Date:
Monday, August 1, 2005
Palos Verdes Peninsula Artists features twenty-two prominent local artists:
Donna Anderson, Lois Barnes, Elma Beck, Don Crocker, Phyllis Ferrara, Laura Hines-Jurgens, Cinthia Joyce, Gloria D. Lee, Frank Minuto, Margaret Mohr, Lois Olson, Dael Patton, Aapo Pukk, Lynnie Sterba, Kathryn Stinis, Richard Stephens, Ruby Wang, Carol Morris-Ward, Joyce Weiss, Karen Wickham, Patricia Woolley, and Jean Zaske.
The book is filled with stunning reproductions of the artists' work and a wide variety of styles are represented including abstract, plein air, portraiture, and realism. Some of the paintings represent the individual artist's unique sense of spirituality. Some depict a political message. Others stand as inspiring and reverent tributes to nature, while still other paintings capture the human spirit and form in ways that make time stand still and the imagination race. The book is written by Palos Verdes resident, Stephen Smoke, the author of 26 books, including 17 novels. He has also directed two feature films and written the screenplays for several others.
“When you have a family portrait, your family is always at home”, says Aapo Pukk. It is that type of simple, yet profound insight that this artist brings to his art.
Portraits are living things to Mr. Pukk. Although he knows that they are made up of paper, chalk, paint, and canvas, he believes that “what we see in them changes as we change. When I create a picture I’m not ready to say if it’s good or not; it’s coming by time. Portrait art needs time. A man looks at a portrait of his wife, and every day he looks at it, her image gets younger.”
Aapo was born in Tartu, Estonia, a city of approximately 100,000 people, and his parents are both artists. He and his wife, Helge, currently reside in Palos Verdes as the guests of Alexander and Dianne Van. Several years ago the Vans traveled to Sweden to have her children baptized. While there, her cousin told her of a talented portrait artist in Estonia. Intrigued, she went there, met Aapo and his family, and hired him to paint her children. “ He captured every aspect of my children. Not only that but he is so nice and so kind. Those first portraits will always be precious to me. And I wanted more.”
Over the years Aapo made many trips to the States. The two international portrait artist associations – the Portrait Society of America and the American Society of Portrait Artists - hold conferences every year in different American cities. Because he often won awards from these organizations, the conferences provided him the perfect excuse to come to the United States regularly. Every time he came, he stayed a little longer, and a little longer. Finally, he decided to stay… at least for awhile.
The Estonian Republic was occupied by the Soviet Union for 50 years. In 1991, after the fall of he Soviet Union, Estonia became a free country, but not fast enough for Aapo. At that time in Estonia, modern art was in and classical art was pushed aside. In the Art Academie in the 1980s, he recalls an exchange between himself and a well-respected art professor looked at my work and said, ‘You can’t draw that. Gnomes don’t exist. ‘ So I drew some wind.”
Mr. Pukk tells the story of an old artist who brought his picture in front of an art jury. This was the 1990s and the jury consisted entirely of modern art people. One person asked the artist, “What is your conception?” The artist answered, “I don’t have a conception; I have my pictures.” After hearing his answer, the jury left him out of the exhibition.
Mr. Pukk likes the work of John Singer Sargent and Swedish artist, Andres Zorn. When asked about his style and the various periods he has gone through as an artist, he says only, “I’m still looking for myself to be complete.”
The artist knew he had to go abroad to fulfill his destiny. “I promised myself when I was 19 years old that my goal is to go abroad. I now have fulfilled my goal, that was ten years ago an now I am happy. Nothing can match what I have now.”
According to Mr. Pukk, art in Estonia now is much like it was in the United States in the 1960s. Classical styles are out of favor. Out of 1.4 million people, he believes there are about two thousand active artists and most of them are thinking in the modern way. “Artists who paint in a classical way are afraid to be seen. They don’t know how to ask for money from the state. Modern artists and the leaders of their unions have essentially come out and told classical artists to go away.” And when they left, just as Mr. Pukk left, only modern art, conceptual art, remained.
And there was another reason, less philosophical and more rooted in the Soviet mindset that created problems for Mr. Pukk. His paintings were selling well. He was on television and radio. He was famous. That was unusual in post-Soviet countries and such success was generally viewed as something strange or bad. Mr. Pukk explains, “If a painter is famous and his pictures are selling well, then it can’t be ‘great art,’ because great art can only be made by poor artists.”
