Picture this: A young Joseph Sheppard, with dark hair, goatee and pencil in hand, sitting in a dimly lit bar on The Block sketching the burlesque queens and their colorful clientele.
Or imagine him on a stool at Mack Lewis' gym at Broadway and Eager Street watching the fighters work out and making quick impressions of their well-muscled physiques. Or perched on a rowhouse stoop behind the Maryland Institute College of Art sketching an African-American high school band as it parades down the street.
In the early '50s, such places were where Sheppard was most often to be found. As an ambitious young artist, the world was his studio - and he was willing to go anywhere, any time to capture the beauty and vitality of the human form.
Today Sheppard, 72, is one of Baltimore's authentic Old Masters, a painter and sculptor steeped in the five-century-long tradition of realistic figurative art who continues to practice his time-honored craft despite the siren song of abstraction and the vagaries of art-world fashion.
This month, Sheppard's hometown celebrates his distinguished career with no fewer than three retrospective exhibitions that leave no doubt as to the magnitude of his accomplishments.
At the Walters Art Museum, Sheppard's boxing paintings from the 1950s and 1960s will be on view through March 9. At Evergreen House, a show of his colorful street scenes and genre paintings opens Thursday and continues through Jan. 26.
And on Sunday, the University of Maryland's University College presents Fifty Years in Art, a traveling show first exhibited in Pietrasanta, Italy, where the artist now lives and works half the year. That show will remain on view until March 16.
Sheppard, whose now white beard and hair tied back in a low ponytail make him look like a cross between Santa Claus and Willie Nelson, seems delighted by it all. "Back when I was starting out, abstract expressionism had taken over everything, the whole art world had changed and there was hardly anywhere that would show this kind of work," he says.
"But I loved painting the human figure. I think I did boxers and strippers and genre scenes because that was a way for me to paint the body in contemporary settings. It was a way to apply what I had learned in art school to the world."
Sheppard grew up in Owings Mills and attended what was then called Maryland Institute of Art on scholarship - the first in his family to attend college. He tried abstraction, emulating the works of Picasso and others. But during his second year he met the legendary teacher Jacques Maroger, who was renowned for rediscovering the recipe for the oil painting mediums used by such 17th-century Dutch and Flemish masters as Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyke.
At a time when modernist abstraction was all the rage, Maroger not only taught his students to paint with the Old Masters' medium, but insisted they also learn the traditional skills of drawing, perspective and anatomy. He made them copy famous paintings to deepen their understanding of the art of the past.
That suited Sheppard just fine. Even as a youngster he knew he wanted to be an artist, and under Maroger's tutelage his natural gifts blossomed.
"I had a talent in that direction," he recalled, "and I think I faced it very realistically because I came from a poor family, we didn't have any money, and I had to start earning my living through my work even when I was in school."
He remembers a sub shop called Harley's, where as a young artist he used to trade paintings for sandwiches.
"It made me realize that you have to produce something to get something back," he says. "This dream of having a gallery find you and all of a sudden everything is easy, I don't think that really happens."
Goes his own way
Early on, Sheppard decided to paint how he wanted and what he wanted regardless of what the art world of museums and galleries thought. His affectionate, meticulously detailed paintings of prizefighters, Baltimore night spots and African-American neighborhoods - all subjects considered unsuitable for serious art in the 1950s - are today an important record of a bygone era in Baltimore.
"A lot of things I painted were pretty controversial in those days," Sheppard said. "One of the statements I remember, from this guy who lived in a big house in Guilford, he said of this little black nude I had done: 'Oh, it's a lovely painting, but we just couldn't hang it in a proper Southern home!'"
Yet Sheppard still managed to sell his works. "Almost all of my early paintings were collected by Jewish businessmen," he recalls. "I think maybe it was because they were just one step up from being on the bottom themselves, they'd just arrived in America in the 1900s, and maybe they felt a sympathy for it, they recognized something there, you know? They had lived in those neighborhoods. It was familiar to them."
Walking through the show at Evergreen House, Sheppard points out a lively street scene that shows throngs of black people sitting on stoops or looking down from windows.
