His father was nuts about the movies, and Sam attended many films with him. He remembers seeing the film about Al Jolson, the first talkie. He was depressed by seeing Camille, and its sad ending. The Wyandotte Theatre showed the early movies, but he also went with his dad to see films at the Michigan Theatre, and was saddened when it was turned into a parking garage.
He attended films on the strip of movie houses on Bagley. There was a United Artist’s theatre next to a Chinese theatre. He remembered the grandeur of the Statler. Many times, his life was like the Great Gatsby film, conversing in a small suite in one of Detroit’s hotels, wearing ties and a coat and sweating in the heat. It was important to be well-dressed when visiting downtown Detroit because looking disheveled invited a vagrancy arrest by police. He remembers attending the AHEPA conference in downtown Detroit. That’s the anagram for The American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association.
In his studio, Karras has a panoramic picture of Greek American couples around round banquet tables, celebrating the visit of the King and Queen of Greece to Detroit. The black & white picture was captured with a special lens; everyone had to smile and strike and keep a pose as the lens rotated from left to right. Sam attempted to capture the face and body of every protestor at a Communist rally during his student days, a painting that he sold instantly to one of his professors.
Sam gave himself assignments. He wrote lists of subjects to capture in paint and pencil, and he drove himself to complete his list.
Sam can copy from paintings. Sam can paint from life in any style. Copying is slavish in his opinion, so he doesn’t do it. Drawing animals is like drawing humans. He once assigned himself that task of documenting gorilla younglings at the Detroit Zoo. Now based in Royal Oak, Sam cruised to his assigned destinations in a station wagon. Now he visits his subjects in a van. He doesn’t always get out of the van. Sometimes he likes to draw the scene and the people who walk upon the stage, so to speak, without them noticing. He has often wondered, “where are the other artists?” Why weren’t other artists out drawing from the reality of the city streets, haunting the street corners over a period of decades?
Sam’s gallery has wire shelves to hold his framed work. When the International Café closed in the late eighties, Sam documented the funeral parade the regulars held, including all the people carrying the neon sign and other restaurant fixtures to a customer’s downtown condominium. Sam also kept his eye on the Mohawk Brandy girl, usually a swimsuit clad woman who was then dating the owner of Mohawk vodka. The viewpoint of a painting that includes the Mohawk vodka girl looks south upon Woodward.
People would talk to him as he worked in all night cafes or from his van. A detective named Gajewski, wearing his police blue coat against the cold weather would talk to him in a diner. He would hang in a pool hall in Hamtramck.
When he went with his wife to Virginia Beach for an annual show, he would book a room at a beachfront hotel with the perfect vantage on the swath of sand. Every year, he would return there.
Sam painted a series of satyrs and centaurs and dancing girls clad in red. These sold quickly to women; he’s not sure for whom they were buying them. An artist friend recommended that Sam paint images featuring flowers. It was bad advice. Sam never sold one goddamn flower painting.
Sam once tried to discard unwanted paintings that had no chance of selling. He was cutting up a so-so painting on a canvas of eighth-inch thick canvas. After he had mangled it with a matte knife, he regretted the destruction, but the painting was past preservation. He searched through his slides obsessively, but he never found a slide of that destroyed painting. He never disposed of a painting after that, despite encouragement of people around him, since that epiphany. The epiphany came in a dream. “Is this a matte knife I see, handle toward my hand?” In the dream, Karres saw a matte knife, and a voice spoke, “Karres, this is not for you to do.”
He had destroyed a clumsy painting, but it had captured an era and what he was going though when he had painted it.
Sam hasn’t yet funded a foundation to care for his work, and he is unable to do so out of his savings. After the bubble burst, Sam’s exposure to stocks such as Worldcom reduced his standard of living from luxurious to comfortable. He has carefully stored the paintings in his oeuvre that haven’t sold, stacks of watercolors, hundreds of Raritan sketch pads, framed oils on the racks. He’s sold hundreds of paintings, sometimes with the paint still drying. Not all of his paintings are documented by slides.
He once was a tenant of the owner of Pasquale’s, a fellow he still joins on short gambling trips to Windsor. His first Royal Oak studio consisted of 500 square feet in the former church at Lafayette and Sixth. That landlord had a personal parking spot at Casino Windsor, and he was s a man known for huge blackjack winnings and losses. That space in the former church was too small, and so Karras signed a lease for the space at 206 West Sixth Street, Royal Oak, Michigan 48073.
Although Sam likes to work late in all-night diners, his body chemistry causes him to conk out around 2:00 A.M.
He tried drawing and sketching in his van in Windsor, but police detained him and searched his van. He has not experienced this inconvenience in the city of Detroit. In fact, he is known and protected by the Detroit Police Department. While improperly parked at Woodward and Michigan Avenue, a mounted policeman rode over to see what Sam was doing. The horse and the rider had entered the scene, and Sam’s eye grabbed the exquisite curves of the horse’s form and his hand drew them onto the canvas. The policeman riding this now-immortalized steed forgot about the improperly parked van, and assured Sam that he could paint anywhere in the city. Sam Karres often said hello to that mounted police-officer during painting excursions on Belle Isle.
