March 04, 2005

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Palo Alto Online

Portrait of a curator

by Diana Reynolds Roome

The image of Giuseppe Verdi, painted in sizzling greens, blues and yellows, churns with energy, from the quirky moustache to the dignified forehead bursting with colors and shapes. The predominance of green makes a merry pun on Verdi's name.

The venerable Verdi, whose jig-sawed outline follows the curves of his bushy white hair and moustache, is one of a series of composers painted with irrepressible wit by Leonard Breger. The artist has also painted Franz Schubert reclining like an odalisque on a trout (a sly reference to his famous "Trout Quintet"), as well as Bela Bartok, Charles Ives, an electrifying Igor Stravinsky, Johann Sebastian Bach doing a wild dance with Abraham Lincoln, and Johannes Brahms setting a piano on fire with his music.

Expect to see these playful portraits popping up all over the Bay Area in the future, as local curator Michael Killen plans to lend them to performing-music groups, to enhance the visibility of their events (he had offered to lend Breger's Verdi portrait to the Stanford Music department this weekend, to coincide with their presentation of Verdi's "Requiem," but the offer was declined).

"I want thousands and thousands of people to be exposed to Leonard's art and I want to help make classical music more accessible to new listeners," Killen said. "I believe Leonard has created more portraits of composers than anyone in history. He's a national treasure and a truly great man."

Killen, a writer, marketing strategist and TV host, is a man of prodigious ideas. He has turned his modest Palo Alto house into an art gallery, with some 200 paintings hanging, leaning and piled along walls in every room. Most are by his two favorite living artists, Breger and Harry Cohen, a Marin painter also going strong in his 80s. Cohen, who used to be a figurative painter, now turns out large, exuberant works in acrylic and collage. His "Red, Black and Me," in gloriously clashing blocks of color, hangs in Killen's dining room expressing a keen appetite for life.

Killen owns a few himself, but for the past year or so he has taken on the role of curating the works of these two artists, who are also his friends. In this role, he opens his house by appointment to show the paintings, which can also be viewed on his Web site.

To bring more attention to artists and musicians, Killen came up with another brainchild. A new Web-based book, "Encounter the Great Classical Composers," was launched this week and is a fresh take on an old subject. Killen is offering the book free on his Web site, in the hope that it will encourage new listeners to discover and appreciate classical music. The book is in progress, but will appear as a series of essays written by musicians and musicologists, exploring their personal reactions to a particular composer and illustrated throughout with Breger's irreverent but warm paintings.

The first installment on Schubert is engagingly written in two parts, by Carol Adee, flutist and music director at Marin Waldorf School; and Benjamin Simon, music director of the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. The second will be on Bartok.

Not all the essays and portraits focus on dead white males. Breger is currently painting Chen Yi, a Chinese female composer whose work has been performed by Chanticleer and the Women's Philharmonic and who will be featured in the book. Meanwhile, Killen is hoping a publisher will be interested in bringing out a hard copy of the book in time for Christmas. He is already planning a companion book about jazz -- illustrated with Cohen's colorful, angular abstracts.

The project doesn't stop there. As host of "The Killen Report," a weekly local cable TV show, Killen intends to interview the authors, many of whom are also musicians, giving them the opportunity to play, sing and talk about their favorite music in a program that will also be Web-cast on his site. This way, the book will be multidimensional, with the sound component easily accessible to accompany the reading of the book.

As if all this weren't enough, Killen himself has become a painter under the tutelage of Breger, who holds art classes at his San Mateo studio and in his students' Palo Alto homes. He began observing Breger's class as research for a book he started writing after an excruciating knee injury forced him to retire from his former business.

"After three months ... Leonard threw some paint and brushes and a board at me and said, 'Please, paint!'" Killen was reluctant at first, but then discovered he had a gift. His large, bold creations are startling, sometimes shocking, and though they often express fearful situations, there's a fearlessness in the painting. Two that refer graphically to Sept. 11, 2001 are banned from the walls by his wife Josephine, whose own raku pottery has a contrastingly peaceful air.

"I love to paint. I also paint because I love how quickly I can get people to say, wow!" said Killen, who has made a meticulous copy of Picasso's black-and-white masterpiece "Guernica" -- in full color. People have accused him of audacity, he said, but the King's Gallery in San Francisco saw fit to make it a centerpiece for a month.

As for music, he enjoys it but performing is one of the few things he doesn't do himself.

"I had an interest in deepening my knowledge of classical music, but I'm too slow," he said. "So I act as conductor of this book."
For more information on the Killen Art Gallery call (650) 327-2312 or visit www.killen.com.


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