Art Attack

Putting the p-a-i-n in painting

By Corey Levitan

“Oh … my ... God,” says Mary Mayer, unable to tear her eyes from the teeny dot of red paint with the ginormous price tag.

The dance teacher from Chicago, who is visiting Las Vegas’ First Friday art festival for the first time, whips out her iPhone for an urgent photograph.

Everybody is an artist, said the German postmodernist Joseph Beuys. I’m currently testing this theory at City of the World, a nonprofit downtown gallery normally brimming with the work of professionals who aren’t experimenting for magazine articles. Here, “Corey Levitan: The One-Half Man Show” has just opened. It’s an exhibition of my life’s work, none of which existed eight days ago.

Why not? Las Vegas resident Autumn de Forest, age 9, has painted art that has sold for more than $250,000 (and not just to her parents!). In the late ’50s, Congo the chimp painted elegant abstractions. So do elephants today in Thailand.

I reached out to Colin Pringle, a noted Las Vegas Michelangelo who also happens to be one of my Facebook friends. Pringle, 71, is among the 32 locals hanging at City of the World. He’s also an art instructor who believes not only that anyone can be an artist, but a great one.

“If they can sign their name, I can bring it out of them,” Pringle says. “Even if they can’t sign their name — although it will take a little longer.”

Still, Pringle thought my goals a tad lofty at first.

“No artist in their right mind would ever try to create an entire show in eight days,” he told me eight days ago. (Insert obvious joke about the state of my mind here.)

But that’s how long I had, considering when DAVID publisher Max Friedland decided to assign me this adventure. Actually, thanks to an out-of-town Thanksgiving, it was four days. So, during his twice-weekly City of the World class, Pringle took me on, as he has hundreds of beginners since 1955 (many of whom are now prize-winners).

Pringle — whose credits include a painting at the Louvre — is a realist. So he suggested I be one, too.

“It’s the thing that lasts forever,” he said. “Pop art didn’t last, and I knew it wouldn’t.”

He is also the other kind of realist.

“Portraits are absolutely the most difficult things an artist can paint,” he said. “So I don’t recommend a double-portrait as your first painting. How about a landscape?”

No. I insisted on “Mother & Daughter,” a 16-by-20-inch double-portrait based on a photo of my wife cradling our newborn daughter in the hospital. It is the defining image for this nascent period in my family’s existence.

Pringle taught me the key to painting my subject: not painting it. It must be viewed purely as a random collection of shadows. Without once touching my canvas, he showed me how to draw these, then fill in the white highlights representing my light source, then prepare and apply coats of wash to blend everything. Automatically, my girls began emerging from the acrylic murk.

Pringle began drawing at 3, inspired by the clothing models he copied perfectly from the Sears catalog.

“My dad said, ‘That’s impossible.’ My mom said, ‘I watched him do it.’”

By age 5, he sold his first oil painting – the same one that won him his first national competition.

“It was quite apparent that I was born to do this,” he says.

Pringle is one of about 1,000 working artists inhabiting Las Vegas — although he’s a rarity in that it’s his only line of work. (He ran a gallery in Redondo Beach, Calif., before moving to Vegas in 1980 to soothe a hand condition.) Here at City of the World, artist Gayle Nathan is a District Court judge; Carol Mittwede owns a yoga studio; and Liza Amor is a Clark County schoolteacher (a popular artist occupation). They pay $30-$100 monthly rental fees to display works that barely pay for themselves.

“We do it for the love of art, not money,” says Pringle, who lives in an apartment modest even for the Fremont East entertainment district.

I’m not the realist Pringle hoped for. It turns out abstraction is my bag. The faces in “Mother & Daughter” turned out so shockingly not bad — notwithstanding the legal action my wife threatened over the size of her nose — that Pringle halted the process before I attempted the realistic details and risked ruination.

“That’s actually quite good,” Pringle said.

It surprised me, too.

Unfortunately, completing this one painting took two days. That left only two more for five other from-scratch masterpieces. Colors flew everywhere — even on top of colors that weren’t dry enough. Wherever skill and time were required, arrogance was substituted.

The results included a white Gesso triangle I titled “Sonny Bono’s Tree,” a trio of acrylic circles traced by overturned buckets (titled “String Theory” by a fellow student) and an oil I called “Still Wet” because it will be for at least another week.

Mary Mayer continues examining my red dot on canvas, aka “Brilliance,” searching for hidden intrinsic layers of value. Inspired by a similar piece I saw as a child at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, it is now the most expensive piece hanging at City of the World.

I’m asking $2,000.

“Really, come on now,” Mayer says out loud to herself.

Later, she explains that the iPhone photo she snapped will join a collection of “stupid things” she’s seen in her travels, including for-sale signs for a “refriderator” and a pair of dance “tihts.”

“You photograph stupid things?” asks F. Andy Taylor, the illustrator and newspaper graphics designer who was kind enough to lend me his City of the World wall for this experiment. “Wow, you’re going to be busy here.”

Isaac Ochoa is equally fascinated by “Brilliance” — no doubt because he paints similar things in his art class at Ira J. Earl Elementary and wants to know if he’s sitting on a goldmine, too.

“Man, I can paint that with my eyes closed,” the 11-year-old tells his mom, who shushes him.

Then Ochoa wonders why “Starry Night II,” my nearby smattering of white stars against a blue background, is only $50.

“It has a BUNCH of dots,” he says, scratching his chin.

Last up to my wall is gallery owner Roz Knight. She opened City of the World in 2006, in a onetime house at South Casino Center Boulevard and East Colorado Avenue.

I can sense the deep fault Knight wants to find with her potentially art-mocking newest resident. After several minutes of studying, however, she calls my sense of color “terrific,” noting only that some of my dots are smudged (due to the wet paint) and that I should have painted the sides of my canvases.

“Colin probably should have mentioned that,” she offers. “Today, people don’t have paintings framed as much.”

That’s higher praise than I dreamed of.

By evening’s end, Beuys’ theory receives even more conclusive proof. Everybody IS an artist, it turns out. Of the three paintings that sell tonight from this gallery, none comes from my wall. But “Brilliance” receives a solid offer. A friend says he’ll take it off my hands for $20, “if no one else wants it.”

It’s not quite $2,000. But that’s what negotiation is for, right?

Some of Levitan’s paintings still hang at City of the World, 1229 S. Casino Center Drive. All proceeds from their sale will benefit the gallery. Check out all of Levitan’s musings at www.coreylevitan.com and Twitter at @coreylevitan.