I had the honor to attend the fabled Swain School of Design from September 1978 until I graduated in 1982. Like many others, I can occasionally lapse into the trappings of nostalgic yearning and romanticize the place and the time and people. But I can honestly say this: it was special.
Swain existed in various forms in New Bedford since 1882. Noted for its outstanding faculty and small student body, there were but 33 students in my graduating class, all receiving BFAs in painting, sculpture, printmaking or graphic design.
It was not without its problems, of course, as when the board of trustees fired Jim Davies, the beloved president of the school, which led to student protests, as cars driving down County Street beeped in solidarity, foreshadowing a similar reaction 40 years later when UMD decided to unceremoniously shut out CVPA students from the Star Store.
However, one of the highlights of being at Swain was the opportunity to take color theory and painting classes with Severin “Sig” Haines. A graduate of Swain himself, he went on to receive an MFA from Yale. As Swain effectively ceased to exist in 1987, when it merged with UMD, Haines continued to teach painting and served as the graduate director of the CVPA until he retired in 2011.
He spent much of his post-collegiate career working in a spacious painting atelier in the Hatch Street Studios, alongside his old friend and Swain classmate Craig Coggeshall, and exhibiting locally and in his ancestral Norway.
Now forgive an awkward segue as I offer up a bit of of “Forgetfulness” by the poet Billy Collins:
“The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.”
In 2020, as a pandemic swept the globe, Haines found himself in his studio, going through the motions of showing up with a workman’s regularity, but struggling to paint, sometimes forgetting why he was there. Not long after, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and dementia. His family — wife Cindy and daughters Liv and Hannah — decided to have him leave the North End studio and work at home, overlooking the garden.
He found comfort in the familiar, trekking up the staircase with his black coffee, to fumble with charcoal and pencil and oil, in a studio perfumed with turpentine.
Dementia is insistent and insidious, and like the forgotten book in Collins’s poem, he slowly lost the ability to paint, to draw, to read, to remember names, to grasp what was happening on the television screen. He found some comfort thumbing through art books.
Soon, he was no longer able to ascend the staircase, and Cindy turned a sunroom into a downstairs bedroom. In October 2022, his condition worsened, necessitating a move to an assisted living facility. He died on June 30 of this year.
I have long been close to the Haines family and at their request, I began cleaning out Sig’s basement workshop and his studio. I was offered books and tools and paint and rolls of canvas, as well as stretched canvases. I took the books and the tools and the paint but I had no use for the canvas.
I told Cindy that I would get the canvas to Peter Dickison, an old friend and Swain classmate who had visited Haines during his last weeks. Cindy was delighted. One of the canvases had a few black gestural marks on it, and Cindy believed that that particular canvas was Sig’s last attempt at painting.
When I gave Dickison the canvas in question, I issued him a challenge: paint on it, finding some way to incorporate and respect the marks Sig made while finding a way to make a painting that was his own. He happily embraced the idea.
As Dickison notes: “It is the opposite of the many tales we hear as art students, of an art teacher finishing the student’s canvas. In a reversal, I was asked to finish my teacher’s canvas.”
He continued: “When assessing my own work, I often think of my teachers and fellow Swainees — what would they think? I think of certain painters who have since my time at Swain been my inner guides. But while actually painting, that is only me, normally.”
Starting out, Dickison considered Sig as he stared at his initial construction on the canvas. He wanted to keep that construction and elaborate upon it. He was a bit discomforted that this starting point was not something he had chosen but he knew a spot near to his Tiverton studio that he’d already decided to paint that might work.
He struggled at first. Making it his own while “finding the joy of his own work with Sig’s idea embedded within was challenging.”
Dickison worked outdoors many days with the trees he had chosen. He could hear Sig’s voice and feel the passion of which he spoke of color, noting “now and then, I would hit a note I knew he would relish. That felt so good to me. It felt like something we both loved purely, a gift that made me feel closer to him. Not so much his student but rather a friend or brother.”
Dickison recalled the landscapes he painted at Swain when he was first Sig’s student, noting “the first time I painted and really saw a tree” and later when he dug into the landscape as a primary subject, Sig shared his favorite painting spots with him.
“It was as if a truffle hunter shared a secret oak tree that was a prolific source of those underground nuggets. It seemed like I had been given a gold nugget. Yet still, I had to find a way to make a painting, my painting. It was not so much a gift as a challenge, as if he said OK, can you paint this?’”
The painting is still in Dickison’s studio, still in progress. And for him, it has already yielded treasure, in the discovery of joy and in the sense of time that is the great promise of the medium of painting.
I told you we were romantics.
Email arts columnist Don Wilkinson at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
What a wonderful challenge and article! Not easy to work on top of one so revered as Sig. Great result Pete!