Sylvia Sleigh, a graceful painter

I went to see Sylvia Sleigh recently in New York.  I republish the following article I posted.

Sylvia Sleigh is in her 92nd year and still looking and sounding well. I meet her at her studio in a brownstone on West 20th where she has lived for over 40 years.

With her thick long hair and make up, it is hard to accept her age except for her decreasing height and tendency to tire easily. We settle on a large sofa in the back of the gracious living room, surrounded by the paintings, many of them male nudes that remind you of how hard it is sometimes, to be a woman artist.

I was reminded of Sleigh's work recently in Turps Bananas, a magazine produced by London artist Marcus Harvey, which focuses on artists writing about other artists. Ellen Altfest, an artist whose work I have long admired, is a fan of Sylvia Sleigh's - not surprising when you look at Sleighs works of men, often unclothed, and lovingly and meticulously observed.

Sleigh was married to British critic Lawrence Alloway and left England with him in 1961 for America. She herself had trained at the Brighton College of Art, long before it became a university.

Sleigh painted Alloway well over 60 times, she tells me. When people questioned whether he liked her work, she would say simply - "he must have as he let me paint him again and again." She attributes her lack of recognition to the fact that she was a woman who chose to paint male nudes, something that is still faintly controversial today.

Her muse, Paul Rosano, a large man with an afro hair style was a musician who was not good at getting himself out there. He was one of her favorite sitters and she seems to have mourned his moving out of the city in search of cheaper housing.

It is also easy to lump Sleigh's work with the work of Philip Pearlstein and Alice Neel, but there are palpable differences here. Pearlstein's obsessive replications of the body are meticulous depictions of flesh in a way that differs greatly from the more romantic depictions of Sleigh. Neel's works, often almost caricature like, are also far distant from this vision.

Sleigh's most ambitious works to date, "Invitation to a Voyage" are a group of fourteen panels which together form a 70 foot long work depicting a picnic. The place, an embankment overlooking the island in the Hudson on which eccentric millionaire Frank Bannerman built his castle to house the excess of his military armaments business. Sleigh, like many of us, first saw this strange place from the windows of an Amtrak Train and arranged a picnic on the cutting overlooking it. She invited her friends and in a particularly poignant scene we see her being helped up by a dashing Alloway. Towards the end of the work, the landscape fades into a quasi abstraction, un-peopled and alone - perhaps an allusion to Alloway's death.

The series, named after a work by Watteau, took her an amazing 22 years to finish. I am a sloth, she says but also she admits that she did not paint for ages after Alloway's death. She looks sad when I say you were mourning. In contrast to this melancholy mood the works are washed with flat sunshine these works now in the Hudson Museum in Yonkers, a place I must make a pilgrimage to someday.

Sleigh is not always good - in fact - she could be down right bad and that is what makes the work so interesting.