier. These men have a unique perspective on the man responsible for carrying on the tradition of The Boston School.
Gammell worked in the Fenway Studios, #401, in Boston. His students were down the hall in #408. He'd arrive at 10:30 a.m. or so and, "get up on what he called his 'equalizer' because he was short, and we were by comparison relatively tall. He would look at our interpretation and always be on target with his criticisms," said Robert Douglas Hunter, who studied with Gammell from 1950 to 1955.
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Hunter goes on, "At this time, and this is an important thing to realize, he (Gammell) was a nobody, a nothing, in the worldly sense of the term. And so in order to give force to his point of view he had to be as rigorous as possible. He was trying to get you to improve your eye, to see correctly, and that's all he was interested in. He didn't care what your reaction was; he wanted it better, better, better."
Richard Lack, who began studying with Gammell in 1950 and continued into the middle '50s, recalls, "I had never run into that kind of criticism. He was very direct, very frank. No hyperbole; just right to the point - which I appreciated, although I got a little irritated in the beginning because as a precocious art student you don't like to have people tell you that your work is awful."
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Robert Cormier, who began his studies shortly after Lack and Hunter, noted, "He would go about it in a very professional way. He would discuss technique; he might say, 'Well, this is scratchy, your crosshatching isn't working.' Then he might make suggestions about how to crosshatch. Whatever you were doing, he would talk about that. Then he would look at the model very carefully and note differences in shape.
And he might mark on the drawing. He would correct the shape very carefully and slowly and pull it in. Gammell was very interested in the negative and positive shapes. He would say, 'Well, maybe the model has changed but I would prefer to think you were wrong.'" Meaning, Cormier explained, Gammell didn't want you chasing the model's gesture around. "He would say, 'Always have a clear idea of what you want to do.'" Lack stated that he was extremely honest in his approach to critiquing. "No theatrics involved whatsoever."
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The curriculum at Gammell's studio consisted of daily life work, memory drawing and the study of anatomy. The emphasis was always on drawing and shapes. He taught the sight-size method, and he emphasized seeing correctly.
"He didn't like drawing that was superficial," Robert Cormier said. "I remember he said to one student, 'That drawing is dangerously pretty.' He wanted you to get things right the first time. He'd mention that Paxton would say that 'It's the preparation that's everything. Any idiot can go back and put a pretty line over it.'"
Painting the figure came later in a student's career, and sometimes gave way entirely to drawing. Lack noted that he spent most of his last two years with Gammell studying shapes, doing pencil drawing.
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"It's the preparation that's everything. Any idiot can go back and put a pretty line over it."
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Cormier said, "He didn't like people to paint too soon. He felt that one of the reasons the Boston School had fallen apart was that people were doing just painting and nothing else. The idea of putting the right note in the right place and the drawing will take care of itself-well, it works in theory, not in fact."
Hunter said, "One of the most important things he taught me was working sight-size. I had never heard of it before - none of us had ever heard of it before. It was most enlightening and most enabling. It was the single most important thing." Because of its fixed points of reference, the same points for both student and teacher, nearly absolute comparisons could be made.
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"Unless your eye was screwed up, or you were lazy, you could see shapes better, you could make them better," Hunter added.
The students studied anatomy using the Richer text. They were expected to do this on their own, and Gammell supplemented it by making reference to anatomy during critiques of life work. Students learned anatomy because it was Gammell's habit to quiz them about it, and if they lagged in their studies he would soon know. They also made some use of the Richer plates as subjects for memory training, and Hunter recalls doing landscape sketches from memory as a way to develop his eye for "the salient elements of color and shape."
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"He didn't like drawing that was superficial."
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Lack described another aspect of the memory training: "The first day I arrived, Gammell said, 'We're going to do a regiment of memory drawing. We're going to start by using these old photographs (he had a little portfolio of models posing) and put a piece of tracing paper over them and put a plumb line, top, bottom and through the middle, and you work on those, the outline, for a week.'"
"In other words, you do one every evening for 15 minutes, and by the end of the week, you should do pretty well. And I took it very seriously because he kept saying that the secret of the masters was in the training of the memory."
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Lack recalled doing some memory work from the life model as well, and pointed out that Gammell directed him to the remarks of Degas and to the writings of Boisbaudran on the importance of memory. "And the nice thing about it was he kept after me," Lack added. "He'd say, 'Lack, where's your memory drawing? I haven't seen it for two weeks.'"
Gammell was a teacher who challenged his students not only at the easel, but in their habits of thinking as well. "'So who are your favorite artists?'," Hunter recalls him saying. "Then you'd have to think, and answer, and then he'd say 'Why?' He was provoking and challenging, and interested in who you were."
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Ives Gammell
Ives Gammell
Hound of Heaven
Ives Gammell
Hound of Heaven
Ives Gammell
The Seamstress
Ives Gammell
Winged Figure
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