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Shawn
Lütz at work in his studio.
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Shawn
Lütz didn’t always
want to be an artist. But from his earliest recollections
he always liked to draw, and was pretty good at it at that.
An
admitted Air Force brat who traveled wherever the Air force
assigned his pilot father, he says he never stayed in one
place long enough to develop lasting memories or
friendships. His family lived for a time in the
Philippines, Thailand, Texas and California, before
settling down to a quieter life in Massachusetts.
Of his
earliest artistic efforts, he recounts one episode that
stands out among others. “I remember at about four when I
was in kindergarten, my teacher gave us an assignment to
make a paper puppet and paint it. I painted a parrot.”
Not to be outdone by his peers, even at that early age, he
painted a Toucan, a colorful, droopy-beaked exotic bird of
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South America. He laughs as he recalls the
experience. “Most
kids used two colors. I
used six. It was quite elaborate, actually. The
teacher picked my puppet as the best of the class.” Lütz
paused for a moment and added: “When my mother heard
the news, she was delighted, but added, ‘don’t think
you’re going to get rich off it.’”
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If his art teacher
could only meet him now.
A Shawn Lütz painting
today is not only hard to come by, because they sell in advance of his
applying his first brush stroke or cutting a board, but he can ask
pretty much what he wants for his art; it’s that good. He is a master
painter of hyperrealism art, who is “sold out” for the next two
years.
Not bad for a kid who
put his art away for from high school thru the mid-nineties while he
earned a living banging out dents from automobile fenders for a
Middleboro dealership on the South Shore.
That special talent:
It was while attending Scituate Middle School in
the late Seventies that Lütz realized he had a special talent as an
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©
"LILACS BY THE SEA",
oil on panel, 18" X 13",
by
Shawn Lütz
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artist. “It was then that I really started to do art. My room
was covered in art and drawings and sketches.” One
piece of work, in particular, attracted the interest of
his mother. It was an acrylic painting of a horse. His
mother read of an outdoor fair and competition being
held at Copley Square in Boston, and encouraged him to
enter his work. “I submitted the painting of the
horse, and I won Third Place,” he says, reflecting the
surprise he felt. “It was my first contest. I was
really excited about winning,” he recalls.
Throughout
Middle School he continued to paint, mostly in acrylic
which he found easier to blend than oil. “Oil, I hated
it,” he says, half amused that he now earns his living
from his very mastery of it. But back then it was a
different story. “It ran all together. I painted wet
on wet.” When I ask him what that meant, he said:
“A line that was this big when I started,” he said, holding his forefinger and
thumb close, widening them as he spoke, “ended up this
big when I finished, because the paint hadn’t yet
dried. I tried oil and gave up, and decided to stay with
acrylic and pastels.”
Scituate
had an art program that Lütz enjoyed, and an art
instructor who created quiet an impression on him. Mr.
Fitzpatrick, a laid back veteran tank commander from the
Vietnam era, had an impact on young Lütz’s life that
carries over to today. “Of all the teachers I had, he
was the one who really impressed me. He was gruff. He
had a beard and long hair. But the paintings he did had
this incredible glaze. I was really impressed. That’s
exactly the look I wanted in my paintings.”
Fitzpatrick’s,
work appeared on an album cover for the rock group,
“Tin Lizzy”, a detail that apparently added to his
“hip” mystique among students.
Lütz
was struck by Fitzpatrick’s commitment to painting.
“We’d come to class and he’d be painting when we
arrived. He’d glance up when we came in and wave his
hand and say, Hi! and go right back to painting until we
were all seated. When we left, he’d go right back to
painting.”
©
"BALLONS OVER TOWN COVE",
oil on panel, 7" x 12",
by
Shawn Lütz
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Although Lütz loved
art, and hoped that one day he’d be able to duplicate the glaze his
art instructor achieved, he didn’t see much of a career in actually
being an artist, and he wasn’t about to try experimenting with oil
again. With the end of high school fast approaching, his mind turned
from the idealism of art to earning a living, and for him this meant
working with something else that he really enjoyed ― cars.
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Lütz the best autobody man around.
He bought his first car when he was fourteen
years old. “It was a windfall for me,” he says, and
a “demarcation in my life. I diverted my energies from
artistic to working on cars, which is kind of an
artistic endeavor in itself,” he says instructively,
to make a point that has meaning to him. It became an
obsession that he financed by working during the summer
months. A field worker for SETA, a summer program for
kids, he fixed small foot bridges and cleared paths in
the woods for hikers. “I made enough money at it to
purchase a car for $600.”
