The Big Picture

Securing the financial freedom to paint is an age-old piece of the artist’s life palette. For Washington artist Gary Goldberg, the freedom to produce critically acclaimed paintings has come from a thriving decorative business--murals and trompe l’oeil designs for homes and office buildings.

Besides a steady income stream, Goldberg’s business produces entertaining anecdotes about the unique and sometimes fickle demands of his clients--like the Virginia restaurant customers who objected to the full-frontal nudity of the figures in an 80-by-6-foot pastoral mural. (Goldberg and the art professor who hired him to assist on the project were dispatched to paint palm fronds over the offending body parts.)

In the months since Sept. 11, however, politics have entered the equation because the patrons of Goldberg’s largest and most impressive murals are members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family. “Before 9/11 it seemed like a wonderful bridge to a different culture,” Goldberg says. “Now people squint when they ask where a mural is going.... I guess I should be doing work for an honorable U.S. company like Enron,” the 45-year-old artist wryly adds.

The kingdom, in which a small and enormously wealthy elite holds economic and political power, has been blamed for the rise of militant young men susceptible to the calls of terrorist leaders. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were Saudis, and the Saudi-born Al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, repeatedly cites the presence of U.S. troops in his birth country as a key motive behind his deadly plans.

Saudi Arabia’s $80 billion in annual oil revenues helps finance opulent lifestyles for a royal family of about 7,000 princes and their families. While many of the Saudi royals pride themselves on their U.S. educations and cosmopolitan manners abroad, fundamentalist Islamic practices prevail within the kingdom’s borders, and anger at Israel manifests itself in anti-Semitic rhetoric.

About two years ago, Goldberg solicited his rabbi’s opinion on sending his work to the Saudis’ palaces. “He thought it was interesting; he wasn’t at all offended,” Goldberg says. Citing a recent concert tour of two pianists--one Israeli, one Palestinian--Goldberg notes, “Art is a wonderful way to bridge differences.”

Those who question his work, he adds, should focus on the U.S. military alliance and reliance on Saudi oil--not the production of art for Saudi princes. “There are thousands of Americans over there pumping oil out of the ground,” he says during an interview in his downtown Washington studio. “Prince Bandar [a Goldberg client] is a pilot trained by the U.S. military. U.S. companies sell American information and weapons systems.

“I’m doing paintings for private residences. I have a sense of perspective.”

Until now, Goldberg’s primary challenge with his Saudi clients was artistic. While he describes his clients as “people with Western mores and ideals,” he still must meet the demands of an Islamic culture that prohibits the portrayal of human figures or animals. That wasn’t too much of an issue when the wife of the kingdom’s then-finance minister decided she wanted to rip out the marble on a bathroom wall to make room for Goldberg’s vision of an Italianate garden. But it became a big problem when another Saudi client requested a wall-size painting for a palace health club.

“They wanted a sports mural,” Goldberg recalls. “How do you do a sports mural without people? It seemed impossible, so I did a semi-abstract, almost Cubist painting.”

The mural features a soccer field arched like a bridge over a city, with unmanned yachts racing under the bridge. A giant oval carries race cars--Formula One speedsters with covers that hide the drivers. His agent, Larry Horn, describes the final work as Dali-esque. Goldberg did take one risk with the sports mural--painting riderless racehorses on a track. His client didn’t object.

Horn, owner of Horn International Design, caters to a broad range of international art clients. He says Goldberg’s murals are popular with the Saudis because “they have such big residences. Their whole life is centered around the home. Weddings, dinners, events we would have elsewhere, take place inside the home.”

While American patrons derive social status from rubbing elbows with their favorite painters and sculptors, the Saudi royals view artists as little more than the hired help. Goldberg has never been to Saudi Arabia, and his contact with his patrons consists of handshakes and a few words. Horn acts as his agent and negotiates the deals while Goldberg paints his murals, section by section, inside his Washington studio. From there, the panels are packaged and shipped overseas for installation.

Goldberg’s latest project, for the Lebanese residence of a businessman and Saudi prince, promises to be his most elaborate yet. Portraying the ruins of the Pharos lighthouse at Alexandria--one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world--the 43-foot-long mural starts with tropical colors and bright marine tones, deepening panel by panel into rich indigos, as if the viewer were sinking farther and farther toward the ocean floor. Horn originally proposed the idea after reading a magazine article about an archeological scuba expedition off the coast of Egypt to locate the lighthouse ruins.

Each panel, nearly 8 feet high, will be separated by a stained glass design inspired by the American Arts and Crafts movement. Goldberg will paint the panels inside his Washington studio with the help of two assistants. After they are shipped to Lebanon, the translucent panels will be installed several inches off the wall and illuminated with back lights.

Like his American clients, the Saudis sometimes make inconvenient demands. Prince H.H. Faisal, a former minister of education, wanted a mural based on two colors--red and gold--to match a dining room chandelier in his Rijadh palace complex. Goldberg added a touch of green and produced a realistic recreation of a Pompeian fresco, based on archeological fragments, in sienna tones. “So many artists are so temperamental,” says Horn. “Gary is very creative and at the same time receptive.”

