A matter of belief: Higher powers and the color teal

Part 1 of my BART Chat with painter Sig Haines was published in the Jan. 31 edition of Coastin’. The conversation with Haines, a former art educator at the Swain School of Design and at the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth continues here.

Don Wilkinson: How long have you been retired from teaching?

Sig Haines: It will be eight years in June.

DW: And now in your retirement, you seem to have a very workman-like approach to painting.

SH: Yes, I do. And it’s a promise I made to myself. First of all, it’s what I wanted to do all my life, to just spend time in the studio and paint. And a few things have happened as a result.

I started out forcing myself to do eight hours a day in the studio. That became a little difficult after some time. Hell, I’ll be 73 in a week-and-a-half.

Sometimes an idea gets away from you. And then two days later, you look back and think ... oh ... and you need to rework it.

There's a chance to really pursue things and it’s been exciting. I don’t know if you’ve heard that I have a show coming up in 2020.

DW: Yes... in Norway.

SH: It’s going a little slowly. I’m a little nervous about it.

DW: You work from photographic reference. Are the paintings you are doing for the show images of Norway?

SH: Yes, of the area I came from, my hometown of Skundeneshavn, on the island of Karmoy. It’s become a destination spot.

They now call it “The Summer Town of Norway.” Buses come through all the time, there are many bed-and breakfasts.

DW: Tell me about the light there. How does it impact your work?

SH: There is a range to it, but the major thing is the North Sea. The weather comes straight off the sea. And there’s a lot of cloudiness going through and it throws different things into place. A landscape can shift because of a heavy wind.

It’s phenomenal to be there, at the place I stay... to be there at 11:30 at night and you’re out on the patio and the sun is just going down. To be out in a light like that, that late in the day... it’s really quite a rich color.

It’s a rocky coast and the light changes it a bit. If you were to look closely at the rocks — what color the rocks are — they’re a great green, the green of a copper patina.

Just as a point of interest, there is a copper mine on the northern end of the island. And that mine was the source of all the copper in the Statue of Liberty.

DW: Let’s stay on the topic of color for a bit. Why is it that you don’t believe in teal?

SH: Teal? First of all, I don’t what it is…

DW: Let’s call it bluish-green then.

SH: Right. Well for me, color is cadmium red and viridian and burnt sienna. Teal and those other colors don’t matter to me. They’re just commercial kinds of colors, commercial terms…

DW: Commercial? How about poetic?

SH: Yeah... I'm not saying they can’t be poetic, but for my work, for my relationship with color, it doesn't mean anything.

DW: Your daughter Liv recently mentioned that when she was five, she asked you for a maroon crayon and you told her there was no such thing!

SH: (laughing) Right! There isn’t! Not from my point of view! Color is my plastic element, It is the thing I manipulate to make paintings.

DW: You are almost 73. And you certainly look to be fit, but I know you’ve had the occasional health scare. As we age, we become increasingly aware of dwindling mortality. Do think this might be the last show you ship off to Norway?

SH: No... no. Not at all. In a sense, I’ve taken care of that issue. I don’t want to deal with something as morose as that and have that be a part of my life.

I’ve found — and this may be as a result of a recovery from alcoholism and in order to do what I do — that what I have decided to do is accept the thing that terrifies us all throughout life.

You have to accept it. It is the only way... there is no doubting it.

I am not someone who... let’s put it this way: I do think there's a higher power than myself. To think otherwise is pretty damned vain. If you think you’re the most important thing on earth, well... you shouldn’t think like that. It’s really bad. It leads to bad things.

Acceptance matters. I don’t think about it (mortality) when I’m painting. I’ve been able to deal with it. When I hear someone I know dies, I think about it. But in my everyday regular life... nah.

I don’t know what happens when you have no time left. But for now, I’m going to keep painting.

Don Wilkinson is a painter and art critic who lives in New Bedford. Contact him at Don.Wilkinson@gmail.com. His reviews run each week in Coastin’.