He
fixed and sold the car, and bought another car and fixed
it. Almost every day during summer months, Lütz could
be seen outside his parents’ home at Peggotty Beach in
Scituate, working on cars, removing panels, banging out
dents, using the shadows cast by the sun to find minor
dimples or imperfections in a door or fender, requiring
further filling and smoothing ― a technique that
years later would define his art.
He
became so well known at the beach, he recalls, that he
was once spared a speeding ticket by a local cop who,
after stopping him for speeding, asked: “Aren’t you
the kid that fixes cars at Peggotty Beach?” When Lütz
acknowledged that he was, the good-hearted cop told him
to stick with fixing cars, not racing them through the
streets of Scituate. He escaped the ticket and never
raced again.
By the
time he finished high school Lütz was fully into
working on cars. He still loved art, and used it often
in high school to amuse friends who’d ask that he draw
a caricature of a teacher or a hot rod. He was even a
pretty good amateur wrestler, representing his weight
class at the New England Division varsity wrestling
competition. But when the proverbial “rubber hit the
road” he didn’t view either wrestling or art as a
means of earning a living. He needed a real job.
It
was his mother, he says, that wanted him to continue his
education before settling into that job. Having nothing
better to do at the time, he says, he acceded to her
wishes and enrolled at Massassoit Community College in
Brockton. While attending college, however, he kept
applying for jobs as an autobody specialist, hoping to
pursue a
career in the one field that seemed to come naturally to
him. To his disappointment he found that almost every bodyshop he applied at
wanted someone with a specialized degree in the field.
The Rhode Island Trade Shops School offered exactly what he was
searching for, an intensive nine month program for those
who wanted to fix cars. The year was 1985. For the next
six years of his life, Lütz labored in a field that he
found increasingly problematic. “I got sick of it,”
he says of the constant pressure to produce. “People
don’t care what goes into the work, so long as it
looks good when it comes out.”
Lütz
describes the autobody business as planted thick with
technical books and manuals that described every
fastener hidden behind every piece of metal on every
make and model of every car, and time sheets that
didn’t always reflect the practical difficulties found
with the crumpled cars that came in for repair. “You
have to know cars intimately,” he says of the
technical knowledge required to be good in the trade.
While banging out dents and smoothing fenders, he
learned something he shunned earlier: how to work with
paint, oil based paint.
There
were base coats and clear coats,
and they came in all colors and new variations of paints
such as triple stage pearlescent
paints that were highly specialized combinations of
colors used on luxury cars. A pearlescent paint combined
so much color that it would actually appear different
shades depending upon where you stood to view it. When
one of these high end cars came in and needed painting,
it became an autobody specialist’s nightmare. “You
had to be able to adjust to the problems you ran into on
the fly,” he said. The problem was this: “paint
manufacturer formulas didn’t always jive with
automotive manufacturer formulas because auto
manufacturers were always tweaking their color
applications in a given day or week to match their paint
chips, or test strips as they were called. Auto
manufacturers closely guarded their own unique color
formulations, and unless they supplied the paint and
formula, you had to figure out those formulations “on
the fly”.
He
explains it this way: “In the sixties, cars were red,
black, blue. Today one color can be comprised of silver,
translucent pearl, black and green. What color does that
make? he asks. And you can run into problems along the
way. “If, for example, when you’re mixing the paint,
you’re off by five pounds of pressure, you’re done. It would throw the whole thing off.”
And
then, “you have to consider the wear that comes from
being outside in the sun, and the natural fading process
over the years. Manufactures supply paint that matches
the original color, but they don’t provided faded
paint. That, you have to figure out yourself.”
After
six years in the business he left with no regrets. He
also left with a better appreciation of what it took to
give paints the luster he so admired in Mr.
Fitzpatrick’s work. Shawn Lütz didn’t realize it
then, he says, but what he had learned about paint in
the autobody business, and how to use it to achieve the
result his customers needed and wanted, was about to
change his life. It happened, actually, by chance, while
he was still doing autobody work and acting on the side.
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An artist reemerges.
Just before leaving the autobody business Lütz
had taken an interest in acting and landed a job “way off
Broadway”. He
freelanced as an actor, evenings, working dinner circuits and
community stage productions at the Mystery Café out of Boston. “I was a pretty good actor,” he
says of his experience on stage that lasted three years, “and tried to sing and dance, but I was a better actor.” During this
period he remained interested in art, and while working phones
in the back office, began painting again. His pastime caught the
attention of a coworker who, observing Shawn’s obvious talent,
asked if he would paint a portrait from a “2” by 1” snapshot that I thought was pretty
cool. It was like a miniature Renoir.” Lütz accepted the
challenge and proceeded to produce a 9” by 12” acrylic
painting that impressed his coworkers.
