REMEMBRANCE: A HISTORY

I am the fourth of Kenneth B. Walsh’s five children. My father was an artist. He was 44 when I was born, and he died two days before my fourteenth birthday. He had been ill much of the time I knew him. As a consequence of his early passing, there was so much about his life I did not know.

Strangely, though, the more his life recedes into eternity, the more I come to know him. The art that he left behind is the portal through which we connect: this years-long search for his work has led me to long-overdue conversations with those who knew him better, or at least longer—relatives, mostly, but also some of his friends and colleagues who are still around. Research has turned up school and military records, articles and pictures in The East Hampton Star, a mention in The New York Times, many, many photographs, and, most fortunate of all, the art.

One of nine children, he grew up in Depression-era Boston, hunting and fishing in the Fells, Medford's 2,200-acre state park, to help his ailing father provide for a large and growing family. In his early twenties, he was the co-pilot of a B-17 “Flying Fortress” in Europe, in the last years of World War II.

“After World War II,” says my half-sister, Dona, “I think Dad was a housepainter in Massachusetts while going to the School of Practical Art in Boston, now called the Art Institute of Boston, and part of Lesley University.”

“After school, we moved to Queens because he got a job in the art department of Lever Brothers Company in New York. I don't know how long he was there, and after leaving he may have worked for someone else, but at some point he opened the Bonart Studio.

“It was there that he did work for RCA (at least one Elvis album cover), Transogram Toys, and I remember something about designing the box for a Schrafft's candy sampler. I have a vague memory that Bonart failed in the first attempt but he opened it a second time and it was a success.”

In the mid-1950s, he and his first wife divorced. She moved to the South, taking Dona and her little brother, Charles, with her.

In 1959, his commercial-art business flourishing, the Bonart Studio needed a “girl Friday.” An agency sent Gail Hannaford, an art student from Queens. They started a family in 1964, married in ’67, and remained together for the rest of his life.

In the early 1960s, my father built a house in Montauk, at the eastern tip of Long Island, and began to depict the area’s natural beauty in watercolor paintings, exhibiting and selling them at the Bonart Gallery, at Gosman’s Dock. Over time, he delegated more of his studio’s work to employees, spending time in Montauk with his new family. Dona and Charles, older than their new siblings, visited in the summer.

“I remember him going to the beach and doing watercolors,” says Charles. “I remember Dad painting the fishermen down at the docks. He really liked their hands and rough features.”

“This guy was some painter,” remembers Steve Malinchoc, who worked for him in New York. “He could have made plenty of money painting watercolors fulltime.

Generally, he was out in Montauk the entire summer. I was out there on numerous occasions—I was running the studio for him.” In my earliest memories, we lived at No. 32 Gramercy Park South in Manhattan, and in Montauk.

His watercolor and acrylic paintings filled the walls, and the expanse of land on which our house sat, in Hither Hills, was similarly decorated with his creations. A wildly multicolored bird, at least six feet from beak to tail and wingspan just as large, flew a few feet off the ground, pole-mounted and turning with the winds.

Great and small pieces of driftwood had been collected and fashioned into an abstract George and Martha Washington, or, perhaps, a seaside “American Gothic.” Another installation, a collage of New York City street signs and blown-up pictures of my impossibly young parents, brother, and me, the sand, sea, and sunshine a brilliant backdrop, illustrated the disparate worlds we inhabited.

(The East Hampton Star, April 25, 2013)

My early life was blissful, playing in Gramercy Park, Sundays at the Central Park Zoo, and summers at the beach in Montauk—the ocean, just down the hill, or Gin Beach, where wonderful parties filled with fun and food and joy awaited.

Forty years ago, two families piloted an early-’60s Nissan Patrol far down Gin Beach toward Shagwong Point. Swimming, running, laughing, the four boys were never happier, and may never be. Four grown-ups prepared a lavish seafood feast—lobster, clams, corn on the cob. The boys drained glass bottles of Coke and Yoo-hoo, the grownups gallons of wine. . . . The whole time that rugged Nissan motored through the sand, the beach was entirely their own. A sighting of another human, another jeep, of any sign of civilization was so exceedingly rare as to draw long stares from the boys in the back. (The East Hampton Star, April 25, 2013)

“He loved to fish,” says Charles. “Once the blues were running he would fish some, get one or two, jump in the jeep, fly down the shoreline and wait for them, and fish some more. One day he followed them for at least two miles down the beach.”

It was not to last. In 1971, bipolar disorder—then known as manic depression—destroyed his business. It nearly destroyed him as well. “I got a phone call at 2 a.m. and he fired me, over the phone, claiming I did this and that. None of it was true,” Steve Malinchoc says. “It was just beginning to open up into a gigantic business. Everything went kaput.”

