ARTISTS IN PORTRAIT : Robert Ginder Searches for the X-Quality

Painter Robert Ginder speaks in a smoky whisper of a voice that reminds you of a low-key jazz player, which he is.

But he plays jazz for fun. Ginder’s heart and soul, his very being, are tied to his painting. And like Dexter Gordon in the jazz movie “ ‘Round Midnight,” Ginder finds himself on the artist’s quest for that magic ingredient, that special something, the mysterious X-quality.

By “X-Quality” Ginder means an inner voice, a quality in an artist that can transform a technically fine canvas into a work of art.

“Everybody knows what it is, but nobody knows what it is,” he said in an interview in his Solana Beach studio. “Everybody can see it, but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is.”

Fearing that this essential quality might elude him forever in frenzied Los Angeles, he headed south.

“I wanted to cut myself off from all these influences, so I moved to North County (about a dozen) years ago because it was quiet. I could concentrate -- just see what was going to come out and not be influenced by the art world.”

For a time, Ginder even quit reading art publications to “find my own basic urge and work from that. That’s what moves you when you’re trying to see something--that somebody’s really gone over the edge and really found something inside.”

It took Ginder 15 years of gritty trial and error, painting from the age of 20 until his mid-30s, before he began to hear--and see--his artistic voice.

It is a kind of lengthy apprenticeship or dues paying that is surprisingly typical for visual artists.

“An emerging artist can be like 45, 40 years old, where in other fields it can be much younger--26, 25. That’s because it takes so long to evolve a personal style . . . that’s significant enough or strong enough to exhibit in a good place.”

During those fallow years he worked free-lance, doing portraits, ads, illustrations, murals, anything to pay the bills. He painted scenic backdrops and signs in Los Angeles before the move to Solana Beach. It wasn’t wasted time, however.

“All those things were great because they helped the work I was doing on my own. All that stuff informed the other works. I had no conflict. It was my earn-while-you-learn period.” Today, some of Ginder’s commercial assignments add to the ambiance of Solana Beach’s Belly Up Tavern. He decorated the Belly Up’s walls with an array of paintings from a stereotypical saloon nude featuring the face of one of the Belly Up’s barmaids and a satire on a milk advertisement, to an old ocean racing J boat under full sail and a native American Indian woman.

But what kept Ginder focused on his own art during those years? Part of it was a desire to beat the enormous odds that face every would-be painter, the desire to prove he had the X-quality. But more importantly there was an inner urge that still drives him.

“You have to have some kind of need to keep doing it,” he said. “You have to get either a lot of satisfaction out of doing your own work . . . or have some kind of psychological need or physical need to do artwork, and it has to be pretty pronounced to keep up that struggle.

“There are times you have to dig down and say, ‘Why in the hell did I get in this position and what am I doing?’ A lot of it is the same basic urge that made you do it when you were a kid.”

For years, he worked and never bothered approaching a gallery. In the late 1970s he would test how his work stacked up against others by entering a piece in an open-juried exhibit at the San Diego Art Institute or the Long Beach Art Association.

“It’s real important to show in a group show because you can see what your work looks like with other works, how it holds its own,” he said.

“I never approached any gallery until I had broken through . . . and felt that I had something that was significant, at least for me.”

Once he felt he had something solid--and, of equal importance, a body of work that he could show--he found that it “was almost more scary because if I was rejected, then it would be a really big deal. I went directly To New York. I didn’t go to a little limb, I went out on a big limb.”

The gamble paid off. New York’s respected O.K. Harris gallery now carries Ginder’s annual output of eight canvases a year, paintings that recall a type of house from his Southern California childhood in the 1950s.

He works seven hours a day in a slow, painstaking process, building up layers of oil paint, using a combination of styles that hark back to ancient gold-leafed Russian icons and 13th Century Italian paintings.

The mixture of ancient painting techniques and 20th-Century California images conjures humor, and also alerts viewers that something “really isn’t right,” Ginder said.

Being able to do that, has taken 20 years and still requires daily practice. Because of that, his paintings have a special quality. You might call it an X-quality.