Muralist William Woodward, a George Washington University professor who founded the campus’ painting department, described Goldberg--a former student--as an “original and independent thinker.” Woodward rejects any description of Goldberg’s murals as merely decorative.

Goldberg, he says, “is one of the few painters who believes that ornamentation has a function. It gives the spirit a place to dwell. He’s in the tradition of the artist who still cherishes and believes in these humanistic qualities.”

Still, whether he’s painting for Saudis in the Middle East or Americans in the northeast, Goldberg’s murals--which can cost as much as $60,000--pay the bills so he can work on what his friends call “Gary’s real art.” Goldberg runs a cooperative art studio from the second floor of a nondescript building in an industrial neighborhood, where a dozen artists divide up the space for their studios.

He wears faded jeans and listens to free-form jazz. His wooden easel stands next to a window overlooking railroad tracks in the foreground and the national Catholic cathedral in the background. His paintings are stacked facing the wall. Sometimes he completes one painting at a time, but just as often he works on three or four simultaneously.

Technically, most of his fine art paintings are still-lifes, but they are much more. As a child, he was intrigued by Rube Goldberg contraptions. “Maybe it was because he had the same name,” he says. “But I used to draw these complex machines for doing a really simple task--where you would press a button, which would cause a ball to roll off, which would hit something on a seesaw, causing it to flip up in the air, which would start a fan going; the fan would blow air, which would cause a boat to move. And all of this is simply to turn off an alarm.”

Those Rube Goldberg themes are still evident in his fine art, in which he says he wants to “bring that spirit in, not so much as an honor to Goldberg, but more like a treatise on how things work. The mind is always straining to figure out how things go together, and to puzzle them together.”

In his current work, he adds techniques learned from his decorative business doing trompe l’oeil--which translates as “trick the eye.” The contraptions in his paintings have precise surfaces, but with warps and bends and multiple images underneath, making them almost addictive to look at. In one painting, he adds to his contraption the image of a gourd flying through the air--about to hit a glass table, which he describes with the Italian word dietrologia, an unseen but nefarious hand guiding events.

“Gary has a sort of Zen-like reverence for the ordinary object,” says David Stainback, owner of Artists’ Museum, a Washington gallery. “He uses them for allegorical meanings. Even though something may appear a still-life, there is always so much more underneath. People with discerning eyes can really see into his work.

Stainback adds that the artist is also a “master colorist who uses all the essentials of design.”

Goldberg, who grew up in a Washington suburb, first decided he wanted to pursue the dicey career route of professional artist when he spent a summer semester in France, painting en plein-air as he and other college students retraced the steps of the great impressionists along the coast of Brittany.

“Although it sounds really romantic, it’s helpful to see that if you want to be an artist, you wake up and paint, and then paint again in the afternoon, and then you critique in the evening if there’s no light left. And you do that day after day after day,” Goldberg recalls. “And you realize some people loved being in Brittany and loved being in France and loved the food and would paint every third day. But some people painted every day and knew they wanted to be artists. That experience really convinced me I wanted to be an artist.”

After obtaining a degree in fine arts from George Washington University, he apprenticed with Woodward on an attention-getting mural inside Clyde’s Restaurant at Tyson’s Corner, considered one of the area’s hot restaurants in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

He also gained early renown as a Washington artist. When one of his professors hooked him up with the Georgetown Gallery, he was given a solo exhibition, selling nearly all of the two dozen landscapes he showed. By the mid-1980s, he was showing with Franz Bader Gallery and selling to such D.C. luminaries as Washington Post publisher Donald Graham, CNN’s Bernard Shaw and columnist Joseph Kraft. In 1989, a Washington Post critic raved that Goldberg’s still-lifes “provoke awe.” Later, he showed at the Forum Gallery in New York.

Goldberg started his decorative business in 1990 after determining that even with his success--at the time he was selling paintings at the Washington market’s top rates of $3,000 to $4,000 apiece--he couldn’t make a living and support a family. Artists here tend to make their living teaching, working in the city’s network of museums or even running a family business. Goldberg decided to turn his talents toward home design.

The Bader gallery hooked him up with a decorator’s show, and his business began to thrive. Soon he was doing work for Washington’s large diplomatic community, which is how he came to the attention of Saudi clients.

The Saudi murals are his largest pieces, and Goldberg continues to feature them in his brochure, alongside work for American clients, such as an 18-by-35-foot sky ceiling with more than 60 gold-leafed Byzantine stars. (The ceiling was inspired by a 15th century Italian fresco.)

“Obviously, there are circumstances [such as open conflict between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia] where I wouldn’t work for the Saudis,” Goldberg says. But for now, at least, he intends to continue painting for his Saudi clients--and to defend his decision to produce palace art.

“We’re talking about art,” he says. “When I start selling weapons systems, you can call me back.”