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©
"DAY AT THE BEACH",
oil on panel, 12.5" X 7.75",
by
Shawn Lütz
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“One of the other people I acted with saw it and asked how I
got the paint to look so sheer on the sleeves. I said I
thought about it [how to do it] for about a half hour or
so and I just figured it out ― and it worked.
People were pretty amazed that I could do that with
paint.”
The
next request came from another actor, who asked if
he’d be willing to do a portrait of
a friend’s mother from an old photograph, as a
birthday gift. Lütz agreed, and produced a 4’ by 3’
oil painting in the 1930’s art deco style. His friend
saw it and said, “My God, that looks like a
Parrish”. Lütz said he didn’t know who Parrish was,
and asked: “Who’s
Parrish?” She gave him a book of Maxfield Parrish
works. Lütz flipped through the pages, he said, and it
occurred to him as he was perusing the art that, “this
is what I always wanted to do.”
The
book described glazes and applying layers of paint and
different techniques. Lütz said he realized, then that much of what he learned
about paint as an autobody specialist could be
transferred to his art. “The glaze came from knowing
how paint lays down. I learned that through years of
working in the autobody business.” It wasn’t quite
the same as St. Paul’s epiphany on the road to
Damascus, but it did strike Lütz then, perhaps, for the
first time, that he had found his niche. His six years
spent working with paint and smoothing out dents was
about to pay off as an artist. “In the autobody
business you try to get a flat finish, shiny without
brush strokes showing. I realized that this is what I
had been striving for twenty years ago, but didn’t
have the experience.” Lütz emphasizes that he paints
with a brush toady, not a spray gun. A glance at his
work shows why.
Enter Valerie:
Shawn
Lütz came to the style that he paints today almost by
accident. He had pretty much given up any thought of
painting as a way of earning a living, and settled first
into autobody work, then acting. Where he would have
gone had an acquaintance not asked him to duplicate a
small photo of his mother, and reignite a latent
interest in art that was dormant for years, is
anybody’s guess. What he would have done had the
Theatre club he worked for not closed its doors,
that’s anybody’s guess, too. And whether he would
have gone further had he not met and fell in love with a
young Boston College nursing student by the name of
Valerie Neenan, well, that’s the rest of the story.
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©
"THE PERFORMANCE",
oil on panel, 12" X 16",
by
Shawn Lütz
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It
is hard to imagine that so much talent would not have
eventually emerged on its own, somewhere, somehow. But as it
often happens in life, circumstances often determine the
outcome of our lives. In Lütz’ case, it was his
girlfriend, now wife ,Valerie, who set his compass and gave
him the freedom he needed to pursue a career in art.
Outside
of a few friends, “Nobody knew I painted,” he said of
the years he spent working in the theatre and for a time
afterward. “I was renting a small apartment in
Barnstable,” he recalls, “and set up an easel in my
living room.” To supplement his income, he took a job working at a frame shop along with an actor he
knew from the theatre. He continued working at the frame shop when
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the theatre closed. “I worked at the shop days and worked at
developing my painting skills at night.” His first commission
came from a wealthy Centerville couple. They asked him to do a
painting of their house. Applying a technique he describes as both
“original and traditional” avoiding any more detail less he
give too much of his technique away, he says he began slowly,
methodically, “working from the lightest of the darkest colors
out” applying almost translucent layers of paint, then varnish,
smoothing, then more paint, then varnish, until a few months later
a completed painting emerged. How good was it? He says: “You
could look back at that panel today and know it was mine.”
It
was while working the two jobs that Lütz met Valerie. “She’s
the reason I’m an artists today,” he says with affection. Lütz
speaks of his wife almost reverently, stressing that he really
means it when he says she is the reason for his success. “She
supported me while I was struggling. She encouraged me to quite my
other jobs and devote myself to painting full time; and she has
supported me ever since. I owe everything to her. I really want to
make that point.”
With
Valerie’s encouragement and support he set out on his own. For
the first time in his life he could pursue an artistic career and
not worry about how he would survive. He set out immediately to
produce a creation of his own, a composite or collage, a technique
that he now uses regularly working with a computer. A composite is
an assemblage of images taken from magazines and other sources
that he arranges, creating an original scene. In the early days he
worked from whatever size the image was. Today, he enlarges the
composite, using Photo Shop as a guide. With the composite in
front of him, and his blank Masonite board on the other, he
begins.
