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CARLO'S CIRCLE
STILL UNBROKEN

by Troy R. Bennett
September 2006

It's late summer and a little hot in the loft of the old chicken barn. But cool evening air is sneaking through a couple of open windows with help from a box fan set to low. Baroque music trickles from a CD in the corner. Crickets are coming to life outside in the golden-rod-green underbrush.

Seven people sit in a circle, silently eyeing an eighth in the middle. The man stands motionless atop a small riser in the wood-floored room. His chiseled physique is apparent. He is naked. The others stare at him; their eyes trace the lines and contours of his nude form in a twice-weekly ritual that's been going on quietly in the woods of Bowdoinham for years.

Then an egg timer lets out a digital bleat, splitting the concentrated quiet. The naked man in the middle takes a deep breath, stretches a little and twists into a different pose. Paper rustles, spinning and flipping over to a clean side. Pencils start dragging over the toothy surfaces, whispering new forms onto the blank sheets. The timer is set for another five minutes and a voice says, "and we're working," just like Carlo used to do.

The voice belongs to Marianne Marrone Legassie, but the words are pure Carlo Pittore. Though cancer killed him more than a year ago, his spirit lingers in the room where he used to paint. You can hear him when Marianne speaks, presiding over the drawing group that used to bear his name. You can see him in the intent faces of the sketching artists. This is what Carlo left behind.

Carlo Pittore, the painter known for his bold nudes, was almost larger than life. He was the real deal. No dilatant, he often drew and painted six hours a day, seven days a week, sometimes without electricity or running water. He once told The Times Record, "I'm hurt when I see the creation of ugliness. It's painful to my eye, my heart and spirit... I'm at war with ugliness, insensitivity, boorishness and stupidity."

Armed with those lofty goals and limitless energy he lured artists to his circle, infusing them with his enthusiasm for art and life.

When he died, July 17, 2005, at home in Bowdoinham a friend artist in his circle, Peggy Muir, told a reporter, "He was at the center of the art world here and for many of us, he was the center of our world. He was like our sun... Now we're like planets rotating around a black hole."

Longtime friend Herb Hartman of Whitefield said this week in a phone interview, "He was such an inspiration to some people. It's hard to think of him as gone. He was such a life force."

"I can't judge his art," he went on. "For me, the biggest thing was his dynamic, sophisticated presence. I never felt so alive as when I spent time with him. He would lecture, he would provoke. He had such a love for life and beauty."

CARLO'S DRAWING GROUP

"Even when Carlo was dying I kept the group going," Marianne says a week later over a bowl of risotto in her kitchen.

She was Carlo's neighbor for 10 years and his devoted student for the last five. She and her husband, Eric Legassie, now carry on Carlo's traditional, twice-weekly drawing and painting sessions in his old studio with a handful of likeminded artists.

She says even when Carlo was so sick he couldn't make it up the stairs to the studio to draw with the group he still wanted it to go on without him. By then she had already been helping him run the group for several years. So though he never formally asked her to keep the group going when he was gone, she thinks he probably assumed she would.

"I like to think he knew," she says. "Frankly, I don't know what else I would do on a Wednesday night. I can't imagine not doing it."

He used to call it the Academy of Carlo Pittore. Now they call it the Bowdoinham Academy of Drawing. But all the equipment in the old studio is the same - the easels, the mules, and the props. And, thanks to Marianne, Eric and the other artists who still congregate there, Carlos's words and enthusiasm linger, too. It never faltered. When he died they took a week off.

It's true Carlo Pittore left a trail of inspired artists in his wake like the Legassies. But he also left behind a lifetime's worth of oil paintings, almost a thousand in all, plus tens of thousands of drawings and sketches. The walls of his small, wood-heated living quarters below his studio in Bowdoinham were lined with hundreds of books on painting and art.

Carlo was never married and had no children, but like his drawing group, there was no question what would become of his work.

"Carlo had a plan," says Marianne, nodding.

CARLO'S PLAN

In 2001, four years before he knew he had cancer, Carlo set up the groundwork for a non-profit foundation that would promote his work and provide grants to support emerging figurative artists when he was gone.

"What a lot of people don't know is that he was fantastically organized," says David Tobis president of the Carlo Pittore Foundation for the Figurative Arts during a recent phone interview from his office in New York. "He set it up long before he had any idea he was sick."

Tobis, a former UNICEF and World Bank consultant and currently the Executive Director of the Fund for Social Change, grew up with Carlo on Long Island when Carlo was known as Charles Stanley. His name change came while studying painting in Italy for five years in the early 1970s. Local children began calling him Carlo Pittore, literally, in Italian, "Charlie the Painter," and the name stuck.

Carlo willed all his books, artwork and stock assets to the foundation. In April, it donated all of Carlo's 1,526 art books to the Maine College of Art in Portland. The collection is estimated to be worth upwards of $36,000. The College previously honored Carlo with both honorary bachelors and doctorate degrees. A reception will be held Saturday night at the school to recognize the donation.

