Muy Granda

 

 

While dreaming up an outdoor sculpture installation for Berkshire Community College (BCC) in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Julio Granda recently found himself knocking on the door of a municipal maintenance building. Since his surrealist design featured a faux roadway that would cut across the school’s courtyard, up the side of a building, and into a student art gallery, Granda wanted to pick the brain of the guy who paints the city’s traffic lines. The way Granda tells it, watching paint dry can be fascinating.
 

 

“He told me how wide it had to be; what the distance between the two [lines] had to be so they wouldn’t close up when you drove; how small towns cheated by making the space larger—they could save so many gallons of paint by making it thinner [than] it was supposed to be,” says Granda, all in one breath. “Then he showed me the machine that he had developed to paint the road. He took me out and we’re walking with the thing—it was a hoot! This guy was absolutely incredible!”
 

 

Granda lets out his trademark, infectious guffaw, and suddenly it doesn’t matter that Pass No Pass never made it to completion. For the seventy-eight-year-old artist, the excitement of a new project lies in its development and collaboration.
 

 

Evidence of the artist’s half-century-plus career decorates the walls and lines the baseboards of his modest studio at the top of the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts building in downtown Pittsfield, where he’s currently at work on a series of dreamy, almost impressionist, landscapes. The canvases depicting Berkshire back roads and Cape Cod sand dunes are dappled with globs of oil paint, nearly an inch thick in some spots. Though this particular medium is fairly new to Granda—he’s dabbled in sculpture, sketching, pastels, acrylics, and calligraphy over the years—the subject harks back to his early days here, after he moved from New York City into a two-hundred-year-old mountaintop farmhouse on thirty acres in Washington, Massachusetts, around 1968.
 

 

“I wanted to become Van Gogh!” Granda exclaims, not a bit sheepishly. He was an art director at a Manhattan publishing house when he told his wife, “I’m going up to the country; I hope you’ll come with me.” He did, and she followed. “I used to paint outdoors, in the snow,” he continues. “People thought I was crazy.”
 

 

Appearing even crazier to his neighbors were the multicolored sticks that he scattered across his lawn, linear imitations of the twigs that would poke through melting frost at the end of winter. Visible to passersby on Washington Mountain Road, Granda’s Environmental Linear Constructions was a precursor to his first major body of work: brightly colored acrylic line paintings, simple in design, painstakingly executed.
 

 

One of these, Between the Bands/The Journey, now hangs in his studio; from afar the jewel-toned vertical stripes appear chunky, but a step closer reveals skinny pinstripes and faint, curved outlines of geometric shapes within. Granda’s eyes scan the tropical hues of purples, reds, pinks, aquas, greens, and oranges, and he sighs. “I’ll never do one of these again,” he says, his relief palpable. “The patience [it took] to do that was incredible. Each band has its layer. It’s like you’re in space—how do you know size in space? It’s all relative. When you take that away, it becomes an optical situation.”
 

 

Granda recalls being invigorated by the fresh air and wide open spaces—similar to those of Spain, from which his father emigrated in the 1920s. His wife, a Bronx native, ultimately didn’t share his enthusiasm. Following their divorce, Granda moved to Pittsfield in 1977, where he continued to teach fine arts at BCC (becoming chair of the department in 1979) and where he found studio space on the second floor of the Central Block building, then owned by J.J. Newberry Co. Almost instantly, he became part of a fledgling community of creative types, which would thrive until the structure was sold in 1996.
 

 

Granda remembers those days—the late seventies—and how the ceiling would shake from beneath the floorboards of the Cantarella School of Dance, sending his work-in-progress aerial assemblage of tall, thin, plasterboard sticks awhirl. When the circus came to town, Granda and his cohorts would race down to the parking lot nearby and craft elaborate balloon sculptures for spectators. He recalls the group designing window art for North Street businesses such as Steven Valenti’s menswear boutique and even assembling monthly exhibitions at City Hall, all in an effort to champion the presence of artists downtown—a precursor, of course, to Maggie Mailer’s Storefront Artist Project.
 

 

“There was kind of an artist movement back then,” explains Megan Whilden, director of cultural development for the City of Pittsfield, who helped launch a 2007 retrospective of Granda’s lifework at the Lichtenstein Center in conjunction with the Storefront Artist Project just around the corner. She cites Granda as a major force in the downtown scene: “He’s like the elder statesman of visual artists in Pittsfield.”
 

 

Granda, however outspoken, is humble. “We tended to just do things,” he says, still with the urgency of an activist. At the group’s regular watering hole, La Cocina, then across from Wahconah Park, Granda projected onto a bare wall Running Fence, the 1978 documentary on the twenty-five-mile-long installation along the California coast by environmental artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, hoping to light a fire under people unfamiliar with art.
 

 

“Julio is that bridge between the abstract world of artists and the reality of the working general public,” explains artist and longtime friend Tom Patti, who first met Granda through writer (and great-grandson of Herman Melville) Paul Metcalf, then a realtor-by-day who sold Granda his home in Washington. “The enthusiasm and the vigor, the way he went about things, he was sort of the spiritual leader of the band of artists that were around at that time,” Patti says. “I lived outside of the community—but he was always drawing me back into it—who could say no to Julio? He had a big influence on a generation.”
 

