Octogenarian Finds Peace in the Palette

“So far I’m not satisfied with it,” Nathan Weinstein concluded, critically appraising his current oil painting, of a farm scene in Sweden.

“I have to get more definition into the clouds,” he said, standing back from the easel with paintbrush in hand. “And I need to make the grass look more like grass.”

Until two years ago, Weinstein’s only experience with a paintbrush had been touching up a door. Now he is working on his 17th painting. And his introduction to art didn’t begin until age 84.

Grandpa Moses.

“Lillian and I had a marriage--a good one--for 60 years,” Weinstein said with a faraway look. “We raised two children, and then we put 140,000 miles on two motor homes. I drove, she did the cooking, and we feasted our eyes everywhere from Alaska to Mexico.”

Sometimes they would reminisce about how they had first met. His family’s lot at Jefferson Boulevard and 6th Avenue had an extra house in the back, which was eventually rented to a mother with two daughters. One of the girls was Lillian, and the young Weinstein found himself taking her out for rides, the highlight of which was stopping to buy a couple of ice cream cones.

Two years ago this month the couple were standing in an Encino drugstore, both seemingly in good health. Suddenly she fainted, and her head struck the concrete floor. Two days later she died.

She left behind a husband who at 84 years old was alone in an Encino house filled only with memories.

“I went around in a fog,” he said. “I stayed inside the house most of the time. I tried watching TV, I tried listening to the radio, I couldn’t get interested in anything.

“Once a week somebody would drive me to visit my wife’s grave at the cemetery.”

Weinstein’s son, Robert, president of California Talls by Robert, which makes apparel for tall women, decided that something had to be done fast.

“One Sunday he came over and said we were going to a hobby shop,” the father recalled. “He bought me one of those kits, which includes a sketch filled with numbers. It was a scene on cardboard of Indians chasing a stagecoach. You were supposed to complete it with the correct colors.”

The elder Weinstein tried for about a week. “For one thing, it was tedious. I sometimes had to use a magnifying glass. But I also lost interest. I got it half finished, and then I told Robert that I wasn’t going any further.”

The next Sunday the son came over again to the house. There, in the living room, sat the numbered painting, completely filled in with colors. The explanation: “I couldn’t stand seeing anything half done.”

However, the father lectured the son not to try to interest him in any of that nonsense again. The next week the son visited once more--this time carrying an easel, canvases, oil paints, brushes, the works.

Robert stopped the protest cold with one comment: “You wouldn’t want me to have wasted all this money, would you?”

The venerable Grandma Moses of Eagle Bridge, N.Y., with no training, took up painting in oils at about 77, and by the time of her death at 101 she left behind nearly 2,000 of her depictions of mostly rural scenes.

Now, about nine years older than when the grand old lady of American art had begun, Weinstein, 86, has completed 16 landscapes.

“And I have no doubt that I’ll be painting the rest of my life,” he said.

And to verify Weinstein’s feeling that he is still improving, he quoted the reply of an artist who was asked for an opinion as to his best painting: “My next one.”

The old man and the seascape.

The Weinstein work that seems to draw the most comments is one showing the lights of apartment buildings shimmering in the waters of Marina del Rey. And creating it introduced the artist to a clever support system.

Robert explained: “The painting was coming along well, based to a large extent on his memories of visiting the Marina, where I have a boat. I happened to have a Polaroid camera with me when I came over to the house and it occurred to me that he might make a mistake while trying to improve the work, so I took a photo of it.

“He experimented with trying paints on the print beforehand, and now it has become part of his technique, especially when he is dealing with showing lights.”

The elder Weinstein has taken a spare room at the back of the house, overlooking the pool, and has transformed it into a studio.

He is ambidextrous, switching arms when he tires. And, like any true artist, he follows no schedule. At times he may continue painting well into the night, at other times he may skip an entire week, depending on the Muses.

So far the works have all been scenery, based largely on recollections from his travels with Lillian, such as to Yosemite Falls and Cape Disappointment in Washington.

Two months ago, he exhibited his creations at a Valley Federal Savings branch in Canoga Park.

And last month, he won the first-place blue ribbon in a competition sponsored by the West Valley Artists Assn.

“His style is original,” said the judge, professional artist Myrna McKee. “Too many artists copy one another. When you paint what you feel inside, you paint with conviction. He puts his paint on the canvas with a lot of strength.”

The worth of the outcome, however, may never be known, simply because Weinstein isn’t selling anything: “I’m leaving all of it to my son to do whatever he wants. He got me into this; he can get out of it.”

And regarding his unexpectedly discovered talent: “One art teacher told me I shouldn’t take lessons because they might spoil my natural ability.”

A pleasant surprise from what he might have expected to hear after his working days, when he toiled first as an auto mechanic, then became the furniture department manager in a store.

He called it quits at 57, not quite able to have taken the advice he would like to pass on to his daughter Joanne, and his nine grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren:

“I think everyone should retire at age 40, and then go back to work at 65. A person should retire before he gets too old to do what he wanted to do.”

Weinstein also finds time for singing ballads at senior citizen clubs, playing poker for nickels, or fashioning canes from the limbs of the peach tree in his backyard. Some of them he gives to friends, some he uses himself. It is one of his few grudging concessions to age.

Another will occur this month, when he will undergo surgery for the removal of a cataract from his left eye.

“Life of late has been like looking through a yellow film,” Weinstein said. “Painting has been difficult, because I have been having trouble coming up with the true colors.”

He is looking forward to getting back to his easel with clearer vision.

Applying oils to canvas was once the least probable part of Weinstein’s plans, but as he philosophized: “A person can sometimes become best at the thing he once thought he might hate the most--when he discovers he can do it well.”