Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty Schmalz, Jr., Carl N.

Anyone who was a colleague or friend knew Professor Carl N. Schmalz, Jr. as “Dick.” Dick Schmalz was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan the day after Christmas, 1926. He grew up with his family in Belmont, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard University, and earned a Ph.D. degree in Fine Arts from Harvard with a dissertation on the Disasters of War by Francisco Goya, supervised by the renowned art historian Seymour Slive. Dick began his academic career at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine where he taught courses in both the history and the practice of art while also serving as curator and ultimately associate director of Bowdoin’s stunning Walter Art Gallery. Dick came to Amherst in 1962. He was made full professor and awarded an honorary Amherst degree in 1969.

To understand Dick’s contributions to our lives, we need to backtrack to 1943 when at seventeen he began studying the art of painting with Eliot O’Hara at the O’Hara School in Goose Rocks Beach, just north of Kennebunkport, Maine. Three years later, he became an instructor at the O’Hara School. It is fair to say that before anything else, Dick was an artist and teacher. He died last winter at eighty-six preparing to teach another group of students from all over the country how they might discover or refine their unique artistic aspirations.

During his long tenure at Amherst, Dick was the very embodiment of the College’s departmental program of Fine Arts that sought always to integrate the discipline of the practice of art and the discipline of art history. His teaching goals, like those of the department, were at their core interdisciplinary, often resulting in the recognition that the very best “artists” among our students were, not surprisingly, also the very best “art historians.” For Dick theory and practice animated both disciplines in their common movement toward human understanding. In his life and teaching, Dick always avoided that cognitive and pedagogical split between image and word, mind and body that diminishes so many undergraduate art departments. Instead, he combined the multiple capacities of our intelligence in a singular aspiration to what might be called the reconciliatory art of art, and by this act, he inspired his colleagues to do likewise for the everlasting benefit of themselves and generations of fortunate students.

His many years of offering an Introduction to the History of Art—often known as Darkness at Noon, but at Amherst was called Art 11 – brought countless eager young students sufficiently deeply into the mysterious thrall of art that they would never quite recover from its wondrous spell. Although many went on to careers as artists, art historians, gallery and museum administrators, everyone left this course as a more humanely alert person. In another course on the History of Photography which included hands-on exercises in color, form and line, he guided students’ work in both studio and library research. He gave seminars on the art of the great masters, including Goya’s haunting prints of human degradation. In every instance he allowed image and word to intersect as constituents of a fuller more nuanced revelation of our human condition. Dick’s collaboration in a first-year seminar called “The Imagined Landscape” with colleagues from other disciplines was a model of his life-long determination to share his abiding embrace of verbal and visual understanding as the basis of artistic wisdom.

All the while, from the beginning, Dick offered instruction, guidance and inspiration for those students interested in practicing their art within the medium of watercolor. For years, the students in his classes could be found everywhere around the campus, exploiting the latest plain air site to see freshly and to construct some form of a visual equivalent of their experience and, from time to time, even engage with Thoreau’s challenge “to awaken to a higher life than we fell asleep from.” Dick’s rare talent involved speaking clearly, often eloquently, explaining what he was actually doing—mixing pigment with water to achieve a precise color-value effect—even as the image of his painting was taking shape on the white paper before him. As an art historian and artist-teacher and painter—Dick exemplified an enviable combination of tradition and innovation, rootedness and flexibility, discipline and creative vulnerability.

During the summer for some twenty years, Dick continued teaching his craft as he had earlier with Eliot O’Hara in his own Watercolor Workshops situated in Kennebunkport, Maine. After retiring in 1994, he taught at the Rock Garden Inn of the Sebasco Estates and at the Heartwood College of Art in Kennebunk, Maine.

In addition to articles in professional journals, Professor Schmalz wrote several books on watercolor painting. One recreated visually and verbally the working approach of his teacher, Eliot O’Hara. Always intent on the direct application of his knowledge and skill for the benefit of others, Dick told the reader that “if followed in sequence, these lessons will provide the building blocks of watercolor technique that will enable the beginner to approach the medium with confidence, and will encourage the advanced painter to develop his [or her] painting  technique by further exploring new approaches to his [or her] work.” In another book, entitled Watercolor Your Way, he developed particular means for practicing artists to discover and develop their own special kind of artistry and vision.

As many artists will, Dick served as a juror for numerous exhibitions of original work. He lectured and offered painting workshops throughout the United States and Canada, and, as Winslow Homer, students will appreciate Bermuda. He was elected as a charter member of the Watercolor USA Honor Society. He received numerous national and regional awards. His paintings inform the space of many public collections and hang on the walls of hundreds of private homes.

Many of us shared in the hospitality offered by Dick and his beloved wife, Do, in their warm and generous home on Arnold Road. At uncounted and unforgettable dinner parties for friends and colleagues who gathered in the old tradition of affectionate outreach, talk of art and life often carried into the morning hours as the sun rose over the Pelham hills. At one such occasion to celebrate Dick’s birthday, everyone present was charmed by a richly decorated Christmas tree rotating slowly in the silver tree holder Dick’s grandfather had brought with him from Germany. The lights from that tree could be seen from the college and for many miles around, literally “spreading light across the earth,” even as Dick’s vibrant and radiant paintings still do.

To remember Dick is to remember his art. In his paintings, Dick Schmalz celebrated life through the creation of light and color. The patterns of cast shadows establish rhythmical gestures in his compositions, providing an intimacy of shared human experience. The sheer magic of the shifts in color comprising light and shadow is spellbinding. His drawing is masterful to the degree that it appears effortless, a quality he worked hard to establish. An integral aspect of his painting is the active nature of his brushwork. Dick's hand is always present in his paintings as you see strokes of watercolor work simultaneously to create illusions of form, space, texture and light, resulting in a vivid “sense of place.” As you look you become ever more aware of a unique moment of time in a particular place that will lead you to the transcendent nature of his art: the humanistic, generous and luminous qualities, including the serene presence of duration, found in all of his paintings. Dick’s artistic medium of choice was watercolor in which the elusive image is not an opaque representation of light. It is instead, palpably, visibly, the very transparency of light itself, incarnated as color suspended in water tinted with pigment – not unlike our own corporeal being. Dick was a deeply spiritual artist whose vision reached out to wholeness beyond all but  the most poetic grasp. 

Encountered in silence, his paintings are, one by one, reminiscent of the words the Irish poet John O’Donohue offers as a blessing to be spoken by an infant about to enter the world:

May my eyes never lose sight   
Of why I have come here,   
That I never be claimed   
By the falsity of fear   
Or eat the bread of bitterness.   
In everything I do, think,   
Feel or say,   
May I allow the light of the world I am leaving   
To shine through and carry me home.   
***   
Normally, at this point, we would ask everyone to stand for a moment of silence to honor our dear colleague. May we ask you to remain seated a moment longer to allow Dick’s artistic vision and light to illuminate this room?   

Presentation   
Hommage to Zurbarán   
Cecil’s Peak, Queensland, New Zealand   
Half Moon Island, Antartica   
Medomak River, Waldoborough, Maine   
Beach at Kiawah Island, South Carolina   
Meadows Edge, Maine   
Palmettos and Bananas, Bahamas Botanical Garden   
View from Lorques, Côtes d’Azur   
The Pools, Sebasco, Maine   
Surf, Fortunes Rocks, Maine   
***   
Respectfully submitted,   
Thomas Looker   
John Pemberton   
Robert Sweeney   
Joel Upton   
May we stand in a moment of silence…