 

Granda encouraged students to explore a variety of subjects, including calligraphy, which he introduced to the BCC curriculum, having fallen in love with the form while himself a student at the Cooper Union School of Art. A navy veteran of the Korean War, Granda recalls a final calligraphy assignment for which he asked students to illustrate the words war and peace: “The class came in, and ‘war’ they could all do—they did gothic letters and they cut it up and they burned it,” Granda says. “But ‘peace’ was elusive. One student, a Vietnam vet, brought a kite. On it, very lightly, was a white paper cutout with the word ‘peace.’ We went out in the courtyard and flew the word ‘peace’—it blew your mind. Everybody sat there, just crying. It was dynamite!”
 

 

Peter Dudek, a sculptor and former director of the Storefront Artist Project, was so inspired by his BCC painting teacher that he followed in his footsteps, attending New York City’s School of Visual Arts. “He was definitely a mentor to many artists in the area, without any visible support system,” Dudek says, referencing the earnest idealism of that era. “The passion he had with his words! He could talk endlessly about things; there was no lack of commitment. He instilled in me that you have to develop a range of talents in order to survive as an artist. I always saw Julio as one of the key players of a generation that really paved the way for Storefront and what it would become.”
 

 

While Granda’s early work tended toward the conceptual—such as Zippers in Cement, sculptures appearing exactly as they sound and exploring the dichotomy of motion with a fixed material, originally exhibited at Clemens Kalischer’s Image Gallery in Stockbridge, Massachusetts—his later works became more expressive.
 

 

“I was trying to combine the rigidity of the lines with the fluidity of the drawing itself,” Granda insists of his early pastels that combined watercolor-like strokes with angular shapes. “I had to get back to the more painterly aspect of things.”
 

 

He’d been working on the line drawings and paintings incessantly, almost to the point of obsession. Finally, after finishing a series of large-scale canvases, The Thirteen, and selling the entire batch to a Boston collector, “I stopped painting for five years. I was getting repetitive. I could do it so easily. I started working with poets and having that opportunity to deal with the word and the image.”
 

 

Granda focused on creating broadsides, texts “brought to life” through illustration, typography, and calligraphy. The walls of his studio showcase various collaborations with the likes of Metcalf, Afro-Cuban poet and activist Nicolás Guillén, and short story writer Grace Paley, including one of Granda’s most celebrated works, Puttin’ On Dog, a spunky illustration commissioned by Williams College to commemorate African-American poet alumnus Sterling Brown (class of 1922). Granda, once the self-described “token white kid” in his scrappy Harlem neighborhood, could relate.
 

 

“That was possibly the most elaborate broadside he had done—it’s tremendously colorful and vibrant,” says Wayne Hammond, assistant librarian at the school’s Chapin Library for the past three decades. Hammond notes that the college has purchased every single one of the artist’s broadsides since the 1990s (most of which are in storage while the library undergoes extensive renovations set for completion in 2013). “The great thing about Julio is that he doesn’t just use a text as an excuse to do something; it’s a legitimate expression of what he’s reading.”
 

 

Granda’s 2003 illustration of Richard Wilbur’s poem “A Shallot” references Henri Matisse in the fluid lines of his voluptuous female forms. The seductive opening line, “The full cloves/Of your buttocks,” is made extra sexy by Granda’s depiction.
 

 

“That really became the beauty of these things: integrating the art, the type, calligraphy in some instances, and then having the poet sign off on it,” Granda says of the works, which have been published in scores of books and exhibited at museums and libraries across the country, some of which are on view at Lauren Clark Fine Art in Housatonic, Massachusetts. An exhibit of Granda’s broadsides also hangs at the Storefront Artist Project as part of the third annual Pittsfield Poetry Week in April.
 

 

“I never took any lit classes,” Granda maintains, “so the poetry came from people who really loved it and then somehow passed it on to me.”
 

 

This exchange among creative minds has been the guiding force throughout Granda’s career, and an attitude he seems to have passed on to his son, Luis, 22, a bassist and songwriter who also lives in Pittsfield. And though his days of art advocacy have mellowed, he’s still sprightly and very much in tune with global affairs, recently cruising among the Panama Canal Locks with his companion of many years, Sara Kataoka.
 

 

As the stained-glass windows of the First United Methodist Church just beyond his studio windows catch the fading daylight, the artist recalls an influential lecture in Buenos Aires by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, a muse of sorts. “He stood up and gave an incredible performance from the heart—that’s duende,” Granda gushes, referencing the Spanish term for what one might describe as a person’s innate, creative fervor. “It’s the passion, you know.”
 

 

The artist surveys the room with a Cheshire Cat grin.
 

 

“I’ve never had anybody return a painting,” he proclaims. “I don’t really let ’em out unless I feel good about it. It can be perfect in every which way, but if it doesn’t have duende…” [MARCH/APRIL 2010]
 

 

Amanda Rae Busch is a senior editor of Berkshire Living.

 

THE GOODS

Broadsides by Julio Granda
Mar 27-Apr 30
Storefront Artist Project
124 Fenn St.
Pittsfield, Mass.

www.storefrontartist.org

Pittsfield Poetry Week
April 10-18
www.culturalpittsfield.com

Lauren Clark Fine Art
./Route 183
Housatonic, Mass.

www.laurenclarkfineart.com
 

PHOTOS: Top, Granda works in his Pittsfield studio.

Between the Bands/The Journey (1985), acrylic on canvas

Road to Worthington (2003)

Wave and Moons (1985), acrylic on Arches paper, leans against a worktable in Julio Granda’s studio.

Julio Granda’s 2003 broadside for Richard Wilbur’s poem A Shallot

A page of sketches

Untitled (2009)

From the Cape Cod series

Julio Granda peeks through part of Berkshire Landscape with Monopoly Houses (2007), his visual commentary on land development