Visions and evocations Thomas Sgouros looks within for his ‘Remembered Landscapes’ BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	No limits As Impressionist Paul Gauguin wrote, "Color is the language of the listening eye." Painter Thomas Sgouros must have been listening quite attentively when his vision was good, judging from his luminous "Remembered Landscapes" series. Gallery-goers are getting two chances to see those works, which have accumulated since 1992. At Gallery Agniel/Martina & Co., more than a dozen oil paintings are being shown through October 9, along with the stunning jewelry of Barbara Seidenath. Come October 3, watercolors in his series will be on view through the 15th at the Providence Art Club. Gallery owner and freelance curator Sara Agniel best describes Sgouros’s current work and its genesis. "In his career, he used the still life as a mechanism to compose form and tone and balance in the square or rectangle of the canvas," she began. "And I think that he treats the landscape in the same way. That basic sky, horizon line, foreground is an armature for exploring what is essentially a purely abstract painting surface. And so by restricting oneself as an artist to a basic format, you have a lot of freedom to explore composition. So that’s what I think is really striking about him. "But then within that," she continued, glancing around at his paintings in the North Main Street gallery, "they’re damn gorgeous to look at!" Yes, Sgouros hangs a lot of beautiful tonal gradations and compositional balances on a simple horizon line. In the early 19th century, J.M.W. Turner produced explosive seascapes that might contain only a ship’s mast at a far horizon to anchor the painting in the tangible world. Ever since, artists have had permission to explore the visceral, expressionistic satisfactions of virtual abstractions in the guise of ostensibly representational vistas. In "Remembered Landscapes," Sgouros takes the excuse of a vast sky and foreground, which meet about a quarter of the way up the canvas, and he plays with color and volume. In more than one, a small patch of white peeks out from the edge of darker clouds, to provide visual balance with a light streak diagonally below. Timelessness is an element in these paintings, collectively and individually. Each is titled "Remembered Landscape" and is undated, as though their particularity has nothing to do with when they were made. Sizes vary from a foot to more than a yard wide; some are framed and others — especially the larger ones — are unbound, reminding us that panoramas sweep far past any rectangular confine. As dawns and sunsets are infinite, so too are the color palettes Sgouros draws from. The grays and browns of some Hudson River School cloudscape might be hung next to a canvas with a violet sky, or one where a pinkish-purple horizon glow hovers beneath dense blue clouds. One vast sky is in various roiling shades of lime and olive greens, except for the merest reminder of blue at an upper corner. If Monet could find scores of variations in what light did to haystacks or Rouen Cathedral, think of how many more opportunities Thomas Sgouros has, drawing from the depths of recollection. — B.R.

In the studio of Thomas Sgouros, high on a shelf near the ceiling, dusty remnants of a prior life are lined up like yard sale discards. Glass bottles and a brandy snifter, ceramic jugs and a silver sugar bowl and creamer, all objects whose talent it is to catch the light in interesting ways, to glint and gleam and reflect hints of nearby colors.

There was a time when the world of representation was very important to this painter, when capturing the formalistic relationships of light and composition in still lifes was what he chose to specialize in.

In fact, before that focus of attention, Sgouros was a commercial illustrator, working for all of the major ad agencies in New York City. Whether he was drawing the latest model Ford or a kitchen appliance, capturing the visual world literally and accurately was his well-paid day job.

Still, the notion of turning his back on the visually literal, like sweeping aside objects on a table, did appeal to him as a young man. Abstract Expressionism beckoned him, along with every other young painter in New York in the late 1950s. The fascination didn’t last very long.

"I wanted to be au courant," he said. "But I gradually realized that I wasn’t that, or I didn’t want to be. So I became a factual painter, painting from observation, looking at the canvas as an entity that needed to be divided up into kind of proportional happy relationships, and using the observable reality as the vehicle to all this stuff.

"And then when I couldn’t do that any longer and decided that I wasn’t going to jump in the goddamn river, I decided to carry the same thing through on these things," he said, gesturing across his Providence Art Club studio to some of his "Remembered Landscapes," two of which were partially completed on easels; others leaned against walls.

The jumping into the river reference was to the period in 1991 and ’92 when macular degeneration took most of the sight in one eye and then in the other over the course of about six months. Suicide wasn’t a serious option, Sgouros said, because he had three children, and his remarkably supportive wife, Joan, was dying of cancer at the time. His present wife, Roxy, was a long-time friend.

As with most people who are legally blind, he can still make out some of his visual world.

"I can see that you’re wearing a blue shirt, I think, or a dark shirt," he said. My shirt was blue checked. He leaned closer in his chair. "And I think you’re — yeah, you’re wearing glasses.

"And you have a beard, for Christ’s sake!" he suddenly exclaimed with a laugh at the discovery.

Sgouros, 77, was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Greek immigrant parents. At Cambridge High and Latin School, his mentor and father figure was Joseph L.C. Santoro, a former president of the Boston Watercolor Society, a position Sgouros stepped into in 1956. In 1975, he became head of the illustration department at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2001, Sgouros received the state’s Claiborne Pell Award for Excellence in Arts, and his work is in museum and private collections across the country.

When Sgouros lost his sight, he had just spent three years completing a set of 84 still lifes that secured his artistic reputation. Afterward, capturing such meticulous detail was out of the question.

"I had to work and I didn’t know what to do, so I started to make paintings," he recalled. "I had no idea what I would be doing. I couldn’t examine anything based on observation, which turned out to be a pretty good thing, because I don’t think an artist should be a reporter of observation of rather something a little more profound, and I hope that’s what I’m doing."

Exploring beneath surfaces, beyond appearances, had been a principle concern passed on to his illustration students.

With the aid of masking tape or T-square, he could still create a horizon line, and then orient tone and color areas, taking up oil or watercolor paint from a memorized palette.

"Very often it works, but sometimes it doesn’t," he said, then pointed across the room. "That little one on the easel I destroyed two days ago, and I’ve been so pissed off about it that I haven’t touched it."

For the past decade-plus, he has been trying to capture "evocations of a place or a feeling."

"In many ways they are abstractions," Sgouros explained. "Shape relationships, color relationships, texture relationships that happen to be in the context of what could be landscapes."

That "could" was revealing. He has come far from the verisimilitude of illustration, which he hasn’t attempted in 20 years. Nowadays his efforts are closer to that of the incipient Abstract Expressionist he was as a young man. Sgouros’s landscapes are virtual abstractions, horizon lines providing context for all the free-form cloud-like action above them.

It’s no wonder that the best of his illustration students have gone beyond the literally depictable. Among the many artists he has taught, Chris Van Allsburg and David Macaulay have dedicated books to him.

What are his core instructions to his students?

"I ask them to paint from their imagination, and I ask them to paint from observation and encourage them to see things individually and not representationally — although that’s part of it," he said.

As a teacher, he wants them "just to find out who they are."

He explained. "You’ve got to be all the artist you can be. Not an echo of me or anyone else, but identify who you are. That’s the purpose of the whole experience."

Apparently, losing most of his sight a dozen years ago didn’t limit the art that he can bring into the world — he learned that he can do so through others as well as through his own brush.

There is vision and there is vision.

"I love what I do," the artist and teacher declared. "I don’t love what I manufacture, but I love the process of trying to organize that surface on the canvas. I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing. Except maybe talking to students. Trying to infuse them with the same kind of enthusiasm."