RALPH
CARPENTIER

by Martha C. Carpentier, The East Hampton Star.

25 February 2016.

Reprinted by permission of The East Hampton Star.

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In 1955, Ralph Carpentier had a baby girl. This was not expected. It was not part of the plan. But, being the son of Italian-American immigrants, raised in Queens by a close-knit family with a loving mother, two strong sisters, and a father who survived the First World War and the Depression through his ingenuity and hard work, my father did what he felt he had to do. He left Greenwich Village, humming with be-bop and abstract expressionism, where he had been studying art at NYU on the GI Bill, to come to the eastern end of Long Island, where he knew the artists summered. He got a job teaching art at East Hampton High School. He made furniture with George Schulte. He hauled seine with Ted Lester. He pounded shingles with Johnny Caramagna. He did what he had to do to make a good life for his daughter, for his wife Horty, and for himself.

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Everyone knows that in the landscapes of the east end – with its flat vistas of potato fields, its 18th-century barns, its convoluted inlets and bays, its open, weather-beaten skies – my father found his identity as a painter.

 

In painting precisely ordered, Dutch-inspired landscapes during the era dominated by

De Kooning, Pollock, and Rivers, my father stubbornly went his own way. He paid a big price for that, but it is something his family and his descendants should always be proud of. His decisions were honorable and they made us who we are. But Ralph appreciated good art whatever its style – he always taught us that art is about line, form, composition, and color, whatever the surface images may say.

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The 18th and the 19th-centuries were at war in my father’s paintings. He sought to escape the passion of his nature in the measured, controlled, serene worlds he created of sea, field, and sky . . . but look closely, and there is usually a tiny dog sniffing in the stubble, an isolated man gazing at the sky, a solitary boat rocking in the sea, all but engulfed by the beauty of the surrounding natural world.

And, sure enough, every line and every form in the painting is subtly designed to take your eye right there, right there to where the man stands, alone in the universe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Ralph aged, the romantic side of his nature began to force its way into his paintings more and more. In the blue, green, and grey cloud-ridden scenes, suddenly the sky would be orange, or the field would be lined with chartreuse, or the sea would be deep purple lit by a tiny white moon. These were our favorites, even though he was always a little bit more nervous about them. Now there’s only one unfinished painting left, still sitting on the easel in his studio. “I have to move the figure a little bit to the right,” he said to me last summer, as I futilely tried to lower his palette table to the level of his wheelchair, “and I have to fill in that line of trees with more color.” 

 

My friends often wonder, although they show me the grace of not asking, why I seem to avoid East Hampton. It is painful for me to come here, not because of painful memories, although like everyone else I have plenty of those, but because of happy memories. East Hampton, Amagansett, and especially Springs, are all frozen in time for me – everywhere I look I see a photograph of the past, and every change since then is an unbearable desecration of those memories.

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For me, it is always about 1965, give or take, the sun is always shining, and it is always summer. My beautiful gypsy stepmother has taken me to Louse Point and she is sunbathing in her bikini while I swim or, on the inlet side, dig in the muck with my toes for clams. Or I am making mud-pies with my cousins under the scrub oaks behind Fort Pond Blvd.  Or Anna Moss and I are furiously peddling our bikes past Bell woods to Amagansett, because the cool kids hang out at Indian Wells. Or the artists are having another bacchanalian clambake on the beach – the clams, lobsters, corn-on-the-cob roasting in the sand, sparks from the big bonfire flitting upwards, and the ocean ominous and vast in the darkening night. 

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And where is Ralph Carpentier? He is a busy man. If he’s not pounding shingles or painting in his studio he’s probably at a meeting – Baymen’s Association, Artists Alliance, Architectural Review Board – we all know how generously he gave of his time to the preservation of this community he loved so much. Or he’s sailing his New Haven Sharpie, the “Heron,” a shallow draft 19th-century wooden ketch made to fish the waters of Long Island Sound, which he lovingly restored.

 

For there was nothing the hands of Ralph Carpentier could not restore to its pristine origins or make from scratch. From the largest things – like our house which he built or the marine museum he created for this town, every installation and display of which, from the history of the menhaden fishing industry to the artifacts of local shipwrecks to the diorama of the east end, designed, built, crafted, and painted by his hands – to the smallest things: pottery thrown on his wheel and baked in his kiln, puppets and stage sets, ships in bottles, book illustrations, films, frames, figurines, and even a perfect miniature Chippendale jewelry chest for Horty.

 

For Ralph Carpentier was, first and foremost, a creator: a father, a husband, a craftsman, an artist, and also a great teacher, always willing to help anyone who stood at his side and wanted to know how it was made or how to make it.

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As we say good-by to Ralph, I would like to conclude with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel I have been teaching for some 25 years, and which my father told me he read long ago and identified with as a young Catholic boy trying to free himself to become the artist he dreamed of being. It ends with the following words, which express very simply Stephen Dedalus’s desire for his father, his mythic creator, always to be with him:  “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”