NYC artist spent years painting her studio view of Union Square

For 18 years, Violet Baxter painted the world defined by the windows of her studio overlooking Manhattan's Union Square. In oil and pastels and watercolors she captured the hurly-burly of the square's days and nights, its celebrations and market days. A spark seems to leap from the canvas in some of the nighttime pastels. The watercolor "Coming and Going," in which people seem to disappear into a mist, shimmers.

Soulfulness and wistfulness co-exist in these paintings. New York seems a wonderland, at least from a distance and perhaps only from a distance.

Forty-five of these works are found in "Violet Baxter: The View From Union Square," a new exhibition opening today at the University Museum.

Baxter arrived from New York City Wednesday in preparation for the opening. Thursday morning she talked to a Southeast Missouri State University art class about "The Artist as Citizen." She was impressed with some of the student work she saw on easels. "You have some very serious students who have ability," she said.

Baxter will give a drawing demonstration for a class earlier today before giving a gallery talk at 5 p.m. The show will remain on display through Nov. 17.

The square Baxter's paintings document has a remarkable history in New York City. It once was the city's theater district. After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in 1861, estimates of 100,000 to 250,000 people gathered there to protest. It was home to the Tammany Hall machine and the Communist Party headquarters during the early years of the 20th century. It began to attract artists during the Great Depression, a tradition Andy Warhol continued later.

Baxter is not a Warhol fan club member. He helped usher in three generations of art that hits you over the head with what it means and extreme competition in the art world, she says, "people fighting to the death almost over their turf. The cynicism is discouraging."

Baxter's early training as an abstract expressionist comes through in her work, even while the images are realistically drawn. Her feelings and emotions are on the canvas. "I needed to know what everything felt like; the wall and its shadows, the air and the space around me. No mark was made without a feeling of it," she told museum director Stanley I. Grand for his essay on the exhibition.

Grand notes that much of her works "evoke a disquieting moodiness and melancholy." She does not disagree. She moved into the studio after some traumas occurred in her life. "I changed," she says. "I needed to have something to bury myself into."

The view from the studio gave Baxter some distance she found she needed. "I was in the same locale I walked through all the time but never paid attention to it until I got the studio," she said.

She has found that her own reaction to the circumstances people encounter in New York City all the time has a great effect on other's people's responses to her. "When I see it as a spectacle, I get people responding to me as part of the family," she says.

Some of Baxter's paintings are views from her fourth-floor studio. Others are from the point of view of different floors. When people were moving out of the building she used their rooms for a few days to draw just to get a different perspective.

Gradually she got to know the people who were in the scenes she was painting. Once a year, the artists in the building would open their studios up to the public. "Being accessible to the rest of the world was a great help," she says.

The paintings allowed her to look at herself at a distance. "Who am I in all of this?" she asks. "I put myself in each one of these little bodies. It's easy to get lost in New York City."

Because they evoke the city so well, many of Baxter's' works are owned by large corporations headquartered in New York. At least six were lost in the tragedy at the World Trade Center.

Such acts meant to destroy and annihilate are antithetical to someone who has spent her life creating.

"I have shielded my eyes from it and don't really know how to comprehend it," she says.

Baxter's husband, Martin J. Leff, is a retired engineer who works on devices that assist people who are deaf or blind. He himself is deaf. Their 29-year-old daughter, Mara Leff, also is an artist.

Baxter moved away from Union Square in 2001 because real estate prices went up as they always eventually do when artists move in and the area becomes trendy. Now she has a much larger studio for the same price. She has supported herself as a graphic artist during part of her career, but stopped painting only during her daughter's early childhood. She has not aggressively pursued an art career but has always been able to sell paintings, she said. "As long as I was painting and exhibiting somewhere, people would buy them."

She misses the New York art scene of her youth. "I was young for a very long time," she says. "The art world was still relating to artists instead of ... commerciality.

"... What makes some things art is when the person brings themselves to the work and it touches some emotional core for them," Baxter says, "something you can't get out of other mediums."

Visual thinking and growing is a process that requires time, she says. She spends lots of time looking at paintings. New York City affords her the privilege of going to museums to learn from the people who ought to be every artist's teachers: The Masters.

"You look at great paintings and wonder, Why is that holding me?'" she says. "That's magic."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

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