Sam has painted on Belle Island since learning his craft at Wayne State in the early fifties. Sam knew everyone who passed the day on that island, talking to the people whom he was painting. In those days, the beaches of Belle Isle were highly stratified; there was a section of heterosexuals as well as a section of homosexuals. Sam often recorded the lounge-life on a bar barge on the Detroit River, another Detroit hangout that no longer exists.
Sam’s art has led him around the world, to his ancestral country of Greece, to Korea, Italy and France. He has painted fast-selling paintings in Chicago, Los Angeles, and even high above Times Square in a Marriott Hotel Room on New Year’s Eve. Karras had Dick Clark on the television set when Jay Leno was leading the celebration in the square.
Sam likes to be a visual artist because once the subject is executed in color on a canvas, it’s there for good. No musical interpretation is required. No stage actor must utter words from a script. Unlike the actor, the painter does not have to put his body on the spot. With good paper or canvas, the image will last for a thousand years and the colors will hold for just as long. He wonders why people buy reproductions, which are turned out on a press for a buck a copy. The reproductions turn blue in a few years. Press systems are better now, but still, a reproduction will not last as long as an original painting.
He has paintings of many forgotten places. For example, one oil depicts street life in Black Bottom, the lost commercial district of Hastings Street. He has painted St. Anne’s in Mexicantown at least 20 times in the past six decades. He knows that the bridge approach was rerouted to avoid a building that is no longer there. Why can’t the new bridge approach be routed away from St. Anne’s? In the lower section of his watercolors, he frequently has written the street corner from where he recorded the view. Often, he has identified important people in pencil, including Detective Daniel Galeski, the Wyandotte police officer who interrogated Lawrence DeLisle, convicted murderer who had driven his station wagon into the Detroit River with four children in the back seat.
At 76, Sam Karres is in excellent shape. After cataract surgery, his eyesight was 20-20 sharp, according to his surgeon. He wears eyeglasses, and during the interview he had trouble reading his pencil inscriptions on his watercolors. He still lifts weights in his home several times a week, and was acknowledged a weight-lifting master in 1993. A collection of these trophies are on display in his gallery – studio. There is some pressure to lay-off his painting routine, pressure he ignores. He believes there is more to life than eating, sleeping and shitting. Life is for experiencing the high of creativity. He vows to keep painting, even to the oblivion at the end of life, to carry his skills to the end. Even after surgery, he has experienced some diminishment in seeing. Sharp seeing for a painter is overrated. What is more important is the artist’s light, skillful touch.
At first, Sam was an college art school dropout. No one could tell him what art was. When he returned, he returned with fervent motivation. If he was asked for one sketchbook of drawings, he produced five. Art school was exactly what he wanted. He was ready then. Wayne Claxon was leading the Wayne State art school at that time. The department head insisted that instructors abstain from demonstrating art technique to the students. He wanted the impressionable students to flounder into their style and technique, not duplicate the methods shown by an instructor.
Karras witnessed a communist demonstration one day. He sketched the entire crowd, thousands of people on the steps of a library. He sold it immediately.
Sam was an art editor for the Wayne State student publication. He would beg for contributions from fellow art students, who were more interested in using spare time to pass English, history and other elective courses. “You’re art students” he enjoined them, shaming them. During his tenure as arts editor, 90% of the art was his contribution. He loved to work on etching, and the department head encouraged him by giving him the key to the department’s studios and workshops.
After working late, he would meet at the Alcove Bar and drink with his brother artists until the morning hours. Since he lived at home in Wyandotte, his mother would send his brother out to pick up the errant sibling. Sam took the bus in from Wyandotte, and he would walk south on Woodward to get to the bus stop. Woodward thronged with all kinds of people from all walks of life, some of whom were dressed curiously, an early version of the streets of Royal Oak. Walking south on Woodward was like walking through a carnival.
He passed whole days sketching in the student center in the 50s. A professor Butts often walked through, talking with his students. Karres captured the professor in a painting, and it too sold instantly. At that time, Sam Karres had representation at the AAA Gallery, on Grand River near the highway, near the Wonder Bakery.
The department head was a good general: ones art aesthetic survived art school. However, after graduation, that director didn’t hire Karres as an instructor. Instead Harley Earl, the famous GM designer, hired him for six months. Harley Earl often came in to lecture his illustrators: “You can design a beautiful car, but people won’t buy it.” Earl was all about putting cars in people’s driveways. “How’s that El Doe Ray Doe coming”, Earl would ask Karres in the mornings.
Karres enjoyed listening to Harley Earl pontificate about style. Looking at a Pontiac model, Earl ordered “Get rid of that goddamn Indian!” Earl was a tall man at 6 foot 5 inches, so he wanted a car that had a high ceiling, small windows, easy to enter. He wanted a car to only look low to the road. And whatever Karres and his design team did, “Don’t make them look like one of those fruity Chryslers”. Karres worked with a Buick designer named Nichols, a bachelor, a childish, college-type bachelor.
The experiment was short-lived. Karras and the illustrators were all hired in a single day; six months later, before raises were required, they were all fired on same day. The design bullpen was located on Milwaukee, across the street from the main GM office building.
