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How Art is Created

Marek Sarba, an artist and self-described rugged blue-water sailor who has traveled the world, is excited about his upcoming event at the Acton Public Library in Old Saybrook on Saturday, April 1 at 3 p.m.

He’s looking forward to showing one of his best-known masterworks, titled And the Band Played On, which shows 57 “unfortunate souls that lost their lives on the ill-fated first and only voyage of the Titanic,” marking the 105th anniversary of the unsinkable ship that went down after hitting an iceberg in the early morning of April 15, 1912, taking with her into the freezing cold depths of the North Atlantic some of the wealthiest people in the world and impoverished immigrants alike, both represented in Sarba’s portrait.

He’s looking forward to talking about his life—from the time he first glimpsed and fell in love with the ocean while on an elementary school trip to the Baltic Sea as an elementary school student in Warsaw, Poland—to his present life painting, mostly marine art and portraits, in his studio in his Old Saybrook home.

But, mostly, he’s looking forward to explaining to people what it means to “paint from the pit of your stomach.”

“Yes, exactly,” he says, when asked about the phrase he uses to describe his work. “I’m trying to tell everybody. Art, it’s the same thing like every other profession. You have to know what you are talking about. Paint what you feel. Paint what you know. When I paint the ocean, when I paint people. These are real stories, real people. When I work, I smell it. I see it. I hear it. You have to hear it. I am with them.”

He says he is happy to be giving his talk at the library, where he will be showing his work, saying libraries are a great place to exhibit artwork because there just aren’t as many galleries as there used to be along the shoreline. Sarba and his wife Barbara once owned a popular gallery and café in Clinton, but closed it in 2012 after 11 years due the time commitment involved with running it.

“Maybe we will bring people together,” he says. “People are trying to educate themselves about art and they maybe have a million questions. I am addressing myself in many cases to people who dream to paint. But they had to work. The life they have is the life where they make a living. They have a family. And not really much time for painting. So maybe in the corner where they squeeze themselves, they try to create something. They get ashamed of it. They are scared to show it. I understand that whole process. Talk to me.”

Sarba wants to create an opportunity for people—whether they just appreciate art, or want to become an artist, or already consider themselves an artist—to get together at the library and talk about how art is created.

When You Have a Little Imagination

Sarba says his first glimpse of the Baltic Sea was “shocking.”

“So much water. I don’t see the horizon, and this was amazing to me,” he says. “That was it.”

He was in love.

When he was 18, he received a letter from the military and learned he would be joining the naval forces.

“And so at 18, I was going to this beautiful horizon for the first time,” he says.

After three years of service, he was discharged, and started working for a Polish ship salvage company, working on ocean-going tugboats as an electrical officer.

“We were towing all kinds of things all over the world,” he says. “You name it, we towed it. It was during the Vietnam War. We had a good job because of the U.S. Air Force sinking ships. We’d pick them up.”

He and the rest of the crew would respond to rescues and salvage operations of all sorts. As the electrical officer, he was sometimes charged with replacing the batteries for the running lights on grand, old cruise liners being towed to their final destination to be made into scrap.

“You go from a tugboat full of life with 30 people into” the empty cruise liner, he says. “It’s dark. You have only your flashlight. It’s quiet. Then you hear the slamming of doors. You look into what used to be the ballrooms and the bars and then all things start to seem alive. You can almost hear her music and see people dancing in those shadows. When you have a little imagination, those things start to become alive. You go to the engine room five, six, seven floors below. The ship is a monster thing. You start to hear the engines working. You start to hear the crew working. It’s just a rusty bucket, but that thing comes alive to you.”

Those were experiences that returned to him when he later took on the job of painting the victims who went down with the Titanic.

While he cruised the world, he also took the opportunity to visit as many art galleries as possible.

“I’ve been in beautiful galleries all across the whole world. Every time I was in a port. Turkey. Greece. Spain. I would go up there and I contemplated and I studied and that was my education. The first time I held a brush in my hand, I knew the hairs were to paint and the wood is to hold on to.”

More than that, he did not know, except for one thing. He knew that making the transition to being a painter would require time and patience.

“Sitting behind an easel is very demanding. The biggest problem is the patience. You have to control yourself and work and work and work. One step at a time and try to get something done. Put some good music on in the background, and a cup of coffee, and paint,” he says.

He and his family had a beautiful life in Poland, but Sarba says they also felt stifled and limited by the socialist government.

“This was the problem,” he says.

And so they emigrated to the United States, and Sarba continued to work as an electrician in shipyards as he dreamed of a future as an artist.

