Prolific painter Newman discusses decades of artwork

Subtle, painterly, devotional. Since 90-year-old Arthur Newman started making art in the 1950s, his practice has honed in on these three qualities.

Newman has developed a visual language where memories are constant references, and things like cars, lamps and dogs take on poetic proportions. Figures appear and disappear in an interplay of positive and negative space, and emotions take on gestural meaning.

There are more paintings than wall space in Newman’s James Island home. Works from his early life come into conversation with recently completed artworks as they are hung together.

Newman celebrated his 90th birthday in June, but he still practices art about three times a week, painting at his kitchen table with Tupperwares full of still-wet paint. He works on multiple compositions at once “and I try not to repeat myself,” he said.

The paintings are grouped on the walls somewhat by periods in Newman’s 70 years of practice. He points out a black and blue figurative period and a more recent period marked by pictures of cars and interior domestic spaces. In both, Newman expertly layers colors of a limited color palette, using many washes in acrylic and oil paint to find the final image.

He first started painting at age 19 when he was involved in college theater. “I started writing, and then I did scene design. I recognized that I really liked the freedom of having no boundaries to what I could create,” he said.

Just a few years after his graduation, Newman first showed his artwork in 1958 at his alma mater, Union College in New York. For the next 10 years, Arthur worked as an auto mechanic, a house painter and a teacher.

Creating a legacy

Artmaking is one of Newman’s gifts. Education is another: He founded in 1980 a nonprofit private school for disabled adolescents, The Oakwood School, in Tinton Falls, New Jersey.

“I started with teaching art, actually. A position opened up to start a class for kids that couldn’t make it in the public schools. And by luck, I got that job. Eventually, I was the director of education at Children’s Psychiatric Center in Eatontown, New Jersey, where I was for about 11 years,” he said.

“Jump forward a bit, and there was a change in administration. I was very unhappy. After 11 years, that institution became unrecognizable to me. I decided to risk it all, and I found a church that was willing to rent their education building to me. We started out with about six or seven kids. And it took off. And now, 43 years later, it’s still going.”

Though he was always painting, Newman said his career in special education required a kind of psychic energy which didn’t allow him to fully commit to his art. “When I retired, I really started painting.”

He’s technically self-taught and was always looking to art history for knowledge and inspiration.

“I didn’t have a mentor, but I was always interested in art history, so … I’m not self taught because I have such a background in art history. Whatever that connection is — from eye to hand, hand to the beginning of a painting — I learned from art history.”

Newman said his paintings are driven by an explorative process: Besides an observational painting from time to time, he mostly works from his own mind. He aims to paint with a sense of playfulness instead of becoming prematurely attached to the final image.

“The paint itself has its own way,” he said, “and I am trying to allow that to happen, not knowing where I’m going. And it begins to appear. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s not so great … It’s responding to the paint.”

Newman’s philosophy makes sense considering he started painting in 1950s New York, the heart of the abstract expressionist movement, epitomized by painters like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler. These artists belonged to a school of thought inspired by the surrealist idea that art should come from the unconscious mind.

It’s unsurprising then that memories are what imbue Newman’s artworks with such poetic luminosity. What’s astonishing, though, is how long he meditates on some of these ideas.

An 11-inch by 14-inch recently completed painting, for example, depicts a parked car in Middletown, New Jersey, which Newman remembers passing by every day as it weathered the seasons and collected dust for one year after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

“While I was painting, it came to my mind,” Newman said.

“My ability to relate to kids afforded me a living and a nice legacy that it turned out to be. I’ve always seen myself as a painter, which was another gift from God.”

See Arthur Newman’s work at art-newman.com or on Instagram @artnewman3.