“When I became well known, the concept artists criticized me more and more. I decided to become a member of Estonian Art Union. They said no. Then I tried again. Again they turned me down. One woman told me, ‘You have everything. Why do you want more? You have fame and money, what more do you want?” This was right after Estonia became free. Everything was new.”
He put his money into a TV show, which brought him more fame. He launched an Internet site and that raised his profile even more. Most of the time he takes the criticism in stride. “I don’t want to be a political figure; I just want to do my work.”
But that doesn’t mean that he is immune to criticism. An Estonian art critic wrote about Mr. Pukk’s work: “ His best portrait is still unpainted.”
“At first I thought that was bad. But the more I thought about it, I’m happy to keep this ultimate, or complete, good result far from me because if a portrait artist is thinking one day that this portrait is the best portrait of my life, then this is not good. In that moment his art is dead and he could die happy next day. Good portrait painting is when there are hundreds of different faces, emotions, and insight in one picture and when it is not controlled by the artist. I was originally upset by this Estonian critic, but I’m happy with him because he helped me to understand that my best work will always be in the future. This type of response to criticism makes you stronger because it makes you want to improve and prove yourself with every painting.”
Because clients often bring expectations with them to the portrait process, not everyone is satisfied with every painting. “If someone is not satisfied with a portrait, I say, ‘Let’s look at what you think is wrong.’ And we look at the painting together. I say ‘Which part do you like more?’ People’s lives are made up of so many things: family gatherings, kindergarten, bath time, fights, marital problems, all things; these things are inside of the person. You have to manage to process as well as the client’s expectations. First of all, I question whether this client is not satisfied with the picture. If he’s satisfied with the picture, then we can go on. I ask if he is ready for art in his house. If he answer is yes, then we go on.
“If someone just wants a portrait from a photograph, I can do that. Not long ago, I did a painting from a twenty-year-old photograph of a man’s wife. He said, ‘No, no, it’s totally opposite. That is not my wife.’ So we started all over again. I told him, ‘I’m your hands.’ We didn’t change very much. I just touched up the eyes and mouth a little with a pencil, and he was already satisfied. He just wanted to be part of the creation. Still, as an artist I have to keep art in, while changing what the client wants changed. I want to be and understandable artist, but not so understandable that the art goes away.”
Although he is proud of his work, has no particular favorite. “One year it’s one picture, next month it’s another. Sometimes I’ll look at something I did ten years ago and say to myself, ‘I felt this was good then, but look at what I’m doing today.’ This growing is never finished. Being genuinely interested in people helps me grow as an artist.”
Mr. Pukk first started painting portraits full time about fifteen years ago. His mother’s friend, also an Estonian artist, told him his paintings were “nice, but you can’t stay with making only portraits. It’s not what artists do. You should paint other objects, like landscapes or something else.” Initially the doubts upset him, but later he used it as a reason to get better at painting portraits.
“I liked painting portraits and I was getting good at it, and I found out more about portrait art. It’s like when you read two pages of a good book, you want to go on. Why should I not continue to read more of that book?”
Over the years Mr. Pukk has painted people from all walk of the life and all ages. “Sometimes I feel that my best clients are artists, like singers and writers, not painters like me. They don’t have expectations. They are interested in my artistic view. They appreciate what I do. They just sit there and let me create them. The worst is when someone says, ‘My nose is too big.’ But if I change it, now the eyes are sad. A man is complete, especially when his portrait is being painted.
“Just empty beauty for me is not creative because there are no corners, no windows. Where do you look in? A man says he has a bad nose. Then I say, ‘You have a bad chin also, but all together you look very nice.’ You can’t separate all these things. God gave you all these nice looking features.”
“Portrait art is to see spirit,” says Mr. Pukk, who has a deep belief in God. “All things I do I discuss with Him.”
Aapo Pukk is an artist whose spiritual life and artistic life are part of the same whole. For him, portrait art is not so much a vocation as it is a calling. He understands the magic of portrait art and what it means to families who interact with that magic over time.
And he genuinely seems to enjoy his role as the artist who creates the magic.
Text by Stephen Smoke
