Art of the ages nestles in a Madeira Beach studio, where a modern master reproduces priceless paintings to adorn the walls of homes, not museums.
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published April 27, 2004
[Times photo: James Borchuck]
Ken Perenyi’s reproduction of Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington leans against his version of Portrait of Diana Kirk, Countess of Oxford, by Sir Peter Lely. Perenyi works on a Modigliani canvas at left.
A Gilbert Stuart portrait from 1796.
MADEIRA BEACH - In Ken Perenyi's little house, Gilbert Stuart's stern portrait of George Washington leans against the golden skirts of the coquettish Countess of Oxford, painted by Sir Peter Lely in the 17th century.
A Cubist still life - Picasso? maybe Braque? - hangs next to the door, and in the tiny sunroom, Jacques-Louis David's larger-than-life neoclassical nude study of Patroclus, comrade of Achilles, almost covers one wall.
An 18th century portrait of an Indian chieftain glowers over the fireplace, Titian's lush Danae lounges in a corner, and a couple of lanky Modiglianis are propped on the patio.
Perenyi painted every one of them.
"My life has been dedicated to understanding the techniques of painters of the past," he says.
He does more than understand those techniques. He employs them to create paintings that are startlingly convincing copies of works in a wide array of styles from the 16th through the 20th centuries, right down to the tiny cracks and surface irregularities that create the warm patina of the works by the old masters.
Perenyi, 53, began painting in the midst of the explosive art scene in New York City in the late 1960s and early '70s, hanging out with Julian Schnabel and Andy Warhol and creating conceptual art.
Today, he lives with his teenage daughter in Madeira Beach - "All I do is paint, cook, wash and shop" - and copies in exacting detail the works of the old masters and other great painters.
His paintings are in collections all over the world, some serving as decoys for the works they mirror. "Some people commission copies of important paintings they own," Perenyi says. "They hang a copy of the $5-million Picasso, and the real one is in the vault."
Perenyi's paintings don't sell for millions, but they do sell, for anywhere from $2,000 to $15,000 and more. Although he makes his living by painting, he says the money isn't what drives him.
"I just live to wake up and paint another day."
He has felt that way since he was a 17-year-old discovering the old masters in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"I just felt compelled to learn to paint like that. I felt that if I had paints and brushes I could grasp how to do this."
And so he taught himself how. "I didn't have any formal training," he says. "I became a painter by default."
Perenyi grew up in Palisades Park, N.J. "I was a teenager with no direction, and I was swept up in the hippie movement. I was a card-carrying flower child revolutionary in 1967. Then I had a chance meeting with some real artists who invited me into their world."
He met them at the Castle in Fort Lee, N.J., a crumbling estate on a cliff overlooking Manhattan. The place became a hangout for New York artists, bohemians and hangers-on; parts of Ciao Manhattan, a film about Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick, were filmed there.
Some of the Castle's denizens were working artists, and Perenyi grew interested in what they did. "I had to do something," he says, "so I starting painting those goofy pictures."
His fourth painting became the cover for an issue of Oz, a London counterculture magazine. Even then, he was imitating masters: the painting, peopled with Castle folks, was a psychedelic takeoff on Hieronymus Bosch.
But he didn't get serious about art until he moved to New York City.
"My mentors took me out to teach me the finer points of picking up girls in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They always did great there.
"In the meantime I'm looking at the paintings. I really did fall in love with those painters."
He was living downtown and painting original works, giant canvases that he then dismantled and welded inside steel boxes. Others were sealed in Plexiglas boxes.
"So some paintings you could see, others you couldn't see. You could only imagine what was in there. In 1972, that was really way out."
He was getting some critical attention, he says, but living "a brutal life. I was living on a bagel and a burger a day."
His roommate's inept installation of a bath tub in their apartment precipitated a major shift in Perenyi's artistic career. A leak caused the tub to crash through the ceiling of a restaurant on the first floor. "I was a kid. I was terrified," he says. "I was afraid we'd be arrested. I had to flee uptown."
There, he found painters, collectors, gallery owners and frame dealers who taught him what they knew. "I received a great education right off Madison Avenue. It was wide open in those days."
And in New York, in London, wherever he could, he studied paintings. "I have always felt that if you look at any painting long enough, it will give up its secrets."
In 1978, he visited his parents in Florida and decided to move. He bought a small frame house on the Intracoastal and has lived there ever since, painting in a sunroom about the size of a typical bedroom.
