Another Swain family loss, and this one hits hard

Painter Craig Coggeshall died in his northern Vermont home, late in the evening of Oct. 20, after a lengthy and debilitating illness. 

Around 45 years ago, I met him for the first time. We became fast friends. I was then a student at the much-storied Swain School of Design and he was an alumni, about 14 years older than me. 

I ate countless meals with Coggeshall and his wife Katherine and his daughters, Jenna and Melissa. When I got married, he was a groomsman.

Coggeshall painted in a converted garage behind his house in the West End and much later in the Hatch Street Studios building, sharing a large space with his old friend Sig Haines, also an alum of Swain who later became a member of the faculty, primarily teaching painting and color theory. Haines died in June 2023.

Coggeshall’s paintings were primarily urban landscape, visual paeans to the city’s fading industrial past, a connection to labor and industriousness, which was perfectly apt. Unlike Haines, he did not go on to work in academia but rather toiled in the factories and mills.

He was on the night shift at the long defunct Nissen Bakery. He also worked as a fish packer and a maintenance man, eventually retiring from Nye Lubricants after 15 years in their employ.

He was a charter member of Gallery X. In the mid-1980s, along with Haines, A.D. Tinkham, Nancy Mitton, and a few other painters, Coggeshall formed the Water Street Gallery in Mattapoisett. 

In 1990, former Velvet Underground bandmates Lou Reed and John Cale put out an album called “Songs for Drella.”

Drella was Reed’s nickname for his old mentor and frenemy Andy Warhol, who died in 1987 following a routine surgery. So what does this have to do with Coggeshall?

I always sensed a similarity between him and the silver-wigged pop artist. But it’s not their paintings. Rather, it is an ethos, at least in so much as I am willing to believe Reed, who wrote the following lyrics to describe Warhol:

“He’d get to the Factory early, if you’d ask him he’d tell you straight out ‘It’s work.’”

Coggehall worked at his craft, unrelentingly. 

Alongside Haines, he’d show up at the studio, Monday through Friday, like two workmen on the clock. Coffee would be brewed. A bagged sandwich and some fruit would be put down for lunch. And the work got underway, as the two bantered all day.

Coggeshall’s space was immaculate. There was never a drop of paint on the floor nor on his jeans. He defied the stereotype of the sloppy artist. 

His shelves were neatly arranged with his still life subject matter: tea pots, carafes, bowls and cups. Every pencil was honed to a perfect point so as not to waste time when the moment struck.

He always had two easels going, two still lifes arranged, two landscapes underway, no nonsense. It was his worker’s ethic that fed the incredible attention to detail which was the hallmark of his painting. 

Coggeshall’s artwork was devoid of artifice. In his paintings, there was a simple truth and it is the truth of observation, done by a man whose lifelong occupation was looking. The work is his testament.

His passing, which I had known was coming for quite a while, still shook me up. I began thinking of loss in a somewhat different way. I’m talking about the demise of an institution. 

The Swain School of Design was opened in 1891 (as the Swain Free School) but it wasn’t until the late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s that it truly flourished. The school put aside fashion illustration, sign painting and similar pursuits in favor of four primary majors: graphic design, painting, printmaking and sculpture. There were great faculty and eager, inspired students.

Swain was small and intimate.There were 33 students in my graduating class of 1982. There were rarely over 120 students in the entire student body at any given time. Faculty and students intermingled professionally and socially. It felt like family. It still does, 43 years later.

Swain began to pull in visiting graphic designers and fine artists that would display work in the Crapo Gallery, deliver lectures or commencement speeches, stroll the studios of painters, printmakers and sculptors, chiding or praising students, pushing them to think in less parochial ways.

A short list would include Sig Abeles, Lennart Anderson, Leland Bell, Ivan Chermayeff, Judy Chicago, Robert de Niro Sr., Ralph Fasanella, Jules Friedman, Paul Georges, Milton Glaser, Malcolm Grear, Grace Hartigan, Lester Johnson, Wolf Kahn, Art Kane, Philip Pearlstein, and Paul Resika among others. There was some serious art world star power at our door. 

Graduates of Swain went on to receive MFAs from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Parsons School of Design, the Pratt Institute and the Yale School of Art. Others went off to work in prestigious design firms in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston and elsewhere. They exhibited all over the country and across the globe.

As young and naive students, we began to gain a sense of something bigger. Maybe, just maybe, we could be the next Bauhaus. Or the next Black Mountain College, small art schools with big ambitions that changed the world. 

But then something we could not imagine happening did indeed happen. In 1988, the Swain School of Design ceased to exist when it merged with what-was-then Southeastern Massachusetts University.

Much like the trauma that the grad students experienced when the UMass Dartmouth administration ordered them from the Star Store Building, the vast majority of Swain students were mortified to have to leave the studios and classrooms that they thought they would spend the entirety of their undergraduate years in.

Oddly enough, the university agreed to bestow Swain diplomas to those students that started there.

Like the Star Store students, the final few classes of Swain students (and the alumni that supported them) experienced something that felt like a broken promise, something akin to betrayal.

What was left was anger, mourning and a profound sense of loss. What got everyone through it was a renewed sense of kinship and commonality. Despite petty rivalries and miscommunications, we were all family. We had each other.

But time rolls on, and death is inevitable.

The herd gets thinned. The family shrinks. Memories shift. And there will be no future Swain students to cement our own legend.

Stories are not told, memories are not shared, hands are not shaken, hugs are not given, and jokes are not repeated. Complaints fade. Praise disappears. The collective memory dissipates. And our history fades away. No one will be around to confirm the tale, the history or the event. 

Tom Corey, who taught graphic design at Swain in the late ’70s and early ’80s, was lost in the late ’90s.

David Loeffler Smith, who began working at Swain in 1962 and taught drawing and painting (and was the self-described “Dutch uncle” to hundreds of art students for nearly 30 years) died in August 2012.

Former sculpture instructor and hotrod enthusiast Russell Daly passed away in September 2019. Printmaking teacher Marc St. Pierre (another of my groomsmen) died in December of the same year.

Gallery X was formed primarily by graduates of Swain and at least two of them — Paul Menard and Richard Vanasse — are gone.

So many former students are no longer with us. This is hardly a comprehensive list but they include Greta Breglio and Darrel Dwelley and Andy Rodman and Peter McClure and Steph Davidson and Merle Sanderson and Christine Bertram and Cynthia Broadbent, and in the last two months, Rebecca Pounds and Christine Langone.

Former beloved president Jim Davies. Former beloved custodian Fred Gomes. Former beloved receptionist Diane Cambra. Former beloved “bookstore lady” Mrs. Jones. 

Maybe it’s time for me to write that book.

Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org