Word: stuempfig
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Dates: during 1949-1949
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Along with most of his contemporaries, Stuempfig has tried his hand at abstract art, but only once. "I was told to paint an abstraction," says he, "and I did it, in school, where all abstractions belong. But at the Pennsylvania Academy where I studied I tried to resist the tendency of the average art student to like the obvious -the obvious being Picasso and Matisse...
...widower with two sons, 8 and 12, Stuempfig somehow combines his absorption in art with "generally fulfilling the job of parent. It's either work or stomach ulcers for me because if I don't paint I get sick." For the last 15 years he has been painting an average 56-hour week, alternately learning and ignoring his craft...
Move People. "Technique, composition and all that should be unconscious," Stuempfig explains. "This whole emphasis on technique is a product of the 19th and 20th Centuries; before that people painted the way they walked. The aim is to create something that moves people, that affects them in one way or another...
...pictures in last week's show were not in the least moving, and they were the ones that proved how cold, competent and clear-eyed a painter Stuempfig is when he chooses not to be romantic. Dark, highly polished still lifes of vegetables on a table, they were so expertly done as to invite comparison with the 18th Century French master, Jean Baptiste Chardin...
Loathe Labels. Like any artist worth the name, Stuempfig loathes labels. He accepts the label "romantic" only because he believes that "all good painters are romantic painters. You have to have a certain romantic approach to life or you wouldn't be a painter in the first place. I can't define the word; to me it applies even to Thomas Eakins and Velasquez...