Marsh Madness
To Stan Sperlak, a soft-spoken man
who looks every inch the outdoor
lover that he is, Mother Nature offers
an everchanging palette.
By Lynn Keyser, Spring 2006

“THE MORE YOU LOOK, THE MORE YOU SEE,” says Sperlak, waving his arm toward a seemingly drab winter landscape. “Even right now—orange and rust and gold. And see the lavender in that mud?

“And that little bit of red in those trees, pinkish red. Those are buds swelling on the maple trees. Now, see those colors in the sky—yellow, pink...”

To Sperlak, a soft-spoken man who looks every inch the outdoor lover that he is, Mother Nature offers an ever-changing palette. Sperlak has been working with nature most of his adult life, first as a landscaper and then as an artist. “Midway through my landscape design career I
got these ideas about landscaping that were very different than the norm. I believed in these sweeping grasses and large clusters of perennials and groupings of native trees. I like things to have a real natural look.”

Sperlak’s problem was trying to get the customer to get the picture.

“I saw an ad for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in ’93 or ’94,” he said. “My intention was to learn how to draw landscape plans for people, to show them my concepts. “What I didn’t expect to happen was that it reignited a whole love for fine arts—drawing, sculpture, painting—the pure joy of art.”

Sperlak roamed the wetlands with an old Nikon camera as a kid and “always kept art in a back pocket.” “I ended up going to the Academy for three years.”

Sperlak laughingly admits his landscape design drawings were probably no better than when he entered the Academy. What he brought out from the experience, however, was a desire to take his artwork to another level. Working in pastels seemed a natural for an artist of the land.

"Pastels might as well have been what cavemen used,” Sperlak said. “Earth products—ochre, sienna, cobalt, charcoal. Eventually they would have mixed them with water or sap, to create a sort of paste. But basically, they were painting their walls with raw minerals.

“Modern artists are still painting with them. Pastels are French for ‘paste.’ They’re mixed with gum or clay, but basically, pigment is just small minerals. Minerals have a thousand facets. With a pastel painting, there’s luminosity because it’s refracting light, like a diamond would, back at the viewer. I’ve always found that working with pastels—right in your hands —is about as primal as you get with an art form.”

Sperlak literally has a feel for the medium. “The pastels all weigh different amounts,” he said. “Some are moist, some are warm, some are cool. They have inherent properties just like minerals. Sometimes when I pick up a pastel that’s one of my favorites, I know it by the little bit of weight that it has. And, I know it’s going to do what I want it to do.”

Sperlak employs the ‘ein plein air technique,’ which means, ‘in the open air.’ “You don’t go back to a plein air painting,” Sperlak said. “You work on it one time, and either it’s complete or it’s not. Some artists can do a plein air painting in twenty minutes. Some artists will work several hours on it. It doesn’t change the fact that it was painted outside and in a certain light.”

The art form presents certain challenges. “It’s incredibly difficult,” said Sperlak. “Light changes. Clouds go in front of the sun. Shadows lengthen during the course of the day. That’s what makes painting outside scary for a lot of people.”

The “ein-plein-air” artist must work quickly. “I usually limit my plein air studies to one hour,” Sperlak said. “If I haven’t gotten the gist of the scene on a small piece of paper within an hour, there’s been too many changes in the light, and if I continue, the painting turns into mud. There’s only a certain period of time that the scene looks the way it does.”

Sperlak has done multiple paintings of the same scene on the same day, noting how the light has literally transformed the subject in just a few hours. “People will say Monet was painting haystacks,” said Sperlak. “No, he was painting light. Light was describing the form.”

Sperlak said the plein air was employed not only by the Impressionists, but also by artists of the Hudson River School, who used the technique for sketches and studies. “Ein plein air work has always been the preliminary phase for a more finished studio work,” Sperlak said. “What I’ll do is take the plein air painting and do a larger version, or do another version of the same size and adjust a couple of things.”

In the mid-1990s, Sperlak, the fulltime landscaper and part-time artist, was wondering how he was going to come up with $70,000, the price for his Nirvana—37 acres of the old Ludlam farm in
Goshen. He figured if he could sell maybe two paintings a month, he’d meet the mortgage. But his paintings weren’t exactly flying off the wall. One day, a woman asked how much for a pastel she saw hanging at his place.

“Three-hundred and forty dollars,” Sperlak blurted out. He laughs at the memory, shaking his head. “I don’t know where I came up with that figure.” Sperlak is still in the landscape design business, but with fifteen dedicated employees, he’s pretty much free to paint when the mood—and the light—seems right. He grabs his easel, dashes out the door and in minutes, is at one of a dozen of his favorite spots. “Sometimes I’ll paint just because it’s time to paint,” Sperlak said. Sperlak’s favorite subjects are literally in his own backyard. About a third of his paintings are done on the Goshen property, a mix of wetlands, virgin woods and fields on the Crow Creek. “It’s my place of Zen,” Sperlak says. He also shoulders his easel down to Benny’s Landing, Higbee Beach, Jake’s Landing, Stone Harbor Point and Reed’s Beach, places he came to know intimately when, as a teenager, he “decided walking in the marshes was more interesting than school.”

Although the ocean is just a few miles away, Sperlak prefers the back bays and marshes. They give him, he says, a sense of the primordial, the ebb and flow of life.

“What makes this area so beautiful to me, what makes it easy to call it home, is the smell of low tide. You can breathe in the marshes and you can walk in them, feel them. The ocean is so much bigger, but it hasn’t intrigued me as much.”

A few years ago, Sperlak became involved in the Wings and Water Festival in Stone Harbor, a celebration of nature that draws artists from across the United States. He volunteered to host visiting artists, offering to give them a taste of the local landscape.

“I had this inherent, somewhat apologetic feeling that they’re coming from Colorado where there are mountains. If I take them to Beaver Swamp, they’re going to be bored to death,” Sperlak recalled. Instead, he said, “they were blown away.”

Sperlak conducts workshops and teaches at area colleges and arts centers. “I whip my students up to a level where they let their emotions take over, and they start to paint from their insides,” he said. “If they think too long, they’re not going to get it. They’re going to over-analyze and the painting becomes boring.”

Sperlak continues to experiment with his pastels, striving to capture what he calls “that moment of truth” in his work. The artist points to hundreds of snow geese, wheeling over the tawny yellow marshes he’s painted a hundred times.

“That’s our job as artists. To share the beauty.”