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Fifty years of Grafer art up at Pines library

(May 26, 2016) In “Breakfast in the Bronx,” circa 1962, one can see a small bowl of raw eggs, presumably about to be scrambled, along with a saltshaker, a few cracked eggshells and a single fork laid out against a stark, yellow background.
Is this a whimsical image, somewhat playful in it’s simplicity? Or is this a lonesome breakfast of despair? If you asked the artist, one Don W. Grafer, he would probably tell you that’s for the viewer to decide.
Dozens of Grafer paintings hang in the Ocean Pines Library. They are a sampling of the works he has produced over more than 50-years as an artist. The works range from the painterly, somewhat Georgia O’Keefe-inspired abstractions of his recent output, to his decade-plus period producing action paintings, to the small, intimate realism he finished while living in New York City in the 1960s.
Grafer, 84, said the retrospective came about after a neighbor who volunteers for the library, Mary Doellgast, inquired about his latest paintings.
“She liked what I was doing and I had a show there once before [in 2009], and she said, ‘How about another show up in the library?’ I said, ‘fine,’” Grafer said.
His wife, Susan, helped work out some of the details and delivered several stacks of canvases last month.
Grafer said he painted a great deal during the 1960s, fresh out of college and working as a statistician for Standard & Poor’s in the city, but set art aside after the children began to arrive.
“After the third one, I couldn’t do much of anything for about 20 years,” he said.
He described those early works as “very realistic and detailed.”
“I expanded to abstracts eventually,” he said. “I liked doing them and I think they say more than [representational] figures. It’s like looking at something and you see a thing in the abstract, but you can also see it in reality. I like to paint the abstracts more now.”
When he retired in the mid 1990s, his son Chris surprised him with a gift certificate to an art supply store. He took the hint and has been painting ever since.
“I had looked at a lot of Pollocks, Kandinsky, Georgia O’Keeffe, de Kooning and thought there was something in there and I have to get on the bandwagon,” Grafer said. “I poured paint on canvases. I used brushes and used a lot of water to move it around. And now I’m back to uses brushes again.”
His latest stylistic shift started in last December and makes up nearly half the work hanging in the retrospective. Grafer has obviously been busy, painting feverishly from his home in Ocean Pines. Before then, however, his output had slowed.
“I got kicked in the ass when I fell down and hurt my back, and my leg went dead on me. So, I couldn’t work that much. But it’s still coming out now,” he said.
“You don’t know what you’re going to paint when you start painting. Your head should be clear,” he continued. “The canvas will tell you what to do. It will talk back to you. That sounds silly, but it’s true. When you’re working, you can see what colors you need and how they can blend in with one another.”
For viewers walking through the more than five decades of his life hanging on the walls of the library, Grafer simply said he hoped they enjoy themselves, “whether it [affects] their head or heart or both.”
“You can’t say exactly what art is for people. Everybody is different, and different people will get different impressions of the work,” he said.
Susan, who watched Don change over the years while his work changed and evolved, has her own take.
“I think it’s interesting for people to see how art can change as a person changes through life,” she said. “When you look in the small computer room in the library, there’s a painting that Don did of a ship that’s very intricate with very fine lines. He would never do anything like that today. He wouldn’t have the patience. Now, he’s much more bold and loose.
“You can see things through the course of a whole life just by looking at the paintings in the library,” she added.
Grafer said he has no favorites in his considerable collection, or among the many twists and turns his chameleonic painting career has taken.
“I enjoy everything I’ve done up to now and I’m still enjoying it,” he said. “I like to play with paint. I love paint, in a way.”
The exhibit will remain up in the library, on 11107 Cathell Road, through the month of June. Grafer also keeps a studio in the Worcester County Arts Council building in downtown Berlin, and is often on hand during 2nd Friday art strolls in the town.