Hands-on Experience Veteran artist Robert Birmelin encourages UM students to shape future of culture

Last week, Robert Birmelin, a New York City artist, was talking to 30 students about his drawings on view at the University of Maine. The novice artists sat on the floor crossed-legged or on benches, or with their knees drawn up close and sketchpads in their laps. They listened to the elder master, an established and practiced artist with academic ties to The Cooper Union Art School, Yale and the Slade School of Art in London, and a three-decade-long trail of exhibitions across the country.

In addition to the small collection of drawings on view through Dec. 1 at the Department of Art Galleries in Carnegie Hall, Birmelin currently is being shown at the Peter Findlay Gallery in Manhattan. (Birmelin’s works also are in the permanent collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American Art and the Hirshorn Museum. )

On the day of the gallery talk, Birmelin’s status as an art heavyweight hung as securely in the air as the drawings did on the wall. The room was rapt with silence and curiosity as Birmelin was advising the burgeoning artists to “make an image that extends into the world” and to consider that drawing is “very much about the hand and the arm and one’s own body” and that within each line there is “some kind of communication of the drive and energy that created it.”

Since the UM Museum of Art moved to downtown Bangor last year, the display space in Carnegie Hall has become, primarily, a teaching tool. The relocation of the permanent collection and its director has, by necessity, energized members of the department to become aggressive about running a gallery program with minimal funds and filling the space with works by faculty and students as well as artists in the outside world.

That’s why Nina Jerome, a painter and lecturer in the UM art department, was emboldened to approach Birmelin at an art talk he gave at Colby College more than a year ago and ask him to head north to speak to her students. She particularly liked the way Birmelin, himself a teacher of 30 years at Queens College of the City University of New York and visiting lecturer throughout the country, addressed the students comfortably and charismatically.

One might describe the artist as having the appeal the Beat poets had in the 1950s and 1960s – Birmelin dresses in black and has a white beard and owly dark-rimmed glasses. But his drawings, which he said came from a love of comic books and superheroes as a boy, are very today, very urban and ethnic. Some of the works can be viewed one way and then turned upside down for another reading. (He did this with one of the drawings at the gallery talk and also told students about another that can be read from all four angles.) Before he showed up on campus, some people who saw the drawings – street scenes with multicultural images and an in-your-face city sensibility – thought Birmelin might be black or Hispanic. (He’s white.)

But Jerome particularly liked a classroom technique that Birmelin described: taking students out into the forest and asking them to remember and draw what they saw once back in the studio. (She does that now by taking her students into the University Forest.)

“I was hoping the students would get the idea that the painting is not just a picture but a way we take our ideas and figure them out in the work we do,” said Jerome who, with painter Ed Nadeau, has a show in the upstairs gallery of Carnegie Hall. “One of the things Birmelin was clear about was that he doesn’t want students to see him as an accomplished artist and that now it’s easy. He still has struggles. Each time he’s doing a painting, it’s a search and it’s the same kind of search they are doing. The process goes on right through life. For him, an experienced artist, it’s on a different level. But it’s important on every level.”

Department chairman and painter James Linnehan said the contact with older, accomplished painters is an important part of the educational process for any artist. “Our mission is to have living artists like Birmelin coming here and talking to students,” he said. “We have a lot of pent-up energy about what to do with the program and having Birmelin and his works and the gallery talk completes a circle. Seeing the drawings and hearing how the ideas come to fruition is important for the students. That’s what it’s all about really.”

Sarah Peters, who was in the audience that day, agreed.

“I think it is valuable to have artists come here because we are in a rural environment,” said Peters, a senior majoring in studio art and art history. “It’s not the kind of art I normally gravitate toward but he has certainly been doing it longer than I have, and I don’t pretend to know anything about art. But the stories an artist tells provides insights. After hearing him, I have a warmer feeling for the work, a more visceral sense.”

And Birmelin, it turns out, has a warm feeling for Maine. During the 1970s and 1980s, he rented a house on Deer Isle for two months every summer and painted along the craggy shoreline. “I had been painting the city and had reached an impasse and felt I had to cleanse my eye and let the landscape speak to me very directly,” said Birmelin. At the end of each day, he wrapped his works in plastic and hid them in the rocks until the next morning. He credits that pastoral experience with leading him to his signature urban style.

“I was pleased with the paintings I did but there was something else I wanted to do and didn’t know how to do it,” said Birmelin, a native of Newark, N.J. “The city subjects were growing inside of me. Then one day I was on a bluff looking down on the reach in a cove and I said I am going to build a city. So on this fairly advanced painting of the cove, I began to put in buildings and gas stations and roads. What I was doing was creating a city I had been seeing for 30 years on the Jersey Turnpike.”

In the end, Birmelin said, the connection between veteran and budding artists is one he likes to tap occasionally since he stopped teaching full time five years ago. Mostly he wants the students to think about their own role in shaping the future of culture.

“Very few of the students here will be artists, as such,” he said. “But those that are really, really involved, if they have professional aspirations, they really do have to get to a metropolitan center at some point. It’s a small world, and so much depends upon proximity to it. On the other hand, one has to believe you can live in any world and have the light inside and can make the ordinary extraordinary. For some blessed souls, that happens wherever you are.”