Interview with Joanna Fink and Bernard Chaet from the Alpha Gallery, Boston
re-edited on the occasion of the exhibition Bernard Chaet (1924 – 2012): A Life in Art – Alpha
Gallery, Boston – December 1, 2012 through January 2, 2013
Bernard Chaet taught painting and drawing at the Yale University Art Department from 1951-1990 and was the Chairman of the Art Department for a number of years.
Chaet’s friend and School of Art colleague William Bailey called the painter “one of the great figures in American art.”
A very good article from a 2013 WBUR episode by Greg Cook is transcribed here Bernard Chaet’s Far Horizon and this Wikipedia page.
Bernard Chaet’s, The Art of Drawing, comes out of his teaching experience at Yale and is put to great use here in this timeless book about creative drawing. This book has been hugely popular and influential to art students for many years. It’s more about making art than technique and materials. Even as he introduces basic concepts such as line and value, his illustrations show the inventive ways great artists used these concepts in the making of their art. Chaet avoids the regurgitation of academic rules that discourages creativity and provides a fresh approach that is as relevant today as when this book first was published in the ’70s.
Painting Perceptions was started in 2009 by Larry Groff to promote the ideas, practice and experience of painters working from observation in a modernist vein from around the world through interviews, essays, videos and community. It later evolved to include imagination-based and abstract painting as well.
Joanne, thank you for this. This artist is very underrated. We need to record him for history.