At some point during his years at Rhode Island School of Design, Eric Telfort was warned, “Many are called, few are chosen,” or words to that effect, by one of his teachers. Painting canvases in the 21st century doesn’t exactly come with job security, benefits and a pension. The financial demands of life after college sometimes force art to take a backseat to the nine-to-five grind. Telfort’s teacher wasn’t being discouraging. It’s just a fact that countless young men and women who study art at the undergraduate level will never actually earn a sustainable living as artists.
Telfort paraphrased his teacher’s words: “Out of all of you in this classroom right now, three of you might make it. The rest of you are going to get married, have lives and forget about art. Some of you are going to hate this experience and never paint again. Some of you will graduate and art will become a hobby.” Artists who do not earn enough money to build a career around painting alone often go into education. Of teaching, Telfort said, “People will say you failed at being commercially great so, yeah, go to teaching. It’s a backup plan.”
For Telfort though, art and teaching are inseparable, two sides of the same coin. Even as a boy in Miami, growing up “in the projects,” he said with a smile and an ironic raised fist, Telfort had a knack for interpreting schoolwork for his classmates. Absorbing lessons and communicating them in a more straightforward way than his authority figures may well have been the first step in Telfort’s artistic awakening. “In a way, it was a competitive game. In terms of my instructors,” the 28-year-old told Tribe, “I’ve always wanted to show them up. I think like a teacher.” He added, “But I don’t think I’ve ever had an instructor I didn’t learn something from.”
Telfort now serves as the program director at Mount Hope Learning Center in Providence, Rhode Island. “We provide afterschool homework assistance and arts-based enrichment to Martin Luther King Elementary School students, kindergarten through fifth grade.” The son of Haitian immigrants who divorced when he was young, Telfort thinks his own underprivileged upbringing gives him a unique bond with the community he serves. “You’ve got to love these kids in order to help them,” he said. “You’ve got to accept the fact that they’re in a place that you probably were in. I’m not too far removed from the school experience. I know what it feels like to have to show up every day and make something of yourself because there’s this social pressure for you to go to school and become something great.”
Professional pressure has replaced the social pressure of Telfort’s childhood. Demands on his time—a job about which he is obviously passionate—necessarily limit the hours he can spend painting. “At the moment I’m building a body of work. I look at my paintings like hand-written letters. I talk about my life in my paintings. When someone purchases one of my paintings, they have a piece of my life with them.” Spreading the word about his work, and the work itself, to a wider audience is never far from Telfort’s thoughts. A 2010 exhibition in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city is just, according to Telfort, the tip of the iceberg.
Though the techniques, palettes and perspectives of Telfort’s work perhaps owe a debt to painters who worked hundreds of years before him, the subject matter is all about the twentieth century of Telfort’s upbringing. His thorough training—a bachelor’s degree from RISD and a master’s from New York Academy of Art—doesn’t preclude subtle nods to popular culture.
One unfinished work in his office on Providence’s East Side features Telfort, his head wrapped up in fabric. He is seated and bent over some papers lying on the floor in front of him. A laundry basket is affixed to his back and a broom has been pushed stick-first through it so that it protrudes at a forty-five degree angle up and away from his bent torso. This, according to Telfort, is a reenactment of an episode from his childhood. In the makeshift costume, comprised only of ordinary household items, Telfort is transform into one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Its literal representation, a plastic action figure, is cast aside in the corner of the canvas.
Portraying himself and his adult siblings in roles they played together as children allows Telfort to relive moments from his childhood, a period in his life, he told Tribe, that wasn’t all bad. “We were just totally naïve to the fact that we were that broke and poor. Even in what some would consider to be a sad upbringing, there was a lot of laughter and creativity,” he said. “Even that privileged person knows about dressing up like a Ninja Turtle or a Ghostbuster.” He added, “We are all the same. We all have had, to some degree, the same experiences and the same situations.”
Regardless of the obvious pleasure Telfort derives from the nostalgia of comic books and science fiction, people have interpreted his work in interesting and troublesome ways because he is Black, because he is Hatian—not that it bothers Telfort even a little bit. “I know I’m bringing to light these complex issues of Black identity,” he said. Of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pose he added, “I got ripped apart for it because my teachers were like, ‘Are you painting yourself as some kind of terrorist? You need to understand what your work means today.’” Criticism like this excites Telfort driving him even further in the direction of exploring the different meanings visual depictions of ordinary American childhood play like “cowboys and Indians” can take on when adults dress up and engage in the very same games.
While Eric Telfort concerns himself with crafting a substantial body of work, painter and photographer Dr. Mahendar Paul must be wondering how close he is to running out of space in his Cranston home to store his. “I am a very prolific painter,” Paul told Tribe understatedly of his twenty years as an artist. “I finished ten paintings in the last two weeks.” Asked why he doesn’t sell his work, Paul smiled, looked up at the ceiling pensively and replied, “I don’t know. I think one of the reasons is that I don’t want to be bothered. See, it doesn’t make sense for me to spend hours and hours finding clients. I just usually give them to my friends.” He continued, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have maybe two thousand paintings here,” Paul said but then amended his statement. “Two thousand may be an exaggeration. There may be more like fifteen hundred.”
