We now come to Part Two of my series on the figural paintings of the 20th century American artist Robert Bliss. This installment concerns the technical analysis of his painting style. Don’t worry, it won’t just be a dry soliloquy about pigments and glazing techniques. I will relate his techniques to the nest of shards that was his paranoiac persona.

Robert Bliss had very two important periods of painting instruction. The first was after WWII when he traveled to Chadds Ford, PA to study with the Wyeths (Caroline in particular). The second was after Bliss retired from teaching at Deerfield Academy and set up home and studio south of Boston.

Let’s begin with Bliss’s time with the Wyeths. The Wyeths are three generations trained in the 19th century style of academic art. I think that I can safely surmise that everyone reading this article has seen many paintings by many Wyeths and would agree that their works are easily described as beautifully wrought. Their style continues driven to this day by odd perspectives and purely drafted compositions. Into this churning process went Bliss.

Drawing was the most important element in education à la Wyeth. Bliss’s estate has come to light in the past year, and therein we find drawings which show his success in precision draftsmanship. Most artists get by with a modicum of skill, but Bliss proved himself abundant with talent. This skill is the basis of his achievements.

The Wyeths’ next lesson for Bliss, after drawing, would have been learning how to paint glazes and contrast them with slight bits of solid, opaque pigment. Pigment is solid matter which light stimulates to reflect what we see as color; varnish is colorless; and a glaze is varnish mixed with a small amount of pigment. Light will reflect color faster from solid pigment than from the small bits of solid pigment mixed with varnish in a glaze. The opaque paint will also have a stronger color than the thinned glaze.

Let’s see this in action.

The painting which I believe best shows the culmination of his Wyeth art education is the work Boy in a Tree (my appellation). This composition has both an odd tangential perspective and a solitary figure pondering nature (cf. Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth).

In this painting you can visually distinguish the ridge line of the Deerfield hills from the sky, the jacket from the pants, the tree from all else, but if you get physically close to this painting these elements are no more than the shifting of colors from one glaze to another. There is very, very little pigment in this entire work. These colored varnishes are layered until the surface of this work reflects with a mirror-like porcelain shine.

Although they are impossible to see in this reproduction, all of the highlights in the tree branches and the trunk are very light strokes of opaque yellow paint. The dark brown shadows of the tree are also dashes of solid pigment. By picking the elements of highest contrast to reflect light first, Bliss makes the tree virtually jump out of the painting.

Then Bliss causes the highly glazed, subtle transition of colors from the sky to the horizon to connect with the highly glazed body of the boy himself in a hazy, technically unified continuum. This trick suggests a connection between the spiritual essence of the boy and the atmosphere itself and makes the boy less tangible and more out of reach. The tree is present and accounted for, but the boy is made vaporous with a pensive outlook that shows his interest is miles away.

When he was teaching at Deerfield, Bliss struggled with his own strong attraction to the boys that he painted. He used the compositions and the technical qualities of his production to evoke a disconnect from this struggle and from his subjects.

After Bliss left Deerfield Academy, he moved to Hull, MA, a resort town next to Nantasket Beach (the “Coney Island” south of Boston, replete with arcades and other attractions). At some moment while painting at the beach, or prowling pinball halls for models, Robert Bliss met another single male artist: Samuel Rose.

Sam Rose was an American Realist, one of the most technically proficient painters of the mid-20th century. He had learned and developed techniques of glazing surpassed by few. Rose and Bliss were friends at the time that I studied painting with Sam Rose, so I can tell you firsthand that what Rose was teaching appears in the later works by Bliss.

Bliss’s paintings now took on a simple tonal quality. Instead of having a wide selection of colors, his palette narrowed considerably. Bliss still used glazes with slight amounts of opaque paint for stunning contraposition. What changed was the method and depth of the glazes.

Bliss began to use a technique called stippling. This is a technique which dabs on a small amount of glaze with a flat-tipped brush, by which process a very small and even layer is applied. This layer is not smooth and glassy like Bliss’s previous brushed-on glazes because the dabbing with hundreds of hairs on the brush causes an eggshell-like surface.

The work Boy on a Board (my appellation) will give us a perfect image to examine.

Bliss painted the background in two contrasting colors—both are opaque paint—flat and solid. He also joined the dark background color with the shadows cast down from the boy’s body onto the board on which he lies. This separates the body from its environment with a halo of dark contrasting monochrome against the round and modeled form of the boy.

The body was achieved by weeks of applying stippled glazes using slightly varied tones applied one on another until the soft curves of the body began to roll out toward the viewer from the stark background. Bliss needed much less depth to the glaze to get this effect. Less glaze depth uses less varnish—and less varnish means less distance for the light to penetrate and reflect. Using the stippling technique the paint layer is just slightly more penetrable than a solid opaque pigment, so a very soft effect is achieved—hence better skin tone than his prior works.

The plain, two-color opaque medium background contrasting with the complex stipple glazing technique causes the eye to be stimulated by and attracted to the variegation. Complicating this juxtaposition, Bliss uses similar colors in the glazes and the background to achieve a chromatic unity. This creates a stressful contrast because the body is so differently painted, yet of the same colors.

Bliss used the same technical contrast of opaque pigment and glazes in Boy in a Tree but to an opposite effect. Instead of having the boy taken away from the viewer by reducing the substance of the image through diluted glazes until it becomes a fractional reflection, the quicker reflecting stippled surface of Boy on a Board allows Bliss to push out the boy’s form faster toward our eyes with curves and cream tones in a passive- aggressive pose. The boy’s hands are positioned so as to suggest no interference, while the remaining body parts are thrust tantalizingly without resistance.

I will now present another image to which you may apply the same theories. The work is Sebastian (my appellation). Please note a repetition by Bliss of this new-found ability to get closer to the model. This is certainly indicative of his new lifestyle away from the stricture of teacher/student.

In this second phase of Bliss’s art and life, he began to share time and space with the boys he painted. He changed his artistic production: The boys reach out; the boys are finally accessible. Each stippled glaze is a lick of paint patiently and lovingly added over prolonged and repeated poses.

When Bliss moved to Hull, MA, he became a free man. He was known to have a drink while he was a teacher at Deerfield, but I can tell you that he added a plethora of illegal substances to his intake during his last years living and painting. I will present testimony to his consumption and distribution of these to his new-found friends—his models—in Part Three.
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John Curuby is President of The Boston Art Club, founded in 1854, and an enthusiastic collector of Robert Bliss paintings.