Book traces life of Maine artist Wulp

Editor’s Note: This story appeared in Tuesday’s Style section, but was incomplete due to an error by the Style editor. The following is the complete version.

When John Wulp was in third grade in New Rochelle, N.Y., his art teacher asked the pupils to bring an object to paint in class. Wulp showed up with a small branch of a flowering tree and began rendering its shape in watercolor. Wulp, who is 74 and lives on Vinalhaven, recounts the experience in “John Wulp,” a new, elegantly produced art book that chronicles his life and work as an artist.

“I was filled with excitement,” he writes in the first pages of the book’s autobiographical section. “I thought the top of my head would come off … I found a means of expression and a theme that has lasted my entire life. I am still painting that branch.”

While Wulp is best known in Maine as a celebrated director of community and school theater productions on North Haven, he won national fame as a set designer and producer in New York City. He has won an Obie, a Tony, a Drama Desk Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Award, and was founder of Playwrights Horizons Studio School in New York. In 1985, when work in New York was waning, Wulp moved to Maine because he was inspired by the paintings of Fairfield Porter and wanted to devote his time to painting. Since then, his life on North Haven and Vinalhaven has engaged him both as a theater artist and painter.

Last week Wulp returned to New York for the opening of a show of his acrylic and watercolor paintings at Beadleston Gallery on Fifth Avenue and to do a reading from the book, which is put out by CommonPlace Publishing, at the Lenox Hill Bookstore. A second exhibition of his work will take place at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland in May.

“This is my 75th year to Heaven,” said Wulp, revealing his literary side by paraphrasing the poet Dylan Thomas. Wulp, who is a dedicated reader and writer, curated and mounted the show at the gallery owned by his friend William Beadleston. “I decided if I were going to have a show, it would by in my 75th year.”

The exhibition features his work as a portraitist but also as a painter deeply connected to nature, especially to his surroundings in Maine, where all but two of the paintings were made during the past 10 years. His style can be described as hyperreal with heightened colors and explicit shadows.

The book collects much of Wulp’s oeuvre – paintings, photographs and set designs – in glossy reproductions, and the history behind many of those works is detailed in the autobiography, which is, in turns, tragic and funny. It also recounts Wulp’s time on the islands in Maine, his controversial status as a tenacious director and his numerous successes with productions, including the original musical “Islands,” a community theater piece that was performed on Broadway shortly after the events of Sept. 11 and will be the subject of the documentary “On This Island” on Maine Public Broadcasting on Feb. 18.

In New York, more than 200 friends, fans and art lovers showed up for the gallery event that took place last week. Among the guests were theater directors, actors, art collectors, artists, writers and patrons who have commissioned Wulp over the years to do portraits. Sigourney Weaver, the actor and the subject of one of Wulp’s paintings, had visited the gallery earlier in the week before leaving for the Golden Globe Awards ceremony in Los Angeles over the weekend.

Playwright John Guare, who wrote the introduction for “John Wulp,” also attended the opening.

“It was sort of like a homecoming for John,” said Guare. “There was great joy and there were a lot of people who were glad to see John in New York, and to see him so happy, and to see how good the paintings looked all together. It was remarkable to see so many of his paintings, and the gallery was a thing of beauty.”

Guare, whose wife, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, Wulp painted in the 1960s, called the painter the “last romantic” and expressed enthusiasm for the standard of perfection that drives Wulp and that also led to his disappointment with theater in New York.

Christopher Crosman, director of the Farnsworth, said that during the years Wulp was making strides in the theater world, he had a parallel career in art. The show in May is a celebration of that career.

“He’s a realist,” said Crosman, “but the subjects he chooses are very personal. He follows the tradition of portrait painters coming from Sargent. His style is tight, almost photo-realist.”

One artist, who had previously seen the paintings only as reproductions, remarked that viewing them in person and to scale made them sing.

“When you see them in person, you can appreciate John’s amazing artistry in terms of design,” the artist said. “I’m thinking particularly of the portraits. They are really quite beautiful and each one has a story about how it was received by the subject and often that story is quite amusing.”

Another artist said Wulp is more graphic than painterly, and added that “he’s so bright and he’s such a genius and that all comes through in the show.”

For his own part, Wulp declines to describe either his style or his temperament. “I wish people would know me from the work I do and nothing else,” he said. “I am not my own most popular person.”

After the gallery opening and book reading, Wulp was scheduled to return to Maine to work with his high school students on a one-act play. He is developing several theater projects, including a production of “The Little Locksmith,” a Maine-based memoir, and a new musical, the details of which he would not disclose. “You’ll see,” he said mischievously. “You’ll see.”

The artist also has returned to the easel.

“I’ve begun painting again for the first time in two years,” said Wulp, who completed a new painting last month.

The subject is an old one for Wulp: lilacs.