If you spend enough time rambling through antique malls and flea markets, you'll come across a peculiarly poignant variety of human leavings: the amateur painting. If you're on the hunt for the undiscovered Early American School portrait that's ripe for an Antiques Roadshow apotheosis, you might be the sort who gives those canvases in the corner a glance.
Often as not, they're junk, but sometimes, and these are the affecting ones, they disclose a flash of talent, whether native or by dint of training, and you wonder about this expressive desire. Had the (presumably departed) painter cherished these artifacts of his or her soul? Or had the painter consigned them to the attic, acknowledging just how knotty a problem art can be?
Of course, if you're the Chairman of the Board, your paintings will find a better fate. Frank Sinatra's abstractions, shown through the month at Godt-Cleary Gallery, are a cut above the average estate-sale discovery. They're not great paintings, and clearly would not be exhibited absent the artist's celebrity. But if you enter the gallery expecting an embarrassment, you'll be surprised—pleasantly or not.
If you question what separates these works from others in the celebrity-painting genre so prevalent in this town, consider the degree to which Sinatra, in both lore and accomplishment, separates himself from the others.
Sinatra had a studio at his Palm Springs home, and apparently had some familiarity with postwar American abstraction. These paintings, dating from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, work territory explored a generation earlier by color field and minimalist artists. They tend to an assertive chromatics—fiery orange-reds predominate—but hey, he did it his way. As a singer, Sinatra had his subdued moments, but his life in general was anything but subtle.
His experiences as a singer seem to inform some of these canvases, too. One of the common takes on color field painting was that it amounted to a visual approximation of music: tones as tones and composition as rhythm. An untitled painting from 1991 intimates this, with horizontal bars of black, ocher and white, and of different widths, paced vertically along the square, red background. It hints at Sinatra's incomparable vocal timing. You also have to wonder if Sinatra, consciously or subconsciously, sought to recover visually what he had started to lose vocally.
In any event, this apparently was a fecund year for Sinatra; most of the best work was done in 1991. Another square canvas unfolds its high-key colors in a radiant pattern, with blocks of playful orange and blue offsetting each other. It's a palette few "serious" painters would choose, but somehow it works for Sinatra, and you imagine he was hearing this odd tonal juxtaposition in his head.
In several other works, mostly long, narrow pieces, he slices solid backgrounds with thin lines, another sort of rhythmic exploration. "Strangers in the Night" (1990) had to have been his visual examination of that hit, with blocks of black and gray pitted dynamically against each other. A corner of black is edged with a vector of white, as if to suggest light bleeding from around a door left ajar.
You can't help reading portals into other paintings, too. A black, squared arch surrounds a region of red in a vertical 1990 canvas, with a shadow of battleship gray extending from the opening at the bottom. And you can only wonder what moved the aging singer to draw a technological-inspired perspective of crossed lines receding to a similar opening.
His attempts at more literal depiction, like "Acapulco Sunset" (1986) are awkward. But the painting just below, from the same year, reads as a stylized landscape, in orange, umber and pale purple, with gestural dashes worked horizontally across. It is the most graceful and engaging work here.
Sinatra was not a bad hobby painter, better than most garage-sale ghosts. But some are born to sing, and merely paint on the side. That's life.