Peruse the works of a father-son artist duo in a new exhibit at the Salmon Falls Gallery this fall. “Old and New,” featuring the works of Robert and Matthew Steinem, will be on display through the end of October.
Matthew Steinem said this will be the first time his and his father’s work has been shown together, and hopefully the first of many joint exhibits highlighting their shared love of painting, despite different styles.
“This is a first run, we’ll see how they hang together,” Matthew said. “Hopefully it’s the first of many collaborations.”
Robert, of Colrain, is a self-taught artist who first picked up the medium as a teenager. After a service-related injury in the Marines, he quit painting for 20 years, but eventually found his way back to it with help from an ophthalmologist friend who made him special glasses that allowed him to overcome the challenges of being legally blind.
At the time, painting was just a hobby, while Robert worked as a writer at various newspapers. He was then encouraged by friends to explore art as a career.
“Whenever I moved to a new area, I’d get a job at the newspaper, so all my training is in writing,” Robert said. “One year, a friend came to visit, saw a painting, and asked what I was doing. I said it’s just a hobby to get away from the computer.”
He said his friend sent him to a gallery in Northampton and “in one year in the art world, I made more than 25 years in writing.”
Matthew’s journey into the art world took a different approach. He grew up with two artist parents, and said it gave him the inspiration to pursue a career in art and a leg up in understanding how to market himself and his work.
“I think it gives me a huge advantage in the fact that I’ve seen somebody do this successfully,” Matthew said. “And when it’s not working, I’ve seen it not working and that be be ok, and how to mitigate frustration and how to just keep plugging along at it.”
He added that art classes at Greenfield Community College helped him develop his own style. Matthew said his father’s work tended to take on more surreal and realistic qualities, while his own reflected semi-narrative surreal landscapes that seemed more abstract.
Matthew said the gallery would also showcase their different mediums, as he worked more with acrylics and ink, while Robert would be showcasing a collection of shirt paintings, where he had primed and stretched a shirt over birch plywood before sketching and painting on it.
Robert said the show was a chance to exhibit many paintings he had made and held on to from when Matthew was a young boy, including a handful of paintings that were made by accident.
“My grandad, who always wanted me to be a lawyer or a business person of some sort, gave me a bunch of white shirts I was never going to wear. So I hung one next to my easel to clean my brushes off and when I ran out of things to paint on I looked at the shirt, and thought I’m just going to pin this to the wall and paint it,” Robert said.
The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily at 1 Ashfield St. in Shelburne Falls.
“Robert Steinem & Matthew Steinem: Old and New” is on display through Nov. 2. For more information, visit salmonfallsgallery.com.