In September 1985, an expedition led by Robert Ballard discovered the ruins of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland. In 1986, a submersible named Alvin, which itself had a remarkable history of having been lost and then found, operating off of a support ship, was used by Ballard and his crew to find out more about the wreckage of the Titanic. In 1987, while Sarba was working in Tampa, that support ship with Ballard and his crew, and the Alvin on the stern, stopped at the shipyard where Sarba was working.

Inspiration

“So, well, I took at a look at the Alvin, and I started talking with the crew, and one of the crew members says ‘I am the pilot of the submarine.’ And he showed me how visible the Titanic is, and how buried it is behind a big wave of sand on the bottom. And so my mind was moved. So that inspired me,” he says.

It became an obsession. In 1987, the Sarbas moved to Old Saybrook and he started the Titanic painting.

“In 1987, it was not like it is today,” he says. “It could be very difficult to find information. Yes, you can find them, but you have to depend on the paper books. We had a computer, but the computers did not contain a lot of information like they do today. Still, I start to paint. And I start to paint. And I get the idea to paint a group of the people which represent those which are sunk with the ship.”

Sarba decided he wanted to paint his subjects standing on the Titanic’s Grand Staircase, on the A-deck landing by the clock that included two carved allegorical figures symbolizing Honour and Glory crowning Time. In Sarba’s painting, the clock is striking 2:20 a.m., the moment at which, on April 15, the ship broke in half and sunk to the bottom about two hours and 40 minutes after striking the iceberg. Included in his painting are, to the far right, Captain Edward J. Smith. On the main staircase underneath the clock, is Thomas Andrews, the managing director of Harland and Wolff, the company that built the Titanic, who was taking the maiden voyage to make one final inspection. Standing next to Andrews is Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, the wealthiest person aboard, who was worth an estimated $100 million. Off to the left side of the staircase is Alma Cornelial Paulson, an emigrant mother, with her 8 year-old daughter Torborg Danira Paulson, one of Alma’s four children, all of whom were en route to Chicago to join their father, who had worked for two years as a train conductor to save up enough money to send for his family. At the upper left is violinist and Bandmaster Wallace Hartley, who led the orchestra playing ragtime tunes and other favorites for the first class passengers as the ship went down.

At the very bottom of the staircase is one unnamed child with his back turned.

“He represents all the children who get lost,” he says. “Walking on the base of the staircase, searching between people, perhaps he will notice someone from his family.

“We have the rich and famous, and the little poor ones, and the first class, and the third class, and the crew. All those people standing on the staircase, and the band plays on,” he says.

The portraits are taken from clips Sarba found in newspaper archives from major newspapers all over the United States.

“And every one, every person has a story,” he says.

Sarba worked on the painting with music playing in the background. Giuseppe Verdi’s requiem. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor.

“My wife had to survive all those months,” he says. “It was like working in a funeral home.”

Sarba says his work on the painting moved beyond obsession. He was haunted.

‘Everyone Wants to Be Painted’

“After a while, you are going inside these people, and they are standing behind your chair,” he says. “When you’re painting, you feel them, and everyone wants to be painted.”

And it wasn’t just the 57 victims he picked who wanted to be painted.

“All 1,512,” Sarba says—everyone who died on the Titanic wanted to be painted. “You tell people who think like that, you go to a psychiatrist.”

Sarba says he wasn’t crazy, but it wasn’t like anything he had experienced before.

“I am an engineer. One plus one was always two,” he says. “But today,” on a day he was painting, “one plus one is about two. Not exactly two.”

He says there wasn’t enough room for everyone in his studio.

“It was so bad. In my studio, the side window is to the garden. And I had all of those people behind the window when I was painting. You see them staring at you from the night. I had to close the drapes,” he says.

Sarba laughs.

It’s hard to tell if he is entirely serious. Maybe. Maybe not. But he sure knows how to tell a good story.

“These are the unusual things. These are the little curiosities,” he says.

In addition to the painting, Sarba had a seven-page brochure made up, showing the names of everyone in the painting, along with a little bit about their history, their families, and why they were on the Titanic that tragic night.

“You get involved in it. Everything comes to be personal,” he says. “And so you are very close to these people.”

Sarba says his approach towards this painting is typical of his overall approach toward his art.

“First comes the story,” he says. “Then I collect documents. And you can never have enough. But you have to decide at a certain point. I have a story. I have references. And I paint.”

His art, his approach toward art, and how to support the arts: These are all of concern to Sarba. That is what he wants to discuss at the library.

“Why do it? I am very supportive of the arts,” he says. “There is no charge to it from me. I do it because the galleries are closing and we have to talk about art. Otherwise, it is just McDonald’s and iPhones.”