He shares the place with his daughter, Bridget, 14. "She's a fantastic runner. And she just made the dean's list," he says, showing off her grade report. "She got straight A's. She's just a wonderful kid."
Perenyi sometimes paints abstracts in his own style. "It's hard to describe. It's basically energy. It's mostly lines, mental rhythms. They're intellectual expressions. That's how I like to unwind."
But most of his paintings are copies, and he paints a lot of them. "I've painted between 2,000 and 3,000 pictures," he estimates. "Right now I've got 50 or 60. I'm sitting on a mountain of paintings."
Kneeling over a canvas on the sunroom floor, he paints with breathtaking speed. Putting finishing touches on a Modigliani portrait of a woman in a black suit, he says, "I started at 9, and it was done at 1. These are play for me. I may go into the Modigliani business."
His version will sell for about $3,000. The original sold at auction recently for about $4-million.
Perenyi says that although his paintings are meant to be persuasive copies, he doesn't intend to pass them off as the real thing. "Everything is sold as a modern work of art. That's what it says on my receipt," said Perenyi, who signs his own name to the back of each work.
"It imitates the antique. It's no different from going to Ethan Allen and buying a reproduction dresser."
Perenyi says he copies only paintings that would have been reproduced by their original artists. The old masters rarely painted only a single version of a painting.
"People do not realize today how much of a business it was. If they painted something like this," he says, waving at an 18th century landscape, "they expected to get half a dozen commissions out of it."
Often, the master painter would do the first version, then assistants in their studios made copies. "Rubens, Titian, they were very smart about this. They ran assembly lines.
"The old masters were very fast. The design, the drawing were time-consuming, but they painted very rapidly."
For him, preparing and aging canvases takes most of his time. "There's more work in the setting up than in the painting."
He has researched the various kinds of canvases used in different periods and seeks out their equivalents. "Those weaves can still be found, but not in art stores. You find some of them in upholstery fabrics. Some of them are woven in China, in India. They're made exactly as they were hundreds of years ago.
"If you look at a painting and see a smooth modern canvas, the spell is broken."
He shrinks canvas by nailing it to his dock, pouring hot water on it and letting it dry in the sun. He mixes his own gesso, a primer used to prepare the canvas for paint, then shellacks over it. Only then does he draw and paint.
Once a painting is dry, which can take up to several months, it is varnished and then aged. Perenyi has developed his own method for "cracking" the surface of the paint into the fine spiderweb of fissures usually created by time.
"Sometimes when you crack a painting," he says, "there's this very faint sound like glass shattering."
After cracking, he uses a mixture of paint, water and soap to age the surface.
"The surface reflection has to have the correct texture, the irregularities in the canvas, in the gesso," he says.
He even ages the canvas used for relining the back of a painting, as well as the wood and tape used to stretch it. He also collects antique frames, so his works can be matched with frames from the proper period.
"I guess I'm kind of a perfectionist," he says.
Perenyi sells most of his work through word of mouth, to private collectors.
"I have some important clients who will buy 20 or 30 paintings at one time. That can set me up for five years."
He also sells through Trinity Gallery in St. Petersburg and through his Web site, oldmasterworks.com.
Although many of his paintings imitate specific works, others do not. Perenyi calls those "originals in the style of," paintings that combine elements of a painter's style with new subject matter.
He often copies his favorite painters, such as David and Caravaggio, but also paints works he's not crazy about but which are in demand, such as 19th century portraits of American Indians by Charles Byrd King.
But they must be works he feels he can copy perfectly. "I'm not interested in any school in which I feel I could do only passable work."
Many of his clients collect original works of art, but that is becoming more difficult to do. "The reservoir of Old Masters is drying up. Collectors are not letting go of them, not recirculating them into the marketplace.
Perenyi's customers "want the paintings of their dreams without laying out millions of dollars."
Some of his paintings substitute as "security jobs," while the originals sit in vaults, he said.
"Then there's the person that just wants to wow their friends and never tells them it's a reproduction. That's most of them, I think. They just want to blow people's minds."
Painting in the tiny studio limits his output. He calls himself a dreamer, saying, "I need to get a studio, hire an assistant, open a gallery. I need to treat this as a business."
But his greatest reward is the paintings themselves, he says. "If Titian saw my Shower of Gold or David, the man I revere, saw my Patroclus, they would be proud.
"When I was a kid and was smitten by those paintings in a museum, I knew I couldn't live with myself if I couldn't do that. I can do as they do. That's the satisfaction I have."
