Lyric Brush

In explaining himself, the realist painter nowadays has to answer two realistic questions. Why does he not leave exact representation to the camera, which has been perfected to the point that it can catch the most fleeting expression, can render color in hues no longer dishonestly brilliant, and can see things in virtual darkness? And why, if he must "get back to the image.'' does he not at least employ the gains of imagination and emotion brought to painting by impressionism, surrealism and abstraction? A picture called The Window Box, on display at Manhattan's Maynard Walker Gallery last week, gives persuasive answers to both questions. In it is a little girl, perhaps sent upstairs for an hour of penance, who dimly but fearfully perceives the end of her innocence. The picture has charm and--in the dark room, the vacuous expression--a touch of horror. Without luck's greatest blessings, the photographer who wanted to duplicate the painting would wait (for the clear light, for the tilt of the head) longer than it took the artist to learn to paint. And if the explicit drawing had been lost in abstractionist broad-brushing, its power would have been lost too.

The painter of The Window Box (and 31 others in the exhibit) is John Chumley, 33, who lives in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and never had a New York show before. He grew up around Knoxville, Tenn., where he had one major interest--football--and one minor one--drawing.

It was not until a knee injury eliminated him from football at the University of Kentucky that he began to concentrate on art. He studied at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, under a great teacher. Painter Walter Stuempfig.

Most of his other instructors were committed to abstraction, but Stuempfig, says Chumley, quickly saw that realism "was the right kind of thing for me." Chumley's subject matter is primarily rural ("It's where I grew up. It's my natural element"), and though his paintings seem simple, they are actually enormously complex. He works in tempera, "a slow medium," goes back to his subject day after day, adding new impressions, perfecting the composition, unlocking fresh secrets.

"You grow along with the painting." says Chumley.

He paints barns and farmhouses, his small children (two boys, two girls), even a pair of empty boots crumpled on a chair. In one scene a young man stands silhouetted against a Gothic-American bay window in the empty parlor of an abandoned house. It would have been merely stagy were it not for its brooding strength; and for all their beauty. Chumley's houses and barns would be flat were it not for his lyric brush and the moods it evokes. A painting of three children's swings, hanging empty from a leafless tree, is filled with yesterday's laughter.

A bent farmer, seen through the cavern of a big barn, seems the loneliest man on earth. And the open window of an abandoned house fills one canvas with mystery, like a mouth that has much to tell but cannot speak.

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