One Deer Running

It was the autumn of 1987 when I wandered into the Fishback Galleries off 57th street in Manhattan, a few buildings west of CBS. The elevator leading to the studios had violet wallpaper with deep yellow flowers and dark green carpet. The spacious abstract paintings of some west coast artist filled the walls of the gallery rooms. Large paintings with gobs of primary blues and reds drew me in, the paint on the canvas, the lines and circles forming predetermined direction with no apparent purpose.

When the curator approached, a notebook in her hand and clearly a lot on her mind, I felt out of place. But I asked anyway.

"Do you still have the works of Cole Young here?"

I thought I sounded artsy, as if I tossed out the names of landscape artists everyday over espresso at Raphael's and Michael's Pub.

"I think he had a show here last spring, " I explained.

"Yes," she said, scanning a bookshelf for a specific title. "Two in the back office are all

I have left. "She pulled out a thick volume and fingered the index. "You may spend a few minutes looking about at our current featured artist if you wish.”

By the time she finished speaking, she had already returned to her desk‑‑a long virgin‑white graphics table covered with neatly stacked manila envelopes and coffee table books.

I followed her.

"Did he do well? I mean‑‑how did the show go over?" The glare of her cobalt blue eyes

told me How did it go over? was not a phrase heard often in these titanium white walls.

"He did well, " she said, turning back to her book. "He was one of our most successful

artists. Some fine clients secured his works."

Fine clients.

Martin Scorsese; John Reed, CEO of Citibank; Walter Shipley, CEO of Chase

Manhattan; Wilson Greatbatch, the man who invented the pacemaker .

Fine, indeed.

"What paintings are left?" I asked.

Again, she raised her eyes, more slowly this time. Her Indian red skirt lifted toward her

yellow hue thighs. She wore black heels. I wore jeans, long hair, and the scent of poverty.

“A cloud scene," she said, this time with a sigh.

"And," she added, "'Homage to Cole’."

“Homage to Cole.”  I couldn't believe it.

"Can I see that one please?"

"Please," I went on.  "Would you mind just a few minutes? I was there when he painted that. I was in the studio, smelling the paint. I remember when he moved a few things because they didn’t look right." Her book slipped from her fingers and she lost her place.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That wouldn't be possible. It is locked up for a buyer.”

Someone bought it, yes. The sale secured for tens of thousands of dollars and the painting eventually hung in the second floor lobby of the World Trade Center.

The afternoon was waning as I stepped back out onto Fifty‑seventh Street. The slate blue

sky had darkened, and the sun had turned pale, a yellow oxide.

They didn’t have his self portrait, I thought. We studied his self‑portrait in his class once, I remembered, as I walked toward a street vendor for dinner. I can picture it. He has no shirt on and is standing sideways in front of a window. I think there was a dead bird on the sill.

And, Jesus, “Homage to Cole” painted in respect to one of the most influential artists in Cole’s life, Thomas Cole. Cole loved the way after painting landscapes most of his life, the most beautiful work Thomas Cole did was of the sky, where the Hudson School painter found “grace and expansive energy.”

I was with him then. Allegany, New York, is as far from the Fishback Galleries as landscape allows. The small village on the state's southern tier counts just six thousand residents. The town and its larger neighbor, Olean, are surrounded by the Allegheny Mountains while the Allegheny River S‑curves its way through, shallow enough to wade across. Pennsylvania lies just beyond the valley to the south, and Buffalo, about 75 miles north, is the closest town of any sprawl. In the midst of these  "Enchanted Mountains" is St. Bonaventure University, which boosts the community's head count another 33 percent.

It's an old campus, dating to 1856, founded by Irish settlers and Franciscan Priests. Most of the buildings are surrounded by forests of gold and red and dark green and yellow trees with leaves, and grass sprawling on forever. One of its older buildings is St Francis Friary. Now a dormitory, it once housed priests and seminarians. In the mid‑seventies it was converted.

Despite its own dining hall, chapel and majestic views, students back then would shy from its remote location: It stood alone, accessed either by road or a walk through the woods on a narrow trail running along the river. When the University started its art program in '75, the newly vacated friary was perfect. In the basement was an old storage room‑‑great for a teaching studio. Beneath

it, deeper in the ground, an old library once used by Franciscans ‑‑perfect for an artist's studio.

Administrators never brought dignitaries here. The art studio and classroom were not on the campus tour back then‑‑someone might have run into Cole Young. At twenty-five, with long hair, mustache, and lanky limbs, Cole leaned forward when he taught his classes, making sure his opinion, which bent to the left, was clear and understood.

"I can smell dead priests here, man," he told me once. In class back then, students moved about—painting, drawing, modeling, seemingly on their own yet under Cole's eyes, and even more, his preaching.

"Trust yourself," he told one self‑conscious student with a pencil and a large pad. A nude female sprawled across an indigo blanket on the floor. The student was supposed to draw her without looking down at his own pad.                                  

"Let go.  You know what her hair looks like. Let the mind and the hands work together."

His head would thrust with each verb, for emphasis.  He'd throw words at his students, desperately afraid they wouldn't get it‑‑not the drawing, but the metaphor of it all.

"You've been doing things without looking your whole lives," he called to everyone.

They all stopped. Cole was preaching.

 "You tie your shoes without looking sometimes, right? Button your shirt? Pee?" He turned back to the student.  "You can find your pecker without looking, right? Know where it is?

What it looks like? How big it is? Especially now, right?"

Cole backed off. He made his point.

Then he taught. "Do it man, you can. Trust your hand. No, it will not look like a photograph. No, it may not look like hair. But it will be movement. It will be information."

Then to everyone: "It is all information. Right? Talk to me. Tell me what her hair looks like. Tell me where it turns and darkens and falls freely. Give me all the information you can. "

Music played when he taught. Dylan. Lennon. Van Morrison. Old Jackson Browne.

