The Brooklyn Rail

“One painter for another!” These four words—inscribed to me by Graham in a monograph of his paintings—came back to me just after his passing. I forgot they were there. And now I find myself struck by how much this simple dedication encapsulates the gift of his being.

I first met Graham through his paintings, years before I met him in person. As an art student in Boston, I pored over his luminous canvases in reproduction. Myth and geometry commingling, unapologetic scale and electric color: cerulean blue light on skin, cadmium red cast shadows in sand. I was in conversation with him the same way he remained in constant conversation with Piero, Masolino, Matisse. Because Graham had made twelve-foot paintings of seagulls, bathers, rafts, and wild skies, I believed I could, too. And I did. That’s what the vibration of a hero does—it calls forth the heroic in others.

Graham often spoke of cave painters—the first artists—as shamans. And he believed them to be women; and that they entered the dark with fire in hand, seeking etheric communion with their subjects—the bison, the horse, the bear—through the act of drawing. He identified their painted handprints as “the first example of self as measure.” I, too, was here. I touched this place. The mystical powers of painting run through channels of intention and receptivity, provided we orient ourselves and attune.

Graham called the rectangle a religious text—a multidimensional field to be navigated, traversed, plumbed again and again. His papers reveal countless thumbnail diagrams of squares—grids within grids and snaking pathways moving through them. Corners and the center. The labyrinth. The maze. Drawing is representational and revelatory. Its importance is as much about the artwork produced as it is about its transformative effects on its maker.

When we were developing the School’s vision statement, “We come to look and learn to see,” Graham expounded, “If we don’t see the connections between things, we’re destined to see life as a list of objects, a shopping list. And a shopping list gives no magic. It doesn’t excite the profundity; this comes when we see that two things seemingly quite disparate are secretly interconnected.” For Graham, this type of sight was spiritual—a hymnal unto itself. Observational drawing activates an innate human capacity to bring order to chaos and, thereby, instills hope. Hope becomes an experiential location in the psyche, arrived at through pencil and paper. 

Graham’s Drawing Marathons were always a singular experience. Responsive and emergent, his teaching style was more “opera” than a “how-to” guide. He unabashedly referred to students as pathfinders, way-showers, astronauts on a cosmic journey. The intuition of the artist is immediate. Color fields hold form like “blueberries suspended in yogurt.” Empty space is always full. 

Perhaps the greatest gift Graham gave me was the importance of asking the right questions—and asking: are we asking the right questions? Dark-light is a question to explore, a generative search. Metaphor and contradiction are gateways into new territory: Paint the green red and the red green. Notice what others overlook. Projecting Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (1575)—a brutal painting of punishment unfolding—he drew our attention to the shocking defiance in Marsyas’s steady gaze: a quiet satisfaction, even in upside-down surrender. Graham elucidated, “It is better to have challenged the gods and lost than to have never played at all.”

And Graham played. Passionately. Completely. With that slight smile always emergent. For him, success was measured in the effort and the experience. Never on the sidelines. It was all in. And it was joy.

Graham once told me: “You cannot paint Mystery into a picture willfully—it must enter on its own, through other means.” Similarly, you cannot will the spirit of a place, but you can imbue it with an architecture of generosity. During a staff lunch at the New York Studio School, he pointed to a vermilion smudge on his lapel—the badge of a painter. He was proud to be one of us, and he wanted us to know it. He said, “As artists, we realize, fortunately, that we are what we do.” 

Graham’s kindness is what I’ll remember most of all. His manners. His compassion. His bright, knowing eyes. His wit. The powerful way he would listen and discern. His vast capacity to hold and to withstand. His dignity. The effort and conviction with which he stood to greet me, and again to see me to the door, during our last visit. An elevated way of being. Grace. 

“You’re one of the most special friends of this lifetime,” he said to me that day. “Graham, you are.” It’s been an honor and a privilege every step of the way.