Karres was out of a job. He was hanging out on a bar on Milwaukee when a friend sent him to Ford’s complex on Warren and Livernois. Bob Mensch hired him at Ford. He brought along the college magazines with all of his illustrations, as his portfolio. During the interview, he was ordered to draw a stapler, an easy assignment for Karras.
Illustrators were placed under the engineering department at Ford. For a time, he worked in an organizational structure headed by McNamara. In lean times, the illustrators were the first to be laid-off. Often, engineers visited the illustrators to talk about art, providing rest and relaxation and maybe inspiration to engineers who were hard at tedious auto development tasks. Karres worked with the new guys to show them what to look for in a stack of prints.
Once, Karres was given a horrible assignment as punishment. He took the prints into the job shop, and the technician showed Karres how to see it from the perspective of a weld gun. That viewpoint allowed Karres to draw the required sketch in a few minutes, and he went out to lunch with the technician. The boss was pleased with the resulting drawing, but he was upset that Karres had failed to fall into his trap.
Illustrators are still important in the auto industry. A good illustrator can simplify a drawing; a computer image throws to much into it. Once production was stifled at one of Ford’s Ohio truck plants. It was difficult to install a hose in the right place. Once Karras’s drawing was delivered to the assembly area, the hose got installed correctly.
Karras started in 1955 and he accepted an early retirement in 1980 after 25 years of service. He married in 1989, and then just kept painting. He didn’t let his talent rest. On the morning of this interview, he met his friends at the Main Coffee Stop, and came back with a set of little paintings and sketches on watercolor cards.
He is a fan of Rodney Dangerfield, who always played characters with plenty of candor. Back to School is a favorite movie for Karras. Business as taught in the schools is a fairyland. No one tells how to handle payoffs to Mafia collectors or inspectors.
Sam began lifting in 1948, at age 19, and professionally represented George Yacos’s Gym, housed in the Taft Hotel. After winning a state competition while representing the gym, he was given a life membership. Alas, the gym no longer exists. He still lifts weights, bar bells as heavy as forty pounds, and works out to the point of fatigue, muscle failure and screaming. Every time a student screams, an instructor gets his wings.
When old age caused him to walk with a wobble, Karres did compensating exercises. When his wife noticed that he was walking with a wobble, Karres solved the problem with a program of toe raises. His routine includes working out with a set of 20 pound bar bells, doing 10 to 12 repititions of each exercise. He is careful to do the exercises with good form and correct weight so that no muscles or ligaments are ripped. His workout is short and intense, lasting no more than 5 to10 minutes every other day. The endorphins generated by his workout are perfect for an after-workout snooze.
One of his favorite black and white films is White Heat with Cagney. He has watched this film dozens of times, watching it for new insights into blocking, gesture and the shape of a starlet’s body. You might think these actresses are perfect; however, he notices if a woman’s eyes are too close. He is an artist who scans the world for striking images that his artistic skills apprehend. When an image seizes his attention, he gets paper and puts it down from memory.
He benefited from excellent art instruction in the Wyandotte public schools. Marion Pulver, an award-winning sculptor, allowed Karres to create his own art program, encouraging him to study Reynolds, Gainsborough and great artists from the books, and copy from the plates. He was also a student of Guy Palazolo, arts and crafts, but he didn’t say where. Pulver didn’t want Karres to be trained as would be a decorator or a sign painter. As a fine – artist in training, he was free to study through the school’s art book collection, sketching any material. The school in Wyandotte was a beautiful building, boasting amazing fish tanks, tiled rooms and great architecture. Wyandotte benefits from taxes paid by chemical companies, including Superior Chemical and Wyandotte Chemicals.
Karres met his biographer James F. Bloch when Karres was appointed featured artist for St. Clair, Michigan’s annual art fair. James F. Bloch had managed Rachelle’s on the River, teaming up with his wife, Rochelle Bloch. When the Bloch’s sold the restaurant, James proposed the project to Karres, and the Bloch interviewed Karres on tapes over a period of five years. As chapters were completed, Bloch read them aloud to Karres.
Karres know Dan Galewski before the detective began wearing a leather coat, before Gajewski became the subject of a movie script, with Clint Eastwood considered to play him. Over decades, Karres has studied the transformation of buildings from active to rubble, as well as the transformation of people.
Karres became a fan of Dorothy Malone and Carole Lombard. He has a beach scene in Virginia Beach in 1992 where a woman was squeezing the zits of her boyfriend. He has seen every movie with Oscar Levant in it. These beach scenes are replies to the Coney Island scenes executed by Reginald Marsh. Like Marsh, Karres scenes have focused on buildings, people and text. He sometimes misspells the text of signs in the old city of Detroit, the city lost to memory.
When he was watching the Guaneri quartet performing at the Detroit Institute of Arts, he was sketching constantly without interrupting the performance. When his rendering of this performance won the Scarab Club gold medal in 1977, it was purchased from Karres the evening of the announcement. He also won the gold medal in 2004 for a portrait of leather-clad motorcyclists in Trenton’s Elizabeth Park.
What's the Matter with Loving a Satyr?
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