“Bob and I, despite our 20 years difference, became the closest of friends. It wasn’t that we spoke heart to heart; it was more that everything between us seemed so natural and unconsidered,” Kleinhans said. “We ended up all going to Monhegan again and again and again. And then on to Scotland, Wales, England…all painting and sketching.”
The couple laughed together, recalling how Angeloch would call for Kleinhans to stop on their drives so he could sketch a scene, taking shorthand notes of color tones and compositional strategies, in ten minutes or less.
“The fastest draw in the West,” Kleinhans noted.
“He was an incredible draftsman and had a sense of place that was quite rare,” Nelson added. “He would capture what he was painting or drawing and yet the look was always his.”
Kate McGloughlin, current president at WSA and the lead instructor in the print workshop Angeloch started and ran for years, also laughed when she recalled her first meeting with Bob Angeloch. “It was January of 1991 and I walked into his etching class and he said, ‘Who are you and what do you want,’” she remembered. “I said I want to learn etching and I’ve not stopped since. I was scared to death of him but I ended up working side by side with him as he told me everything I did was wrong. And so I fell in love with the man. It was hand in glove with us. And within eight months I’d quit my job so I could do what he did.”
McGloughlin first went to Monhegan with Angeloch and his second wife Mara in 1997, after a particularly difficult summer fraught with family and other troubles.
“He said, ‘You’re coming to Monhegan this year,’ and handed me a list of expenses and a check to cover half of them,” she said. “And then every morning we’d go out with our painting kits and sat side by side and captured what was before us, which was not like anything I’d ever seen in my life. At night we’d play three-handed hearts and whatever he did, I’d do. Bob would shoot the moon, so I’d shoot the moon.”
Everyone we spoke with in recent weeks who worked with, learned from, played poker with, or just knew Bob Angeloch all agreed on a number of his voluminous characteristics.
“He was a guy who knew what he wanted to do,” McGloughlin said, recalling how he was always making and checking off lists, be it of paintings he wanted to make, office duties he needed to finish, or maintenance jobs he felt needed doing at either the WSA or his own studio. “You could set your clock to him…and yet he loved every aspect of his life.”
