MONROE Artist Salomon Kadoche.
By: Leon Tovey
MONROE "I was born in the wrong century," Salomon Kadoche said Nov. 18, gesturing widely at the artistic clutter that fills the basement studio of his Greenbriar at Whittingham home: paintings on canvas and quick charcoal studies on paper piled here and there in the midst of antique pots and pans, empty wine bottles and bouquets of dried flowers.
A painter and retired commercial artist who grew up in Morocco, lived for eight years in Israel and studied art at Hunter College in New York City, Mr. Kadoche realized as soon as the words left his mouth that they were rather cliched and his round, thoughtful face broke into a grin.
He continued quickly, speaking not of the fine art realist painting reminiscent of the mid-19th century that has been his passion, but of the commercial art that was his livelihood before he retired with his wife, Bernice, to their tidy Greenbriar house nine years ago.
"When computers came in, they killed the commercial artist thing," he said. "For me it was lucky that I was ready to retire then anyway."
Mr. Kadoche spent the quarter century prior to his retirement designing catalogues for department stores a way of making a living virtually impossible now, he said, in this age of desktop publishing and online commerce.
And he admits that the realist oil and pastel painting he now does exclusively "traditional," is how he describes his work is considered similarly anachronistic by the contemporary fine art world.
But that, he said, is where his heart is and has been ever since he saw, as a 14-year-old in Morocco, a realist seascape titled "Moonlight on the Ocean."
"I saw that painting for the first time, I said, ‘oh my God, that’s it,’ " Mr. Kadoche recalled. "I am not an abstract painter; I enjoy looking at it, but I cannot do it myself. I’m very visual; for me the image comes first, not the concept."
The importance of the visual world is apparent in Mr. Kadoche’s works, from the "slice-of-life" Paris streetscapes that adorn the walls of his home, to the somber pastel portraits that have won him back-to-back awards the last two years from the American Artists Professional League.
The AAPL, a national organization dedicated to promoting traditional realist art, awarded Mr. Kadoche its Art Spirit Foundation Dianne B. Bernhard Award in Pastel in 2004 for "The Elder Painter," a portrait of an elderly painter hunched over, intent on his palette.
This year, Mr. Kadoche was awarded the AAPL’s Medal of Honor for another portrait, "Tattooed," in which a heavily tattooed young man, with a shaved head and a nose ring, stands, arms crossed, contemplating the meaning of life or where to get his next tattoo.
Like all of Mr. Kadoche’s work, the two paintings, while realistic, do not cross the line into what is often referred to as photo realism. Their soft edges and subtle colors manage to capture and convey both the physical attributes and the personalities of their subjects. As such, they are unquestionably paintings.
"I don’t go for (photo realism); it’s just not my thing," Mr. Kadoche said. "I don’t want to just get that moment that the shutter closes, I have to see my subjects move around, to see how they really are, to properly paint them."
Live models go through at least three sittings more if he can afford to pay them and an in animate objects sit for weeks while he works to get the details just right. For landscapes, he said, he will sometimes cheat: sitting for a few hours at the site and taking a picture to get the details right later if he can’t return later.
Not every piece is successful, he admitted. His studio is crammed with hundreds of paintings. Good ones, as he describes some, and others that "did not succeed." His goal is to make each painting better than the last one, he said, which is why he chooses to enter most of his work in juried competitions.
"I am not a businessman, so, for me galleries are not the best option," he said. "With these competitions, I’m competing with myself more than anything and it pushes me to be a better painter.
"In this way, I’m always on the same path," he added. "It’s sort of a tradition."