He was a skinny version of Harrison Ford  when he smiled. Not as tall, though‑‑five nine maybe. And his hair somewhere between auburn and light brown, long, near his shoulders. And his blue eyes would dart about the room while teaching or lock into another's when one on one.  Cole played his game and if you couldn't play along, leave, take economics where no one gets it. Get off the freaking bus. Drop out. "Life, man. That's all this is, this whole education thing. Life. That's it."

 Back then Cole and his wife moved to a farm in Allegany. You had to want to go there‑‑and most people who ended up there were usually lost. Still, Cole spent most of his time in his studio beneath the art classroom in the old friary on campus, about seven miles away.

Most mornings while I was a student, we'd be in the studio till three am, Lennon on the stereo, Cole smoking pot, working on something that looked like a valley beyond a secluded scenic overview. Pictures taped to the walls represented nature's original inspiration for this work. The smoke filled the studio. Hours passed and he still worked on a rock. Same rock he had been working on for a week.

“ Shit." He put his brush down. "There isn't enough detail in the trees." He looked at the pictures. “See? I've gotta move the rock.”

The fine detail in “Homage to Cole” is laborious painting. A stick in the brush, fallen from the sugar maple in the foreground, was a week's work. The birch tree, which gave him trouble in the painting, took even more time. It was done between classes, during lunch, late at night when no one was around, in the early hours while reminiscing about the late John Lennon and listening to music.

            This was about the time of the Iranian hostage crisis and pictures of starving children in the third world poured in on network television every night. Cole was pissed. “No one in this country is going to give a damn until that kind of terrorism happens here, in America. Then they’ll wake up.” His anger produced two canvases, both set in New York City, and both of tall buildings ablaze after a terror attack. This was twenty years before 9/11.

Cole Young's paintings have been compared to JMW Turner and Caspar Friedrich. His work has the passion and range of Friedrich~ the calmness that evaporates into furious motifs in nature‑‑carried out with one of the most varied palettes in contemporary art. To Cole, rocks are not brown or slate or tan or white. They are a composite of colors. To use one color of oil to represent that rock is, to Cole, to focus on vague images instead to scrutinize the scene. In the

1800's, Friedrich used similar colors and approach. He too would labor over color, layering one on another and mixing and scraping till the right tone was achieved. I once pointed out that van Gogh said to leave the obvious vague. “Van Gogh was an asshole,” Cole responded. So it was.

Friedrich's contemporary, Turner, whose work hangs in museums throughout the globe, mastered the turmoil in nature as well, particularly clouds. "Work," one Buffalo art critic wrote, "not unlike... the early paintings of Cole Young."

With that remark, exhibitions began to emerge. So did his work. The volume of work in his studio grew. Three walls were blocked by large canvases in progress, balanced on cinder blocks, lit by huge mercury lamps to insure perfect color. All about each canvas were books‑‑Friedrich, Turner, Constable and pictures and studies of subjects. All are landscapes, though that term‑‑"landscape artist"‑‑was not right, not to Cole.

When his class studied a "landscape artist," he'd say, "It sounds like he's working for a garden center. It's just a tag. What gross information does 'land‑scape artist' carry? Huh?" He smiled. "He's a painter.  He paints nature.”

"And damned well," he'd add, and everyone laughed. Cole doesn't like to offend people, though he knows he does. "I'd rather offend some of you," he told his class, "to wake you all up, than be oh‑so‑damned‑polite and have you not get it. "

What Cole got were acclaims in the art community and New York's Fishback Gallery opened his one‑man exhibit. And he sold well there. Fine clients bought his paintings.

            Nine years of complacent monotony later, in the spring of' 96, during a brief period of what Cole later said was false energy, he painted two small canvases. They are both called

"Graveyard." In these paintings, he ties nature directly to the human impulse to acknowledge and commemorate its dead. It is a row of dead trees seen close and from a low vantage point from within the decayed woods.

The observer is inside, looking up. The view is locked directly to the shredded, peeling bark and broken limbs of a few pitiable stalks. There is a hint of color in the brush, and the sky is neither threatening nor inviting.

He also painted one large painting. A huge, four by seven foot scene in an autumn woods, but the emphasis is on a bubbling, dark blue cloud. It is called "Difficult Cloud." These three paintings head to the Buffalo State University Art Exhibit, win top awards and critical acclaim. "Difficult Cloud" sold for eighteen thousand. The small, "Graveyard," sells for six. He kept the other. Still, these moments were patches of blue in an otherwise apocalyptic sky. Teaching, painting, nothing could keep Cole young anymore. He was a student staring at his hands because he didn't trust himself.

In the late nineties, his daughter Dylaina encouraged him to join a smoking-cessation seminar. Later he told me he knew she wanted to save his life and she did just that, but not because of the cigarettes. It was late and we sat on the porch of his farmhouse. He told me what happened that night. On the way to the high school for the seminar, while driving along the upper end of 5th Street in Allegany, Cole saw a deer running across a field. At twilight‑‑too early for headlights, too late for the sun‑‑he watched the grace, the limbs stretched. The beauty. He also noticed that the deer, on its present course and speed, would have run into the side of his van.

He slammed on the brakes and old oil paint tubes flew out from the back with cans and bottles. The deer veered into the woods. How could something with such grace and beauty so suddenly run itself into a collision with death, he wondered. Cole sat there and lit a cigarette to calm his nerves.

That night, he sat among twelve other men and women in a room at an Olean High School. He waited silently.

The director of the seminar walked in and talked. "You start. You stop. You will. You won't. Listen, do it now or drop the whole damn issue," the guy said. Then he left, telling them he'd be back in ten minutes.