Joseph Solman : drawings, collages & PRINTS

The art of drawing was critical to Joseph Solman and remained the basis of much of his work. In an introduction he wrote to a portfolio of his works on paper… 

“The drawings of Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Claude and other masters through Ingres, Delacroix, Degas, Seurat, Picasso and Klee are prized as works of art as are their paintings. How heartwarming for us to learn that in Rembrandt's own day a fine marine painter, one Jan van de Capelle, a friend of the master, had acquired no less than 400 drawings by him; while Govert Flinck, a pupil, also owned a notable collection. Watteau is said to have told his friends that his drawings were even dearer to him than his paintings. Drawings are , in the words of Graham Reynolds, Keeper/of the Victoria and Albert Museum, "the sip of claret which gives the flavour of the whole wine."

There is probably no useful distinction to be made between the quality of a drawing produced for its own sake and that of a drawing which is a preparatory study for a painting, or a matter-of-fact recording of detail.”

The earliest period between 1925 - 1930, part of which time he was a student at the National Academy of Design, Solman has described as “the period of indefatigable, endless drawing” where he filled a great number of sketchbooks in trains, streets and libraries.

From about 1931 to 1940, while working in oils and gouache, his drawings consisted mainly of sparse, stenographic notes, often scribbled on the back of an envelope or any scrap of paper at hand. Solman drew directly on canvas with a worn-down stub of a brush dipped in black or blue-green paint to sharply outline the forms and areas to be elaborated in color. His gouaches, on the other hand, were always done directly on the scene. His portraits were also started and finished fronted by the sitter - drawn and redrawn in paint at the outset with the same stub of a brush. The latter became his main drawing tool, a technique which he later taught to students.

In the mid-forties, Solman made a series of studies for a portrait of Mozart. These resulted in a group of 12 watercolors and gouaches used ultimately for a silk-screen folio edition (see below).

In the Fifties, when the Solman family began their Summer vacations in Rockport, Massachusetts, he sketched beach scenes and domestic subjects in pen or magic-marker. He has said that he “often halted my wife in a momentary position, either relaxed or strained, to probe in pencil or paint the desired design. To be wed to an artist adds a new peril to marriage but I must testify to my wife's endearing patience at all times. My son and daughter, on the other hand, were reluctant victims, though they sometimes favored me with sullen resignation.”

In the Sixties, he took to sketching subway passengers on his journey to and from a part-time job at the New York racetracks. The act of pencilling a diligent reader on the grey print of the Morning Telegraph was an accident. He had no sketch pad at hand. He soon found out to his delight that drawing against the print was like cutting out shapes with a pencil instead of with scissors. Solman found that the subway was a multi-faceted studio and he did reams of work. A framer then attached them to acid-free board to give them permanence and he filled them in with watercolor from appended notations.

In 1968, he began serious work in the monotype medium during the three Summer months in the family’s country house at Gloucester, Mass. From that time to the present he sketched rural scenes, trees, marshes etc., and back in the city, tar-carts, motorcycles and the midtown buildings and skyscrapers he had avoided in the Thirties. Much of all this material he used for his monotypes, placing the sketch under the glass as guide for the final painting. A large group of drawings were also made during some five trips to Venice, many of which were turned into monotypes.

The gallery presents a small selection of drawings and prints by Joseph Solman.