Tobis says Carlo didn't specifically choose the Maine College of Art for his books but, "Carlo was a very big fan of MECA and he definitely wanted his library to be given away."

Every book donated, which Marianne says were filled with his personal notations, will bear a quote from Carlo as an inscription: "I hope I have learned the only important truth of my experiment in living, that however unsuccessful is the realization of our dream, the pursuit of the dream is all that we really have and the joy of living comes not in other peoples' acceptance, but in our own."

To fulfill Carlo's aim of supporting struggling artists, the foundation plans on showing and selling some of his artwork to raise money to be awarded as grants. The foundation itself just received a grant from the Jonas Family fund for $10,000 to catalogue and photograph the thousands of pieces in the collection. Many will then eventually be viewable and searchable on the foundation's website.

Tobis says Carlo once told him that when he finds deserving struggling artists he should, "'write them a check for $500.' That was his way... he wasn't about just helping himself."

CARLO HELPS MORE THAN HIMSELF

"He didn't convince me so much as he pissed me off," Marianne says smiling in her kitchen after dinner when asked how Carlo persuaded her to start drawing.

Marianne, who is originally from the outskirts of Philladelphia, was already an artist when she moved in next door to Carlo, but she didn't draw. She made pots and jewelry she says. Now she runs her own jewelry smithing studio on Maine Street in Brunswick.

One day, for the umpteenth time, she overheard Carlo lecturing someone about how important it was to know how to draw and how much practice was needed to become good at it. He was famous for saying if someone wanted to learn how to draw all they had to do was draw 12 hours a day for 14 days straight.

So, on the morning of June 17, 2001 Marianne dragged a desk and chair outside to Carlo's place and began to draw. She stayed there from nine in the morning till nine at night for two weeks. She drew everything she could see- even her own feet and hands.

"I set my desk outside his door so whenever he opened it he saw me drawing, drawing, drawing," she says. "He kept opening the door to see if I was still there... "it was a big day in my life. The day I started drawing."

She could hear him inside, talking on the telephone saying, "You'll never guess who's becoming an artist."

However, Carlo wasn't merely a cheerleader to those who wanted to learn to draw. He demanded dedication and he was an honest critic, sometimes brutally so. He wasn't afraid to let a student know when they weren't working up to their full potential.

But that made his praise carry even more weight.

"He said what he thought. So when he was encouraging he really meant it," says Marianne. "He was such a powerful guy because he didn't mince his words. He really said what he thought."

Eric met Carlo in 1995 when he was living and working at an Amato's sandwich shop in Portland.

"A friend of mine had been modeling for him," Eric says, gripping a mug of exceedingly strong coffee after dinner.

Eric's friend told Carlo that Eric was an artist. So Carlo went looking for him at Amato's on India Street in Portland. Later, Eric took Carlo back to his tiny, two-room apartment to show him some drawings.

"He came to my apartment," Eric Says. "It was filled with empty beer bottles."

Carlo immediately walked over to a drawing Eric had tacked up on the wall. He got very close to it and studied it for several minutes.

"He told me I should stop being a mediocre Bohemian," Eric remembers. "He used to lecture me a lot... he wanted everyone to excel."

Carlo invited him to come to Bowdoinham for a week to draw. That week was a turning point in Eric's life. He slept on the floor of the studio.

"It seemed magical - the models, the smell of the turpentine, his energy, the lectures... baroque music and all his books," Eric says. "I quit drinking."

Carlo put him on a strict regimen of drawing. Eric drew self-portraits, nude self-portraits, and sheep in the barn. It was then Eric drew his first nude model.

"He had me drawing six hours a day."

When he went back to his old life in Portland it seemed like he was wasting it. Soon he got himself transferred to the Brunswick Amato's and moved into one of the wood-heated yurts behind Carlo's place in Bowdoinham. There was no electricity or television. His life consisted of drawing and looking at great art in Carlo's books.

"I called it my 'solitary refinement,'" Eric says.

It was in Carlo's weekly drawing groups that Marianne and Eric met.

"We were always friends," he says.

Carlo studied to become a Notary just to marry them. When he took the test he was already feeling the effects of his cancer.

"He was diagnosed just before the wedding," says Marianne.

Their two-year wedding anniversary is in September.

IN THE END

Widespread recognition in the art world, and the wealth that often follows, never reached Carlo. Only a handful of his paintings ever sold.

"His legacy is the people he touched," says Tobis, his friend from the old neighborhood.

Less than a year before he died, Carlo said, "The winning in art is the process. The joy of painting was beyond anything I could imagine. It got better and better as I got older. It has nothing to do with business or fame."

Back in Bowdoinham, on Wednesday nights and Saturday afternoons, like clockwork, they gather in Carlo's old studio to do what brought him so much joy. They paint and they sketch.

On the wall hangs a sign with his words painted in big, white letters, "I am so happy, I am so grateful for my life, and I am so happy to have loved all these humans who I love and who love me, and I love you all."

And they're working.