THE
FOREIGNER
Mentor Huebner (c) 1959
Oil on Masonite 30" X 24"
THE FOREIGNER
BY
A perpendicular
or horizontal 30" X 24" space is still only a two
by two and a half foot area. And that's a pretty small place
in which to fit a huge ocean freighter, no matter however you
angle it. To reduce it's size and still retain the impact of
its design and inspirational grandeur takes talent. And scale.
Mentor was a Master of scale, design and perspective and exhibited
this talent not only in conceptual drawings for film production,
but also in his fine art paintings. His compositions were never
out of scale. He could 'eye ball' it exactly. And then he would
calculate it for back up.
Before a mini version of the passenger plane could be built,
the one that was in the Warner Bros. film, “Love Affair",
Mentor was asked to draw it. For financial reasons the producers
wanted to know how small they could get away with building it
and still have it appear full size. On a sheet of onion skin,
18” X 24”, Mentor not only drew it to scale but
he drew it artistically too. The film's producer/ director/
actor, Warren Beatty was happy with the results. Mentor's conceptual
design of the plane made it all very clear.
This painting's foreign freighter's design is also clear. It
looks huge within the perimeters of the 24" X 30"
space. Mentor never needed to paint or draw anything life-size
in order to convey it's meaning.
As a Plein Aire painter, Mentor ‘did his thing in the
streets’, and painting sizes had to be restricted. First
they had to fit his French Easel. And then on the way home,
when they were wet, they had to fit into his car trunk ~ with
room to spare.
And since Mentor carried everything ~ and the easel and painting
supplies weighed a ton, life-size anything would have been out
of the question.
12
Paintings 12 Intimate Stories
click
links to view larger images and see individual intimate stories
OR
click
here to view a slideshow of the paintings in sequence
