Rogers is a painter. He’s been a painter since high school days.

He’s also a teacher, an actor, and a baritone. But drawing and painting are his first and enduring loves. And though his Parkinson’s has somewhat diminished his painting capabilities, he recently won two top awards at exhibitions of the Santa Barbara Art Association at the Faulkner Gallery.

Rogers is a New Yorker, born and bred. And though he has lived in California for 27 years, if you talk with him for about two minutes you will detect the unmistakable vernacular of those who grew up between the Hudson and the East Rivers with a touch of Park Avenue.

Upon graduation from high school, a scholarship led him to the Franklin School of Professional Artists and three years of indoctrination into the world of commercial art. Afterward he became an unpaid apprentice to a leading Broadway set designer (The King and I, Death Of a Salesman, Streetcar Named Desire). To support himself he free-lanced doing window designs for local stores, including Tiffany’s. His work with the set designer taught him respect for great lighting, and for the employment of the art of allusion. But his work dealt mainly with the mechanical aspects of the theatre and did not challenge his creativity.

Using his drawing ability he began to do fashion designs for advertisements by men’s clothing companies. This put him in contact with the top art director in the field of fashion design, Alexander Lieberman of Conde Nast (Vouge and Glamour). And he did a little modeling or men’s wear photographers. But soon another latent talent, born in high school drama groups, caused him to momentarily turn aside from the commercial art world and look to the excitement of the Broadway stage, from in front of the footlights rather than in the building of sets.

Rogers had some success. He joined Actors’ Equity and earned parts in Summer Stock, with male leads in The Boyfriend, Little Mary Sunshine, and South Pacific. But the big time eluded him and audition rejections caused him to retreat to his art studies. Though he continued to get some understudy parts, the tension between his love for the theatre and for his painting finally drove him to the decision to focus on art and go for a college teaching career. He went back to school and obtained his BA at New York University, his MA at Columbia and CCNY and, later on, his MFA at UCSB.

He began to teach developing an imaginative course called Radical Anatomy at New York’s School of Visual Design and at Parsons School of Design. His basic courses always began with drawing a link on the blackboard and going on to develop that line into the creation of form, value, perspective and composition. Drawing, he explained, is making a flat-plane, two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional illusion.

Rogers did not neglect his own painting and drawing during his teaching assignments in Hawaii, Texas, and California. “Teaching is rewarding and I am challenged by the attempts to help develop young talents into accomplished artists. But I really teach in order to provide a financial base so I can paint, paint, paint.” He has recently been a popular teacher of life drawing at the Adult Education Center of SBCC.

Gradually Rogers’ South view alcove is filling up with his recent paints and drawings, many of which are of heroic dimension. His present problem is to make room to paint. His recent awards attest to his continued acceptance by the local art community and we hop he limitations of his body and of his living quarters will not slow his creative productivity.

     
      Self-Portrait by Rogers Craner