“He had this way of bringing people together,” Nelson said. Recalling the games of ping pong, darts and croquet he kept running at the school, and elsewhere, for years…allowing people to connect on various levels at once.
“He was a hub. In the 1980s, articles in Woodstock Times would refer to him as Mister Woodstock,” Kleinhans added, noting how Angeloch also had a circle of poker-game friends, gallery friends, and friends who he managed the Woodstock Artists Cemetery with for years.
The two recalled how he first came to town as a veteran taking advantage of the post World War II G.I. Bill in 1948, when he set up a series of tents in a local field — one for sleeping, one as a kitchen, another as a studio — while attending the Arts Students League. As well as all he did to keep the Arts Students League running, and then his own Woodstock School of Art.
“Bob lived low on the hog, but he lived a true artist’s life. I wanted to know the nuts and bolts of how you got to live like he did,” McGloughlin said. “He wouldn’t go out to eat that often but every year he’d get away to this painting paradise. Now, when I’m teaching, all I really pass on are the things Bob taught me.”
She spoke of the innate knowledge of painting, printmaking, drawing and all formalist art values that Angeloch had, and imparted to all who studied with him.
Nelson and Kleinhans noted how they felt Angeloch’s presence all around the school now, but would acknowledge his discomfort with some of its newer niceties.
“We had no bathrooms. We’d bring our own water in,” Nelson recalled. “Bob would say, ‘What do you need bathrooms for. Who needs air conditioning or heat? Paint! Make art!”
McGloughlin laughed when told of such memories and noted how she, too, could envision Angeloch turning in his grave over the fact that this coming’s opening was being catered, or that the refurbished new WSA gallery space is being renamed in his honor.
“I think he may have felt it was all getting away from him in recent years,” she added. “And sometimes I notice how clean it all is, and air conditioned, and I think to myself, ‘Oh God, poor Bob.’ But then I remember that we have 400 students a year now and are employing 30 working artists at almost a living wage, with a chance to get employment, and I know Bob would be proud of that. He created a school of art that’s a great maker of art teachers.”
I ask Kate McGloughlin what she remembers most of her mentor Bob Angeloch and she breaks down for a moment. When she gathers herself she says, “I had no idea that by meeting Bob it would give me the life I have today.”
She, and Paula Nelson and John Kleinhans, said they were looking forward to an element of closure, and hopefully catharsis, in this Saturday’s opening of the painting half of the two year Bob Angeloch retrospective.
Later, we met with Bob’s son, the painter Eric Angeloch, in his office at the Woodstock School of Art.
He recalled early memories about the place…being babysat by artist friends of his father, and the Coke machine that he coveted until it was taken away because the place was losing money on its nickel-apiece soda pops.
We ask how the show’s going.
Angeloch says that having been around his father’s work his whole life, it should be easy. And he’d have his own son to help him hang the exhibit of 35 or so oil paintings (to be followed next year by “Angeloch Under Glass,” featuring the artist’s works on paper: drawings, prints and watercolors).
Was he expecting catharsis, or closure?
“It’s a little too personal for me,” Eric Angeloch said with a much-unsaid smile.
After which he handed over a drawing — an undated Bruce Ackerman cartoon of his father, Bob Angeloch, all glasses and intense scowl. Yet friendly, somehow, at the same time.
“It’s him,” the son says of his father. “I expect everyone will be here, too.”
The Robert Angeloch exhibit opens at the Woodstock School of Art, located at 2470 Route 212 just east of Woodstock, from 3 p.m.-5 p.m. on Saturday, July 7. Then stay up through September 1. For further information call 679-2388 or visit ulsterpub.staging.wpengineschoolofart.org.
