Groundbreaking artist closing studio

Edward L. Loper Sr., a barrier-smashing black artist who paints in colors the untrained don't see, is closing his Wilmington studio after 52 years of teaching there.

The 93-year-old also starts an exhibit today at Stuart Kingston Galleries that will include the last 10 paintings he owns.

Loper, who taught himself by studying how famous artists painted, said Thursday he's not sure how long he'll be able to continue exhibiting, at his age and in his health. He does plan to continue teaching in fall and spring semesters, but in smaller classes at the Graylyn Crest home he shares with his wife, Janet Neville-Loper.

Loper just doesn't have the stamina he once did, Neville-Loper said.

"It's just become too much of a burden," she said. "He tires too easily these days. If he can teach here in the house, just a couple of people at a time, he won't have to worry about driving or anything."

They are converting their family room into a small studio, and friends and students have promised to make sure Loper gets out this summer to paint, she says.

"If people want to buy them, I'll sell them," Loper said Thursday at his studio.

"We're going to be lost," said Betty Ulrey, who has studied with Loper since 1976 and was there Thursday. "I've studied art my whole life, but I've never had a teacher like Loper."

Helen Knapp, a student since the early 1960s, said she has never missed a year of painting with Loper.

"He taught us how to see," she said.

Loper might say that he had to learn first how to see. As a young man who couldn't make ends meet in the Great Depression, he took a job with the Works Progress Administration, painting murals. It wasn't long before he was painting at home, too.

Supervisors in the program -- including illustrator Howard Pyle's nephew -- worked with him, and he began studying masters, including famed illustrator N.C. Wyeth. He would work with an artist's style, and then fall in love with another artist and mimic that style, too.

He met Albert Barnes, a wealthy doctor who collected art and who invited him to take classes at The Barnes Foundation, where Loper was surrounded by the work of impressionist, post-impressionist and early modern painters who fractured and flattened the planes of dimensions in paintings.

Color became increasingly important to Loper, as it was to Barnes, and Loper became convinced that people don't see the colors that surround them.

"What he means is that people look at a tree, and they see a green tree," said his friend Patrick McGrath. "In fact, depending on the light, that tree is made up of just about every color in the spectrum. If you learn how to see it, you can put it in your painting.

"That's what Ed teaches people to do, to see the color where the average person just doesn't see it, doesn't get it."

By the late 1950s, Loper had created a signature style, which McGrath calls "fractured realism."

Loper broke racial barriers in the art world, winning prizes for his work, only to have organizers surprised to discover he was black.

He also fought criticism from critics who expected a black man to choose an African or African-American theme. He chose primarily landscapes and cityscapes. "To me, black art is the person who does the painting -- if he's black, it's black art," he once said.

McGrath helped organize the Loper exhibit at Stuart Kingston. Among the 15 paintings -- which include some owned by friends who have agreed to sell if their prices are met -- is "Table with Flowers," the 30-by-36-inch painting Loper finished last week.

Asking prices range from $14,700 to $35,000, and Loper's average is about $18,000 per painting, McGrath said.

One of Loper's paintings just sold for $25,000 in a Wilmington gallery, and that might be a record for Loper.

A 2008 Loper oil on canvas of flowers and fruits called "Rich Bounty of the Earth" hangs in the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, home of Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill. Loper had originally declined to loan a piece of his art for the Observatory, but reconsidered after details were worked out.

'He wants to keep busy'

McGrath worries about Loper's health, which he said has shown a marked change in recent months. Just lately, Janet Neville-Loper says, her husband uses a walker if he has to go far.

Loper chose to close the studio, she said.

"And it was the right decision, I think, because of his stamina and having to drive back and forth," she said. "We are depending on people to take us too much these days, and we can't continue to do that."

She's happy he wants to continue teaching and painting. His production has slowed in recent years, but not his enthusiasm for the topic, about which he remains passionate and vocal.

"I'm delighted he wants to keep busy," she said. "This will keep him more alert."

Loper's studio, in the basement of a home he built on North Ogle Avenue 52 years ago, is on the market for $199,900.

It was his family home in his first marriage, and it's where he met Janet when she signed up for lessons more than 20 years ago.

The Lopers recently redid the two-bedroom house, which sits on a large lot and includes a colorful mural of beautiful women on one wall.

Loper says he hopes to sell the house to someone who loves art and will use or rent the studio, but he doesn't really expect that because most art lovers can't afford a house like that.

It doesn't make him sad to leave the mural, he said. "Someone will get to see it."

William S. Montgomery, Wilmington Mayor James M. Baker's chief of staff, has been one of Loper's students for nine years. In addition to painting with Loper regularly in Wilmington, he traveled with Loper and a group of local students to Quebec City about five times for an annual painting trip Loper organized, but it was discontinued about two years ago.

Most recently, Montgomery has been taking weekly classes with Loper at the Delaware College of Art and Design, held at Loper's Ogle Avenue studio.

"It's certainly understandable that he's scaling back at 93 years old," Montgomery said. "Still, he's taught thousands of people at his Ogle Avenue studio over the past 40 years or so. I'm just happy to have been able to have spent so many Saturday mornings with him and learning from him. He's one of a kind."

The Lopers head to Washington today, so Loper can pick up his third honorary degree, a doctorate in humane letters, from the University of the District of Columbia. Allen Sessoms, the former president of Delaware State University, which gave Loper an honorary doctorate in fine art, is the president of the D.C. university. Loper also has an honorary doctorate in humanities from the University of Delaware.

Loper said Thursday he wasn't sure how to feel about the honor.

"I'm getting these things now, but they weren't around when I needed the attention," he said.