"The Family Curse" The Angelochs of Woodstock
By Jay Blotcher

When the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum contacted artist Eric Angeloch about mounting a father-son show, it seemed a neat and logical premise. Angeloch, 47, is a second-generation visual artist and the son of Robert Angeloch, 85, an accomplished painter and founder of the Woodstock School of Art. Angeloch the Younger was instructed to select a variety of his own landscapes, an equal number of his father’s figure drawings and landscapes, and create an exhibition that would prompt a spirited discussion on genetics and artistic style.

But the board of WAAM had not reckoned fully before approaching Eric Angeloch. An instructor at the Woodstock School of Art, Eric can lay claim to an artistic lineage that expands beyond the work of his accomplished father. His mother Nancy Summers, 79, is an award-winning painter with her own formidable family line: Her late parents, Dudley Gloyne Summers and Pauline Stone were successful illustrators—she of bookplates and children’s books, he for books and magazines—in the early 20th century.

The original concept having swelled from showcasing two artists to celebrating the lives of five artists joined by bloodlines and, in numerous ways, aesthetics. Eric, who has a decided taste for wordplay, has entitled the three-generation, fifty-work retrospective “The Family Curse: The Angelochs and Summers of Woodstock.” The show will run from July 14 through August 19 at WAAM.

On a Sunday afternoon in June, Angeloch is still reviewing paintings and illustrations for the proposed show. Canvases by his relatives, some liberated from a cellar after decades, sit propped against walls in the artist’s Woodstock home-studio. In the nine months since he was first asked to consider the exhibition, Angeloch estimates that he has reviewed several hundred art pieces. “There’s absolutely a ton of work.”

He pauses wryly to mention that his maternal great-grandparents also worked in pen and ink, but were excluded from the show because none of their work survives.

When Angeloch began to evaluate work for the show, he explored numerous criteria for making his final selection. One day he decided that subject matter would unify the work. Another day, he decided that medium would be the deciding factor. Again, he realized his tactics were far too narrow. “I realized the only thing that really was going to work was to chuck all that and just go with what I really responded to.”

Playing curator for family work meant a measure of sleuthing that stirred old spirits. Eric Angeloch prodded his parents to unveil older works that had been in storage for decades. As he pawed through their artistic pasts, he rediscovered works that were dissimilar in style to his parents’ best-known pieces. For instance, by delving into old sketchbooks belonging to his father, Angeloch found compact, intimate figure drawings that veer significantly from the sprawling, feral landscapes for which Robert is best known.

One major challenge for Angeloch was to title the pieces. The extant works of his grandparents were commissioned illustrations that lacked names. Additionally, parents Robert and Nancy, Eric chides, were not particularly imaginative in naming their own pieces. By way of example, Angeloch palms a 1959 work by his mother, a composition in oils of eggplant and fruit that suggests a student of Cezanne. She has simply dubbed it “Still Life,” without any identifying number.

“The Family Curse” will ultimately include an eclectic variety of figurative work, still life and landscape. Each family member will be represented by ten pieces.

Angeloch grew up in Woodstock with two parents who were working artists, and who had a huge social circle of fellow artists. For most of his childhood, Angeloch said, he simply believed that all adults were artists. There was no pressure from the family to become an artist, he said. The most overt support he remembers might have come one Christmas, when his parents gave young Eric a set of colored markers. Nonetheless, Angeloch began studying under his father while in his teens, attended the Art Students League of New York City, a crucible for some of the best-known artists of the 20th century, and returned home to study at Woodstock School of Art, where he still teaches. While he denies that his father’s reputation dwarfed his output, Eric was aware enough that he initially eschewed landscapes to avoid invoking comparison with his father. After several years of figure work, however, he realized that landscapes “put bread on the table” and returned to the genre. (Angeloch draws landscapes from memory, not by model, resulting in renderings of trees that resemble no known genus.)

Eric’s grandparents lived up the road in Woodstock and were a significant presence in his life. But their careers as artists had ended by the time their grandson arrived. Pauline Stone was by then an antiques dealer. Angeloch gestures to the wall of the dining room. A watercolor illustration by Stone, circa 1915, is a beguiling study in economy of line and movement. A young girl stands in a field, her skirt ruffled by a passing breeze. To the right of this work is a framed pen and ink sketch of a topless female. Her woman from the back, nude save for a pair of high heels.

Exhuming the works of his parents and grandparents moved Angeloch to reevaluate the arc of his own work. A self-described “late bloomer,” he feels he did not connect with his own style until age 40. While he became known best for his landscapes, Angeloch chafed at pigeonholing and painted in numerous styles over the years, admittedly a transgression in a field that prizes consistency, he said. Ultimately, he returned to landscapes in the face of mounting requests, but with a marked ambivalence. “It’s a little scary when you look at [the later landscapes] initially; they get darker and darker.”

“The Family Curse: The Angelochs and Summers of Woodstock”. Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, 28 Tinker Street, Woodstock. July 14 through August 19.For information, call (845) 679-2940 or visit www.woodstockart.org/

An unreconstructed philistine, Blotcher has been writing about the arts professionally for a quarter-century. He has lived in Ulster County since 2001.