Editor's Journal

by Timothy Cahill, September 28, 2007

I first met Richard Callner in 1988, long before I actually made his acquaintance. I was relatively new to the Capital Region when I went to review a 30-year retrospective of his paintings at what was then the University Art Gallery at the University at Albany. Callner’s name meant nothing to me, and I went to the show expecting the assignment to be routine. It wasn’t. What I encountered were intricate, exciting paintings, complexly textured and drenched in color. I can’t quote from the review I wrote then, because I’ve lost the clip, but I remember well its exuberance—it was a full-hearted praise song to an artist who made me feel I’d been in the presence of something extraordinary.

The exhibit touched me in ways I scarcely understood. But soon afterward, I moved from the area and all but forgot about the artist and the impact his paintings had had on me. After several years, I returned, and in 1998 was covering art for the Albany Times Union when a friend called to recommend I write a story about Dick Callner. He had been stricken with Parkinson’s disease a decade before, around the time of his UAlbany show, and the symptoms had accelerated. Yet for all the physical disability the disease created, he was still painting, and that was what my friend wanted me to see.

One of the advantages of being a journalist is that you go places you have no regular business being. If it hadn’t been for my job, I might never have found myself in the great white studio of Callner’s Latham home, a capacious, high-ceilinged workspace with a bank of north windows. And so I met the painter for a second time, this time in person. He greeted me with a brush in his hand, which is how he spent much of each day of his life. There were paintings everywhere, on easels, on worktables, propped on chairs, leaning against walls, and every one of them rife with hue and tint. There was no radio, no neighbors, no traffic noise, but the room seemed filled with music. Kandinsky had written about this. “Color is the keyboard,” the German abstractionist wrote, “and the soul a piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating.”

Color was a sixth sense for Callner. He told me that he only needed to see a color once and never forgot it. He apprehended color in a way that went beyond mere sight. I can’t explain it more clearly, because I do not fully grasp the mysteries of color. Few of us do, just as few of us hear the way Beethoven or Coltrane could hear. I can’t imagine what it was like to respond to color the way Dick did. It must have been like having the world bestow a continual blessing on you.

The Parkinson’s had him in its grip even then, and he endured the shaking hands, slurred speech, and fatigue without any apparent complaint. I knew as a journalist I had to ask him about the disease—that’s another bizarre aspect of this profession, the prying questions you get used to asking: “Do you ever feel sorry for yourself?” I queried, near the end of our visit. “Once,” he replied, unfazed. “I think I dropped something. Feeling sorry for myself would be a waste of time when I could be painting.”