NOT NICE, BUT NOT UNIQUE

FOR nine years past, Ivan Le Lorraine Albright has been laboring over the same painting (opposite). He hopes to finish it in another three. The painting more than justifies Albright's dedication to it even now: it is at least as able as it is odd. The overworked word unique fits Albright's accomplishment exactly.

The artist himself is a brisk, cheery little fellow of 57 bearing an amazing resemblance to the dwarf named Doc in Walt Disney's Snow White. Like Doc, he is white-haired, baldpated, plump, restless and has a stammer. His sad brown eyes are partly hidden behind horn-rimmed spectacles. He laughs a lot. His art, of course, seems as out of this world as any hobgoblin's.

Things Are Nothing. Albright paints in an old wooden house in a dreary down-at-the-heel section of Chicago. "I like this neighborhood." he says. "I can think here." An ingenious system of black window shades enables him to throw just the light he wants on each portion of his still-life in turn. The still-life actually exists, whole, in his studio. Albright built the moldy brick wall himself, and assembled all the vast assortment junk that makes up the rest of the picture. The major items are on wheels, so that they can be shifted about the studio. But Albright does no more shifting than neccessary; he lets things lie until richly coated with dust. He loves them chiefly for their melancholy aura of vanished life. "Things are nothing." he says. "It's what's happened to them that matters."

No fool-the-eye realist, Albright paints each object in the light most flattering to it. To paint the whole picture in a single light would make it "static," he believes. Another Albright idea 5 to paint different objects at different angles. He will turn the canvas upside down to paint a bottle on a bureau, then turn it sidewise to paint the bureau. At first glance, everything in his pictures seems well anchored in space; at a second glance things start spinning.

Results Are Something. Albright's brushes are the smallest obtainable. For really fine work he uses one lateral spine of one chicken feather, tied to a handle for him by a man who specializes in tying fishermen's flies. His first step, which may take years is to cover the canvas with a very detailed charcoal drawing. After fixing the charcoal with a spray, he begins applying thin glazes of oil color, sometimes spending weeks on a square inch. When I get sick to death of painting glass " he says "I paint wood for a while. Then when I get fed up with that'I'll paint bricks . . . and so forth."

When he gets sick of painting altogether. Albright taxies home to Chicago's fashionable North Side (his wife is Josephine Medill Patterson Reeve, daughter of the late founder of New York's Daily News) or goes off to his Wyoming ranch At such times of rest, Albright readily confesses that he does "not enjoy painting much. I go at it the hard way. with my eyes wide open. But I do like getting the results I want. I'd rather paint one good picture than a hundred bad ones. Anybody can paint bad ones--including me."

Among Albright's most famous works to date are a phosphorescently rotten-looking woman in underwear called Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida and a moldy door called That Which I Should Have Done, I Did Not Do. "I just can't seem to paint nice things," he muses. "I've tried but it doesn't work. Once I designed a Christmas card and got a prize for it but no royalties. I think the only copies sold were those bought myself. It was a stained glass window--very dirty and dusty. Looked like a funeral. Say, do you think I'm crazy?"

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