By
Taryn Plumb |GLOBE
CORRESPONDENT
View “Expressions in Painting with Paul Crimi” on www.pembrokecommunitymedia.com. Visit Crimi’s website at www.paulcrimifinearts.com.
JULY
27, 2014
DEBEE
TLUMACKI FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
Donning
a paint-splotched smock, Paul Crimi raises a brush to a midnight
black canvas, quickly covering it with white streaks that create
faint silhouettes.
Soon,
blotches of green and yellow form trees; blue fills out the sky and a
flowing river below. He continues with dabs — both generous and
gentle — of red, orange, black, purple, moving up and down and
around the landscape.
Finally,
in less than an hour, he has a mostly completed painting: An abstract
rendering of the Indian Head River in Hanson, lush with reeds and
fall foliage.
“All
you have to do is paint,” he stresses to his audience at the end of
his demonstration. “Don’t ask anybody permission, don’t ask
anybody to criticize. Just do it. In the act of doing, you’ll get
to know who you are and what you are.”
You
might call him the local Bob Ross.
For
decades, the prolific, energetic, 70-year-old Pembroke artist has
hosted an area cable access show, “Expressions in Painting,” in
which he introduces various concepts, techniques, and styles, and
urges people to cultivate their inner artist. And while he’s become
somewhat of a local celebrity over the years, he’s also now
enjoying a bit of national fame: Recently, his shows have been
sporadically picked up by stations in Philadelphia, California,
Wisconsin, Illinois, Maine, New Hampshire — and even Alberta,
Canada.
“He
actually talks to the viewer,” said Margaret Jones, president of
the nonprofit Pembroke Community Media Center Inc., which produces
the show. “A viewer can develop a personal relationship” with
him.
And
unlike the beloved, curly haired Ross — famous for his “happy
little trees” as host of the PBS program “The Joy of Painting”
— Crimi doesn’t as explicitly lay out what, where, and how much.
“I’m
not up here doing this: Step 1, Step 2,” Crimi said from his seat
in a scuffed rocking chair in his studio on a recent sunny afternoon.
“I’m more affirming than teaching.”
Sometimes,
he said, he specifically refrains from identifying what colors he’s
mixing or what brushes are layering those onto the canvas. “I want
people to have their own identity,” he stressed.
Instead,
in his roughly hour-long show, he’ll paint — anything from foggy
days in the woods, to vases of flowers, to Nantucket in the
wintertime — impart some instruction and commentary, and ruminate
on his family, his background, or his passionate spirituality.
“Life
is a precious gift I love and hold dear,” he said in one recent
show, “and my art is the best way to express my appreciation for
the joy and happiness and wonderful blessings in my life.”
It’s
an endearing approach for many.
“He
really brings his family, or whatever mood he’s feeling, or
whatever’s going on with him, into the painting,” said Catherine
Briggette, Pembroke Community Media’s executive director of
marketing.
Ted
Bennett, one of his volunteer videographers, agreed: “I love his
philosophy,” he said.
Crimi
averages about a show a month, or as Jones noted, “as the muses
strike him.” They are filmed at his studio in Rockland and at local
high schools, where students working on his crew earn community
service credit hours.
Once
edited, the shows are available on the Pembroke Community Media
website as well as YouTube, and are also offered through public,
educational, and government access television.
“Expressions
in Painting” has aired regularly in Pembroke, Bridgewater,
Marshfield, Hanover, Halifax, Plympton, Middleborough, Brockton,
Danvers, Beverly, and Cambridge, Jones said.
“I
felt that I had all this knowledge, and I should share it,” Crimi,
a father of four who has been married 49 years, said of the show.
“It’s more about getting people to have the courage to step out
and do it.”
Anybody
can be an artist, he emphasized; if you tell yourself you can’t —
well, then, you won’t be able to.
“Just
put the paint on the canvas,” he instructs in one of his shows
available on YouTube. “Let it speak to you in your own way.”
And
if you’re just starting out? Begin with simple things like fruit or
vases or trinkets, or your own personal favorite objects. Also,
although classes can help, don’t get too close with instructors, he
said, because “they’ll teach you how they paint.”
Ultimately,
“don’t be too critical of yourself when you’re painting,” he
urged. “Just keep painting.”
As
is the case with many artists, he started young — he recalled his
mother exclaiming one day: ‘‘Oh gosh, we gotta get Paul some
paper!”
Later,
he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where
he further honed his drawing, painting, and printmaking skills.
But
coming from a family of barbers (preceded by both his father and
great-grandfather), he went into hairdressing as his full-time trade.
He
did that successfully for 43 years, most recently running shops in
Norwell and Plymouth, but he said that “the art’s always been the
love and the passion.”
Before
retiring at age 63, he said he would wake up most mornings at 3 a.m.
to get studio time in every day before heading to his parlor to
handle clients.
Likewise,
he found ways to blend the two careers, using his parlors as
galleries to show off and sometimes sell his art, and considering his
customers his “living art.” In his studio, meanwhile, he has long
used hairspray as a layering agent, and a professional blow-drier to
expedite the painting process.
There’s
no doubt that, in his decades as an artist, he’s been prolific.
He’s
created hundreds of linoleum cuts, collage prints, watercolors, and
acrylic paintings, done from photographs or “pulled from my
imagination.”
He
did one series of 137 on a particularly beckoning stand of birch
trees; another series of 30 on the 23d Psalm; and more and more
pieces continue to emerge from a 1997 trip to Italy, during which he
says he snapped 2,500 photos (or roughly 100 rolls of film).
“I
do them from my soul,” said Crimi. “I call them my soul
connection.”
That
passion is evident with a visit to his studio in a former mill
building in Rockland.
The
walls are covered; tables and desks are overflowing. Look one way,
and you see a series of seascapes — waves broiling over rocks,
islands brooding just offshore, scavenging seagulls. Glance up and
around to see decorated mirrors, crosses, dangling and standing
sculptures — colorful, abstract, realistic.
Scan
from there, and you take in stands upon stands of birches,
water-lilies, lupines in the woods, Italian street-scenes, colorful
collages, and welcoming wooden paths — paintings and drawings on
simple canvases, some framed, others propped neatly against or on top
of each other, even more stacked in drawers.
Vases
sit crammed full of all sizes of brushes, tinged various hues from
their recent forays with the canvas. An easel is dashed with splashes
of every color imaginable — artistic battle wounds.
“I’m
my own greatest collector,” he said, looking around. He shrugged,
“I’m still doing it, every day, seven days a week.”
View “Expressions in Painting with Paul Crimi” on www.pembrokecommunitymedia.com. Visit Crimi’s website at www.paulcrimifinearts.com.
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2014 BOSTON GLOBE MEDIA PARTNERS, LLC