"This was over on Pennsylvania Avenue before they knocked all the buildings down," Sheppard says. "That's Lombard Street, the old Jewish section, east side, what they call Cornbeef Row now."
Sheppard stops in front of a dramatic painting of a black boxer, his eyes veiled by a towel covering his head, standing in the ring flanked by a trainer.
"This is a painting of Floyd Patterson at his training camp. I went up and spent some time with him, and it was fun. He wanted me to paint his brother," Sheppard recalls with a chuckle. After I was an art student I worked out with professional fighters for three years at Mack Lewis' gym, and a lot of my paintings came out of that."
One of his most dramatic boxing pictures grew out of his experience of seeing a fighter killed in the ring during those years. The Evergreen House show has a small version of the picture; a much larger version of the painting - nearly five by five feet in size - is the centerpiece of the Walters exhibition.
"I call this Descent from the Ring, and obviously it's a reference to all those paintings showing Christ being taken down from the cross. What happened was when I was working at Mack Lewis' I sparred one time with this guy named Ernie Knox - he happened to be a black fighter, not a white fighter like here.
"But I was at ringside the night he was killed at the Coliseum and I had some sketches of it. Sports Illustrated found out I had sketches and they used them in the article they ran. Later, they asked me to paint one of their covers, the one on Jack Dempsey. So that's where the magazine cover came from. Out of this tragedy."
By the 1970s, Sheppard had become a prize-winning artist - he had received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Italy and France in 1958 - who had also made documentary films and painted a series of public murals for Baltimore in addition to many private commissions.
He also found a second home in the artist colony of Pietrasanta in Italy and eventually bought a farmhouse there that he converted into a studio and living space.
Living in Italy rekindled his interest in sculpture, and in the 1980s he created the dramatic sculpture that is now part of the Holocaust Memorial in Baltimore.
He also developed a thriving portrait business; his sitters include William Donald Schaefer, Walter Sondheim, John Waters, Barbara Mikulski and former president George Bush and first lady Barbara Bush.
Vindicated
Today, Sheppard feels his devotion to the principles he first learned as a student of Maroger have been vindicated.
"Because I do genre painting, the American scene, I'm often classed with Bellows, Hopper and Marsh, as a social realist. I did a show about five years ago called 'Artists at Ringside,' and it had Bellows and Eakins and Sheppard, about eight of my paintings. But I still think of my work as contemporary, because I'm painting today."
His current project is an ambitious effort called "Beast of Burden," which he's been working on in Italy in recent years.
"It's things I've experienced and seen, and even some things borrowed, of the people who work like animals, who're not slaves but they have to work like slaves because of the economy or whatever. I've already got about eight paintings and a couple pieces of sculpture I've finished - gold mines in Chile and in Bali, where we were on vacation and saw a very deep ravine where they were chopping bricks out of stone and all these women had to carry the bricks on the tops of their heads up the side of that sheer cliff. It was terrible."
Sheppard says many of these new works were inspired by his own background, as well as by the work of documentary photographers like Lewis Hine and Sebastiao Salgado.
"I was painting from one of Hines' photographs of these kids mining coal in Pennsylvania. They were 9, 10 years old, no education, working nine or 10 hours a day, hands all broken and everything from going through the coal, and I said, 'My god, I could be painting my grandfather. My grandfather was a coal miner in Pennsylvania.'
"So a friend of mine said, 'Why don't you paint your grandfather?' So two of the paintings are my two grandfathers - one who was a coal miner and the other was a dirt farmer. It adds a personal touch to the show. We're looking for a place to start to show them. Maybe we'll start it like we did the 50-year show, somewhere in Italy, and have it travel."
Any advice for young artists just starting out?
"Take up another profession!" Sheppard laughs. "I say if you have to do it, if you're absolutely driven to be a painter or sculptor, then go for it. But if you're not driven, it's too difficult in my opinion. It's a tough profession - like singing or being a football player - and you have to have that passion, because it's so difficult, you get so many slaps in the face. It's not for the weak of heart."