For
seven months he labored over a unique creation, inspired by a
statue he saw in a history book: a Gaelic soldier, sword in hand,
preparing to kill himself, after mortally wounding his wife,
hoping to spare both from the revenge of approaching Roman
soldiers. He describes the painting thusly: “It was of a soldier
preparing to kill himself after killing his wife. It was all
dramatically lit. He was standing on a hill with his city burning
in the background. The rays from the setting sun were lighting the
mountains, really dramatically. He was supporting his wife with
one hand, holding the sword up to his neck with the other,
glancing back over his shoulder. The road he was standing on faded
to black as it approached the city. It had a dark, romantic theme
to it. I really liked it.” So did his wife, and so did one of
his acting friend, Cynthia Robotham,
who took an interest in his work.
Robotham encouraged Lütz to submit his painting
to Cummaquid Fine Arts
that at the time was sponsoring a group show. The year was 1992.
He entered the painting and received favorable reviews. “When
Valerie saw the response the painting got and how people reacted
to it, she really encouraged me to do more.”
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Robotham,
too, saw something special in Lütz’s work and
recommended him to the curator of the Cahoon
Museum in Cotuit. This was all pretty heavy stuff for
Lütz who says it came sudden and unexpectedly. After
doing a painting for the museum, he was invited to produce
additional work for a one man show that was scheduled a
year later, an opportunity that rarely presents itself to
someone whose star hadn’t quite yet been created, much
less risen.
All
that was about to change, however. “Based on my work,
the curator asked if I could produce enough work to fill
two rooms.” Lütz explained that all he had produced to
date was four paintings. He was apprehensive, but excited
by the prospect. “I said, I don’t know. Maybe I can do
one room. She thought about if for a few moments and then
said okay, do a room. I think I did maybe ten or eleven
paintings.”
That’s all it took. The show ran two weeks and
sold out. There was a definite demand for his work. Lütz
had arrived. |
©
"WISHING WELL",
oil on panel, 14" X 8.75",
by
Shawn Lütz
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With
his wife firmly behind him, and Robotham opening doors,
the next step landed him where he is today, at Winstanley-Roark
Fine Arts in Brewster. “Cynthia said she had a
couple people she wanted to introduce me to. That was
Bob and Anita. They wanted to see my originals. I worked
fourteen hours a day six days a week to produce some
paintings to show them.”
Lütz
was under pressure now as never before to produce.
“Anita and Bob wanted paintings and I was under a lot of
pressure to produce,” a situation that doesn’t
necessarily lend itself to the kind of work he creates.
“I create one painting at a time.” he explains his
methodology this way: take the position of someone’s
body, for example, I may like the way an arm looks in one photograph
and the face from another. I work at it, piece by piece,
until I get a collage of the image I want and it looks
natural, like you just came upon it.”
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©
"VIEW TO THE SEA",
oil on panel, 20" X 16",
by
Shawn Lütz
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Since
1996 Lütz has been producing magnificent works
of art exclusively at Winstanley-Roark Fine Arts,
one at a time. Lütz is one of those artists
whose work is so good that even the gallery
owners respect and accept the delay. “I have
kind of a unique situation” he says of the way
his art is sold. Few people get to see a body of
his work all at once because it sells faster
than he can produce it. Rather than produce by
demand, as most artists must, he says he produce
s quality collages that he calls his
“studies”, shows them through mailings from
the gallery and sells from them. It’s a
different approach, but it works; his paintings
are sold out two to three years in advance.
“People who know me and my work know the
quality of what they’ll be getting,.” he
says.
“I
paint what I want to paint.”
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If
it seems a little distant, think again. A Shawn Lütz
painting is something to behold. His technique of
painting in thin layers, baking his painting in an oven,
applying varnish, then painting, baking and applying
more varnish, all the while smoothing each layer with
sandpaper until the multiple layers of almost stain thin
paint literally reflect light, is what truly
distinguishes his art. His paintings are truly
luminescent. “My paintings are hyper realism: smooth,
shiny and with no brush strokes visible. The viewer sees
the painting as if he or she were right there. There are
no blurred or undefined parts as you might see in a
photograph. I want to make the painting,” he adds,
“with the scene as if you were right there in them.”
Think
of the how a new luxury car looks on its best day, and
that’s the glaze of a Lütz painting. And, he says,
“he does it without power tools or pressure
sprayers.” Thank God!
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