Daniel Gerhartz | Cadence of Beauty

Daniel Gerhartz’s paintings reflect the rhythm and patterns he discerns in the natural world

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Daniel Gerhartz remembers as a boy hearing his father, a vocalist and elementary-school music teacher, sing “The Wayfaring Stranger,” a traditional American folk/gospel song about the poignancy of suffering in life and the promise of reunion and joy beyond. But it wasn’t until recently, when he heard a particularly stunning version of the song, that he found himself moved by a fresh understanding of its plaintive beauty. He knew he needed to create a visual interpretation of his own.

As often happens when the Wisconsin-based painter embarks on the germination phase of a narrative painting, he opened his mind and eyes to ideas for imagery. In this case, he initially thought the subject would be a little boy, a semi-autobiographical reflection of his faith. Instead, Gerhartz’s painting WAYFARING STRANGER depicts a young girl dropping her doll as she steps into a stream, her eyes on a bright distance and a wistful, serene expression on her face. Behind her, the devastation of a roiling dust storm and destruction of her family’s home tell the story of her fate.

Gerhartz, who paints primarily from life, enlisted his young niece as the model. He researched and found appropriate clothing, asked her to imagine she’d just gone through a horrific dust storm, and captured her image in intense sunset light. “She’s a dramatic young lady and did a really good job,” the artist says. He sketched, made color notes, and took hundreds of photos, several of which he combined to get just the right expression, gesture, and even the windblown folds in her dress. “Every finger makes a difference, every line in the fabric, even the beautiful lines of smoke and the groupings of irises and daffodils,” he says. Each becomes part of a composition that, to Gerhartz, resembles a musical score.

Having grown up listening to classical music—although he would have preferred spending all his time outdoors—Gerhartz later came to appreciate his early musical exposure and the parallels he sees with painting. “I often think: That’s a gorgeous harmony, I wonder what it would look like in color? Or, what would that be as a visual composition or line?” he says. “When I look at a landscape, like the weaving line of a river, the patterns and rhythms almost have a musical feeling. I build compositions with those themes.”

When he was a boy, the woods, rivers, meadows, and rolling farmland of rural Wisconsin were Gerhartz’s world. His father’s family had a farm about an hour from the small town of Kewaskum, where the artist was raised, and he and his two younger brothers spent countless weekends and summer days there. “Those memories are a lot of what I draw from in my art—the strong impressions, the sights, the smells, the sounds of a farm. I love all that,” he says. Until about age 12, his childhood revolved around “typical boy stuff”—fishing, hunting, riding his bike, and playing baseball with friends.

Then one rainy day a good friend pulled out a Walter Foster how-to-draw book and suggested they do some drawing. Gerhartz discovered he really liked it and was pretty good at it. He also found himself inspired by the illustrations and paintings in sporting magazines. But other than a hobby-painter uncle whose painting of Dan’s grandmother bore a good resemblance, he knew no artists personally. The only path he could imagine in that direction was commercial art. So when a high-school teacher connected him with her son, who was attending the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Gerhartz chose that school with illustration in mind. As it turned out, circumstances during his time at the academy began preparing him to enter the fine-art world.

There were certainly excellent instructors at the school while he was there, including Bill Parks and Irving Shapiro, Gerhartz says. But as important as anything else was the influence of a group of fellow students and friends who would each go on to national acclaim: Scott Burdick, Rose Frantzen, T. Allen Lawson, and Nancy Guzik among them. With enthusiasm and exceptional talent, the young painters spurred one another on artistically and professionally. Then, just as he was finishing school, Gerhartz met Richard Schmid. The renowned painter, who later married Guzik and who died in April, led painting sessions each Sunday at the Palette & Chisel Academy in Chicago, and Gerhartz attended many of these.

When Gerhartz moved back to Wisconsin shortly after graduating, Schmid, Guzik, and other former classmates would gather there and elsewhere for plein-air painting excursions, often spending a week at a time together. “We enjoyed painting together outdoors, and Richard would critique our work and share with us what it really meant to have the mind of an artist,” Gerhartz says. He remained friends with Schmid and Guzik, visiting them when they lived in Colorado and continuing to paint together. “It was just a blessed time. Richard sure left a legacy.” From Schmid he learned it was possible to make a living with painting, although for a short time—a year and a half total—the young artist worked in commercial illustration. “I found out I wasn’t built for it,” he says. He began gaining gallery representation, met and married his wife Jennifer, and settled into raising children (eventually five) and painting.

For the last 30 years or so, the 55-year-old artist and his family have lived on 20 acres near the edge of a state forest about a mile from where he grew up. His studio is a spacious separate building with generous windows for north light and plenty of room for storing costumes, drapery, and still-life objects, and for setting up lighting to paint from life. The quality of light, in fact, is among the most striking elements in Gerhartz’s work. It can be sunrise, sunset, midafternoon, or an unknown light source casting an intense, golden glow through a woman’s veil, as in WHAT IS LEFT UNSAID. That painting earned the Gold Medal in the Master Signature division and a Members’ Choice award at this year’s Oil Painters of America national exhibition. “Light itself speaks its own story. It touches the heart and draws people in on another level,” the artist says. “I always think there’s two narratives going on: the light, line, and composition, and the overarching story. I’m bringing all the elements together to build on and support each other. So much of what I do is by feel, asking myself, does this work? Is it emotionally charged?”

One way Gerhartz infuses his art with a sense of emotional intimacy is by engaging family members and friends as models. For LIMITLESS, he and a good friend’s ballerina daughter spent an afternoon in a park, where Gerhartz photographed the young woman as she leapt and posed in elegant, exuberant dance steps. He also drew and painted life studies of her. Then he climbed into his kayak with his paints and floated on the Milwaukee River, which rolls through the middle of his town, to capture the lily pads and water on which the ballerina would dance. Back in the studio, he put all the pieces together. “She’s on the water, so it’s a fantasy,” he says. “But having children, Jen and I want our kids to fly, to flourish in life. The painting says: I’m living an unbounded life. I’m free.” Creating it after 10 months of lockdown and coronavirus restrictions added another dimension to the spirit and message of the piece, he says.

As with all his work, Gerhartz designed the compositional elements in LIMITLESS with an almost musical intention. “Even the clouds and the little pink streaks in the sky create a rhythm, and rhythm comes from balance and counterbalance,” he says. He experiences that sense of cadence and order in the world itself, not as something he makes up on canvas. “When we hear about Creation, our earth, everything is patterned,” he says. “I cannot look at the beauty of what we’ve got here and think that it’s random.” Although he hasn’t studied mathematical sequences, he intuits that even the spacing of branches in trees follows such patterns, and he incorporates this feeling into his designs.

Gerhartz often wonders why we as humans turn to the arts. His personal response to that question is that the best examples of art direct our attention to something larger than ourselves. “It makes me yearn for a beauty I know exists,” he says. He calls to mind a quote by the writer C.S. Lewis, who talks about the human hunger and thirst for deep peace. Gerhartz’s wish is that his paintings help awaken this greater desire by offering a glimpse of the serenity and loveliness available in everyday life. “There’s so much heaviness in this world, I don’t need to paint it,” he says. “Whatever I can do to project hope, through beauty, that’s what it’s all about for me.”

representation

Meyer Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; InSight Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX; James R. Ross Fine Art, Indianapolis, IN; The Red Piano Gallery, Bluffton, SC; Illume Gallery of Fine Art, St. George, UT; www.artzline.com; www.danielgerhartz.com.

This story appeared in the June/July 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.