The business shuttered and his boys now school-age, the family decamped to Montauk, becoming year-round residents. For some years my father tried to recover, but the treatment of that era—heavy medication—knocked him out and laid him up. He slept a lot of the time.

But his depression lifted after a few years and he began to paint again. A bold new style emerged, and one after another, a canvas was pinned to a wall and a new vision committed to it. Abstract figures, neat lines and shapes filled with bright acrylics, blending and overlapping in an explosion of movement and emotion. It was all a bit weird to me, until years later when I saw a major Picasso exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Quickly, my father’s new style made a lot more sense.

Between 1974 and ’77, dozens of paintings were completed including the now-iconic “Montauk,” prints of which hang in many houses and businesses to this day, and the more-than-seven-foot-long “Africa.” Some were exhibited, some were sold.

Alas, his illness reared up again, and then cancer did as well. He died, on September 5, 1980, in a Veteran’s Administration hospital in Brockton, Massachusetts, thirty miles from the place of his birth.

My mother moved us to Massachusetts, where many of Dad’s siblings still lived. In a new school in a new state, Mom bought me a guitar and I began to take lessons. Some of my friends in Montauk had done the same, and from the start I yearned to return.

At 18, I began to spend summers there again, and with my childhood friends formed a band. At 20, I was performing in dockside bars, enjoying the fruits of my labor and exploring the infinite potentiality of my own artistic medium.

Years passed, and I played rock ’n’ roll on the South Fork, in New York City, and points beyond. Ultimately, my love for words and music combined at Billboard magazine. Based in New York, I attended sessions at top recording studios, many concerts in clubs, theaters, arenas, and stadiums, met and interviewed many of my musical heroes, and made whirlwind trips to Los Angeles and London, Nashville and Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, and back to New York. I loved every minute of it.

Over time, I wrote and recorded music, and when the internet leveled the proverbial playing field, I came to see these songs as assets, distributing music online, occasionally seeing a modest royalty.

After his death, many of my father’s paintings sat, rolled up in a New England attic. Always in the back of my mind, finally I began see these as assets too, a collection to be reintroduced to the universe.

I copyrighted the images—iPhone pics taken in Mom’s attic, slides of his work that we’d kept through the years. My younger brother, also named Kenneth, took a few paintings, and they hang at his house in Massachusetts. Dona and Charles, I learned, have others. I remembered that some people in Montauk had bought his work, and that two watercolors had hung at the Montauk Public School throughout my attendance, from 1971 to ’79. (In 2017, I finally took them back, at least for a while.)

In February, 2012, in Brooklyn, newly divorced, downsized, and surviving on whatever freelance work I could find, I wrote a letter to The East Hampton Star.

I am trying to locate paintings made by my father, Kenneth B. Walsh (1922-1980). After running a commercial art studio in New York City through the 1960s, during which time he also exhibited at his Bonart Gallery at Gosman’s Dock, he moved to Montauk fulltime. The mid-1970s were a prolific period for him. While he painted many watercolors in the 1960s, mostly of the natural environment of the East End, the mid-1970s saw creation of dozens of paintings in a modern style. At least one, called “Montauk,” was recreated in poster format and sold locally. Some of these modern paintings were sold; I believe others were exhibited in local galleries. Two of his watercolor paintings hung in Montauk Public School throughout my childhood, and another was displayed for decades in Salivar’s restaurant.

It is my hope to catalog, restore, document and ultimately exhibit the most comprehensive collection possible. My family presently has in our possession approximately 25 of his works; I have slides and photos of several others that are unaccounted for. Further, I would like to contact any of his contemporaries on the East End. I know little about the business of art and would be grateful for any information, recollections or guidance from any artists that knew him or were creating art in the same period. I would be most appreciative if any who knew him, and especially anyone in possession of his work, kindly contact me. . . .

Several did, some that include his work in their collections. Others knew him and shared fond reminiscence. The 25 works became 35, then 45, and then 55. Some remain in the extended family’s possession, others in collections. Still others are missing and presumed lost. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if more of his work still hangs in some corner of the universe, or maybe just down the road.

This book of my father’s work, and the May 2017 exhibitions in Montauk and Amagansett, represent the better part of a decade’s effort, though it wasn’t until very recently that I finally found the time, and the courage, to make that effort, no matter the expense, no matter the doubts, to will it into being.

Of course, for Kenneth B. Walsh, this represents the entirety of a lifetime. This feels long overdue, but at last the Bonart Studio is reborn. At last, his work has been compiled, documented, and exhibited. I can rest now, maybe, as I oversee and promote his work.

My deepest hope is that Kenneth B. Walsh, artist, is recognized and celebrated.

Christopher Walsh | East Hampton, New York | May 2017