A retired veterinarian, Paul came to painting much later in life than Telfort and continues to take classes at Providence Art Club. Having grown up in India, art wasn’t an available course of study. Nothing could have been further removed from reality in the India of Paul’s upbringing than a career in painting. “In India, where I was born—I’m from Punjab—there were only two professions. Either you become a doctor or you become an engineer. That’s it.” The desire of parents for their children to enter stable, lucrative lines of work is certainly not unique to India but Paul said art was simply unthinkable.
A look through Paul’s photographs tells the story of a worldly and well-traveled artist. He was recently in Mongolia and Tibet. Rare images of tribal regions of India, stacked in frames from a recent show, line one wall of Paul’s basement. The shelved walls of his home studio are positively jammed with paintings. Stacked on top of one another, only the white edges of the canvases are visible, some spattered with the reds and oranges of their unseen subjects.
Though Paul mostly paints and photographs (and even sculpts) the human form, he’s been working on landscapes more often lately. Five recently completed highway scenes depict a Providence sunset from a driver’s prospective. The moment—specifically the light—just struck Paul, enough so that he pulled the car over and asked his wife to drive so he could take some photographs to paint from. “Look at the light. Isn’t that amazing? When you actually see it then you are excited.” Paul gets fixated on moments of simple beauty, paints them and moves on, rarely revisiting or altering the image once it’s complete. These sunsets may well be destined for the shelves if he doesn’t run out of room. He seems to have replaced the work ethic of his years as a veterinarian with incalculable artistic productivity.
Paul’s home, where he lives with his wife, is beautiful, uncluttered and decorated abundantly with rugs, furniture and sculpture from their travels. Several of Paul’s paintings grace the walls of his home, works usually featuring one or two figures, many scenes from India. One is of a seated old man in Tibet with his head down and his body almost impossibly crumpled. Other than the side of his face, his hands are the only visible evidence of his flesh. The rest of his body is wrapped in fabric. “In Tibet, and in India, older people can sit all day, not even moving. Look at the hands, how arthritic those hands are, those fingers. Older people, they have nothing else to do. They just sit there basking in the sun all day.” Luckily for those who get to spend some time with Mahendar Paul and his work, idle hands are not something he ever worries about.
________________________________________________________________________
Self-taught Providence painter Francisco Hernandez came to the United States from the Dominican Republic and, like Mahendar Paul, is now retired. While many of Paul’s images—paintings and photographs alike—are a result of his frequent travels, Hernandez’s most recent subject came from his wallet and, by extension, another notable Rhode Island painter. The George Washington portrait Hernandez is working on is based on the famous image on the dollar bill, modeled after a portrait by Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828). Part of the inspiration for the piece came from a visit to the Gilbert Stuart Birthplace & Museum in Saunderstown, Rhode Island. “I’m painting Washington because he’s one of the founders of the country. I was very inspired by his story.” Hernandez pays literal homage in the work to dignity, hope and liberty. The words, each scrawled out chaotically, overlapping behind Washington, form the background of the composition.
Hernandez came to the United States in 1987 but started to paint in the Dominican Republic at the age of 14. The separation of the vibrant colors in Hernandez’s acrylic compositions suggest a more controlled, perhaps pointillism-derived version of the drips and splatters made famous by Jackson Pollack (1912-1956) but with vibrant neon and psychedelic combinations. Fitting the famously firm Washington into this world must make for an interesting challenge.
Of some recent subject matter, two stirring images of WaterFire, one which until recently hung in Congressman David Cicilline’s office, and several horses, Hernandez is unclear as to their relation to one another. “I don’t know,” he told Tribe. “I have a lot of curiosity and I try to express my interior life.” He pulled out a photo album containing photographs of earlier works, some of which contain more overtly political themes. One image, appropriately enough to this election year, Hernandez painted in the 1990s during Newt Gingrich’s reign as Speaker of the House, features a stampeding elephant. “I painted that when I heard about the Contract with America.”
Looking through this photo album with Hernandez, it’s hard to imagine that the painter of the dazzling color and controlled chaos of his current work is the same artist who used to paint more similarly perhaps to Mahendar Paul or Eric Telfort. Hernandez thinks that seeing and reading about Pollack’s work years ago was a big part of his evolution as an artist. “He painted from the inside out,” Hernandez said of Pollack’s painterly expression of his inner life. Hernandez captures figures, objects and locations from the real world with abstract techniques. A clever writer might do well to describe Hernandez’s technique as “literally figurative,” though “figuratively literal” might end up achieving the same effect. We’ll let you decide for yourself.
