SENSEI, MY FRIEND

Douglas Shields

Of all the varied hats I wore working for Sam, none was more special to me than assisting him in the studio. How many times I’d sit alongside and watch, after opening the paints, laying down sheets of paper or stretched canvases, making sure the water was clean and the spray bottles were full, rollers at the ready, sticks and brushes close by and in abundance. There was no one method of starting. One time Sam would walk around, stirring each color. Another time he would just stare out at the work on the wall, then survey the white surfaces and begin. Sometimes Sam would stand and work, going from one finished white surface to another in the quiet of the evening. Toward the end of his life, he would sit and work surrounded by buckets of liquid paints; bottles of ink, dyes, and watercolors; squeeze bottles of acrylic; and piles of long sticks that to a great extent replaced brushes. It always fascinated me that in a large studio (Sam worked in several with three thousand square feet or more of painting space), we would often end up working in one or another corner almost pinned in by all the buckets of color and tools (Sam’s words) that he used to paint with.

How many times Sam would look up at me after spattering a piece of paper with red, green, blue, or purple (the dye colors he called them), spray the color with water, then watch as it spread outward in all directions, and with those intense blue eyes smiling at me, he would say, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” “Right,” I’d reply. Then after a reflective pause he would start adding more and different colors, spatters, and drips. Sometimes he’d wipe up an excessive opaque puddle to bring back a transparent look to the form, maybe a few chosen strokes with a brush. Often he would dip a stick into a bucket, bringing it out loaded with color for “drawing” lines into the image or to just fling it violently down across the surface, pause a little more, then say, “Better not do any more or I’ll ruin it.” If it was a large sheet of paper, he would help me move it out of the way, having us lift up and go slowly in unison so as not to distort anything. Sam always knew what he was doing. And as for images, he never ran out. Once he told me of an important dream he’d had in which there was a room that only he could open the door to enter and, once inside, he was able to see new images. And this room with its images was only his to visit anytime he wished. Sam often expressed the feeling that there wasn’t enough time to paint all the images in his head.

Sam would paint for hours and hours at a time (toward the very end of his life this changed only due to the cancer that sapped his immense energy). I’d watch some, maybe photograph him lay out more paper or canvas; sometimes I had to mix up more color as he worked, fix leaky spray bottles, find that “special” brush, or answer the telephone, which managed to find him no matter where or what he was doing. When he worked on large canvases stapled to the floor, every so often he’d sit on his stool and I’d pull off the paint-soaked socks, spray his feet clean with water, wipe them dry, give him a fresh pair, and send him back to do battle. Usually I ran out of energy before he did.

When Sam was finished for the night, he’d go home for a massage and always ask me to come by in time for a little dinner, that is, after cleaning up the corner he’d been working in and putting tops back on all the opened paints. What a time we had.

These are just a few of the memories I have of working with Sam. I was one of a team (a family in those days) who served him. There were many wonderful times and some not so wonderful. All in all, Sam was my employer, my friend, a brother (he often said he thought of me as a younger brother), and my Sensei. He taught me by example about the nature of pigments and how to use them, and what it means to call oneself a painter.

Sam changed my life forever, down to its very core. He was and is one of the most original modern painters.

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