Karl Stuecklen, Free-Working Vermont Artist
“An Appreciation” by Steve Lerner

Karl Stuecklen brought an old-world style of painting to the Green Mountains of Vermont. He described himself as a "free working artist" and one could see that he had made of his life a single piece.

Some of us are divided. We have our work life and then we have the rest of our persona. We divide our lives between our work and our living. Karl's work was at the center of his life and it radiated out into everything he did.
Karl's household economy was an extension of his work as an artist. He bought land while it was cheap, erected the dome, cut his own wood, grew his own vegetables, and carried water up out of the stream to irrigate the garden. He learned to gather wild mushrooms and fiddlehead ferns to augment his meals. All of this domestic frugality permitted Karl to be a free working artist instead of someone who made a living doing something practical and then painted in his spare time.

Most of us who know and love Karl have heard the stories about where Karl's smoke technique came from as he and his family descended the circular stairs to the basement in Germany to escape the bombs. We know of his job with his uncle in Brooklyn at the hardware store. We know that he worked at Mr. Peanut in Times Square and drew sketches of patrons. We know he delivered art to the advertising agencies and then one day demonstrated that he could make drawings that were better than those he was delivering. We have heard the stories about his life as an artist in Manhattan when he rubbed shoulders with painters who later struck it rich. And how he fled the city after his son Karlchin was killed crossing the street.
After he came to Vermont, Karl made a living as an illustrator of books. He did the book covers of the Indris Shah Sufi series. He illustrated the organic gardening books and the Beard on Bread books. But he was also always available to do local work. Karl was an artist the way Willie Skidmore is a carpenter. If you needed art you went to Karl. Karl made the Sandgate sign (a couple of times), he did the drawing/ map of the businesses and attractions in Arlington that hung in the coffee shop, he drew portraits of local characters to enliven the pages of various Sandgate publications, he donated his art to support a variety of local causes, and he made art to protest the American Wars.
But the real action in Karl's studio centered around his paintings. Karl's paintings went through numerous seasons. There were the large sized early abstract works, such as the Mozart to Mahler painting, which hangs in my bedroom. There were the huge orange/red sun paintings, one of which hangs in Mary Ellin's living room. There were the self portraits that chronicled the changes not only in the aging artist but also in how he saw himself. There were the portraits of friends and children and the paintings of his wives and his nudes. There were numerous landscapes and skyscapes of Vermont, which the Saltonstalls cherry-picked. There were the rich colors brought back from trips to the Central American tropics and European gardens. There were a series of erotic paintings that went off to a collector in California. And now, more recently, there is a return to the more abstract work that always fascinated Karl despite his talent as a draftsman and amazing ability to capture the exquisite beauty of local plants.
One of my favorite works by Karl was always one he never sold. It was his ever changing palette of oil colors which he mixed on a cracked piece of storm window that lay on a table near his easel. Whenever I went to his studio and stood by the insulated stove pipe beneath the uncovered insulation in his studio roof I would always go to his palette first and see how Karl’s colors were changing. And when I would remark about some of the startling colors that he made Karl would laugh and make some dry remark about the artist’s alchemy. Only then would I step back and stand with Karl looking at his most recent efforts.

Standing there I had the sense of what Karl meant about being a “free working artist.” Karl was beholden to no man. He painted what he saw and went his own way. Several times in the course of his life as an artist he fell into a style that could have sold for some serious money if he had stuck with it. But within a year or two he always changed and tried something else. He kept exploring. He kept looking for his truth. Whether it was a portrait of his dead father, a shark fisherman’s catch, an improbably swarm of birds, the fiery northern lights, or some birches on the snow-covered mountains, Karl painted what he saw, tended his garden, carried his wood, and cooked up some of the best meals that Sandgate denizens will ever taste. With Karl everything was art whether it was on a oil on canvas, salad in a bowl, or a carefully balanced stack of stones by the side of his driveway.
His influence is still upon me.

Steve Lerner
neighbor and friend