This is how life sometimes works.
In 2009, attorney and artist Daniel Belardinelli, was in the North Bergen Municipal Court to help out a friend with a motor vehicle violation.
“I really didn’t want to go, but there I was,” he said. “Then, when I was leaving, I was almost at my car and I thought, ‘I’m here. I really should go visit sister.’ “
His sister, Kim Lopez, worked in the adjacent town hall. On his way through the building, the artist in Belardinelli began to notice a series of colorful, child-like paintings that “really grabbed my attention.”
In his sister’s office, three of the paintings were hanging over her head.
“Who did these?” Belardinelli asked.
“The janitor,” she replied.
“Well, I want to meet him,” Belardinelli said.
And so began the discovery of artist Robert Sundholm. In the past month, the 75-year-old painter has been featured in People Magazine and the New York Times as a Top 10 pick from New York’s Outsider Art Fair at the Metropolitan Pavilion. Last week, he sat down with the BBC and CBS.
He has a remarkable back story, which begins with his father taking him and his brother to a Christmas party at a Brooklyn orphanage in 1948. He never returned.
At 7, Sundholm experienced abandonment so profound it resonates in his paintings 68 years later.
“There is a lot of loneliness in my paintings,” he said. “People are always alone, searching for love, which is very hard to find. I found more in my paintings than I do in life.”
Sundholm was trained at Food Service High School and began working in restaurants – and outside them, too. He said he was a street hustler, one of the “Five Dollar Boys” gay men would pick up outside the Horn & Hardart restaurant in midtown Manhattan.
But it was while working behind the counter at Schrafft’s in Manhattan he met Marian O’Connor, a schoolteacher who always asked him to save her a slice of blueberry pie. He did.
In that gentle, yet common negotiation a relationship was formed. Life at work.
“She was my second mother,” Sundholm said. “She taught me how to read and write. She gave me a children’s dictionary, because it was easier for me to understand.”
He was 32 when she opened up the world of reading to him. She passed away in 1991. In grief, Sundholm said he almost drank himself to death, but quit.
“I was out having a great old time,” he said. “Then I ended up in the hospital with a swollen liver.”
O’Connor left him a bit of money so he bought a small apartment in North Bergen on the top floor of a seven-story building atop a Palisades ridge. His windows looks west over the expanse of the Meadowlands and to the Watchung Mountains, but Sundholm usually paints what’s immediately in front of him. Except the beach.
“I’ve only been to the beach five times, but I paint it from memory,” he said. “I like the colors.”
After he settled in, he got a job working as a janitor at the North Bergen Municipal Building. There, he began to do ink drawings of people he worked with.
Sundholm’s talent got two women in the office to take interest in him.
“I was 60 by then and never painted,” he said. “They gave me colored pencils and paint.”
And just like that, the world of color opened up to Sundholm. He painted almost compulsively. Some ended up taped in the halls and offices of the municipal building, where they were discovered by Belardinelli.
“He was this very simple guy,” said Belardinelli, who lives in Boonton. “When he came down to my sister’s office he went right to trash cans to empty them and barely looked up. You could tell he worked hard at his job, but I could also see there was a lot more to him.”
Belardinelli wanted to see more of his work and Sundholm invited him to his apartment. And that’s when Belardinelli saw the full extent of Sundholm’s productivity.
“He had one room just stacked with paintings,” he said. “They were lining the hallways, on the walls. I grabbed 30 of them and put them in my convertible.”
He took the work to Salon X in Jersey City, where he had a show of his own scheduled. But was so intrigued by Sundholm’s work he told the gallery to give Sundholm his spot.
“I wanted to help him,” Belardinelli said. “I had the connections to show his work to collectors and friends.”
In between then and now, the men were out of touch for several years. Belardinelli was tending to his mother’s illness and Sundholm briefly gave up painting. But in 2015, Sundholm reached out to say he was painting again.
The North Bergen apartment remains as full with paintings as when Belardinelli first visited, despite the fact that Sundholm’s given hundreds away.
Sundholm paints nonstop, doing five every day, either watercolors on paper or acrylic on canvas.
The smell of paint is heavy in the air, and he works on a kitchen counter in between a color-splattered toaster and the refrigerator. Newspapers line the space and he mixes colors on paper plates.
He works his own photographs.
“But I like painting better than taking pictures,” Sundholm said. “With pictures you only snap the camera. In painting I can control everything. I control the colors. In acrylic especially I can add in fantasy and charm.”
Belardinelli started the Marianne B Gallery online to showcase Sundholm’s work.
Several of his pieces were accepted in the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, and the he exhibited at the annual Outsider Art Fair, which features artists with no formal training.
After that show, here’s what New York Times critic Roberta Smith had to say in making Sundholm a breakthrough artist at age of 75:
After a sometimes harrowing life, Mr. Sundholm has finally made good on his desire to paint, depicting city scenes in a brushy fly-away style descended from Oskar Kokoschka and European Expressionism. They sometimes miss, but when they hit, they unerringly fuse abandon and reality.”
That description tickles Sundholm.
“That’s the whole reason I paint,” he said. “To abandon reality. When I paint, I escape reality. I enjoy every single moment.”
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.
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