Reporter with a Brush

Anyone who wants a fast and finely painted introduction to what is going on in the U.S. art world need only pay a call at Manhattan's Stable Gallery this week. On view are nine oils by Lowell Nesbitt, 34, one of the nation's most highly regarded younger painters. His subject matter: the interiors of six studios belonging to other artists. By meticulously representing their working environments, Nesbitt functions as a reporter; in effect, he achieves a visual essay on how the contemporary artist lives, thinks and works.

As Nesbitt shows, artists in 1968 are more likely to litter their workbenches with draftsmen's tools than with paint rags, to trim their walls with Surveyor's lunar photographs than with models of the Venus de Milo. But each artist still reflects his personal style in his habitat. George Sugarman, who creates boldly colored abstract sculptures, works in a spartan loft equipped with power sanders and gluepots. Claes Oldenburg's huge apartment is in a perpetual clutter because, as Nesbitt points out, "Claes likes to have a lot of things around so he can stumble over them. There is the same sense of unexpected confrontation here that there is in his work." Louise Nevelson's mammoth constructions emerge from a darkly mysterious, board-and box-crammed warren that, as Nesbitt observes reverently, "is an environmental experience in itself."

Can-Do. Curiously enough, Nesbitt never shows any artist in his studio. Instead, he makes the room evoke its owner. He deliberately included the softness of a paper bag on Nevelson's workbench to emphasize the hardness of the wood blocks next to it, angled his view of Charles Hinman's loft so that its slanting half-opened window and rolls of drawing paper tilted against the wall suggest the dynamic diagonals that characterize the shaped canvases that Hinman produces. By simplifying textures and using a dreamily radiant color scheme, Nesbitt adds his personality to that of the resident. Says he, in what may be fighting words to some: "A photographer is not able to bring interpretation or create any formal invention. A painter can and does."

Nesbitt's own studio is evoked by haunting grisaille renderings of his wall moldings and a view through his window at the empty windows of the tenements across the street. Or are they empty? They are, but such is the skill of the brushwork that the observer feels compelled to look again. "I always want there to be a chance for the viewer to see more," says Nesbitt. "I feel a painting should become a focus point for meditation like a mandala."

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