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Ted Kliman, 79, a Greenbelt artist whose oil paintings, drawings, etchings and watercolors were infused with imagery from Judaism and Christianity and whose best-known works are paintings of draped cloth, died Feb. 16 at Holy Cross Hospital of congestive heart failure.
Mr. Kliman was an educational and industrial filmmaker for 20 years before picking up a paintbrush at 45. Accepted into the Maryland Institute College of Art, he received a master of fine arts degree in 1979, immersed himself in art history and began exploring questions of life's meaning through his work.
"Some people search for the infinite," Mr. Kliman told The Washington Post in 2001. "They look to God by fasting and prayer. I search with my painting. Can a painting be a prayer?"
When he read "The Metaphysics of Cloth," an essay by Polish-born painter Ewa Kuryluk that explores Leonardo da Vinci's drapery studies, he found inspiration for what became black and white depictions of faceless, bodiless cloth that suggest human figures.
He had been working with drapery for several years in his former Baltimore studio, where he painted realistic works using a director's chair, drapery and shadows.
A professor challenged him to experiment with surrealistic techniques using the same elements. After reading Kuryluk's essay, he took his Jewish prayer shawl, draped it over a flexible mannequin and created a drawing called "Leonardo's Tallit."
Soon he was creating large paintings of cloth, which, by folding into soft, undulant swaths, he transformed into something almost tactile, lifelike.
The empty shawls had Hebrew and Yiddish lettering on them, and some referred to the Holocaust with names such as "Shoah Triptych" and "The Dance of Death." Later, he incorporated Christian icons into the shawls. He called them "The Lamentation Series."
"I think that what he is doing is much deeper than he is able to articulate in words," said Deborah Sokolove, curator at Washington's Wesley Theological Seminary Dadian Gallery, in a 2004 Post article. "It's there in the paintings. It is very evocative. There are very strong statements about absence and presence. They are filtered through his Jewish experience, but they are very universal."
Theodore Elwood Kliman was born in Philadelphia. He served in the Army during the Korean War and played minor league baseball before receiving a bachelor's degree in English from Penn State University in 1954.
Before launching his career as an artist, he spent nearly two decades making educational films at Virginia Tech and other universities and industrial films for a company in Baltimore.
He had artistic inclinations from an early age. He told his son Todd Kliman that he had drawn comic books as a youngster and was crushed when his mother threw away what she called his "scribbling pictures." He painted for a couple of years on the side before he enrolled at the Maryland Institute.
"He was creatively restless," his son said. "He longed to make something durable, something lasting, longed to leave behind the collaborative worlds of film and theater and stretch himself as an artist."
For the last 15 years of his life, he lectured widely on his work and on art history and also taught at Morgan State University, Prince George's Community College and elsewhere.
In 2002-03, he was artist-in-residence at Wesley Theological Seminary and at the time of his death was artist-in-residence at Artery 717, a gallery in Alexandria. His works hang in more than 200 museums, galleries and private collections around the country.
Besides his son, of Hyattsville, survivors include his wife of 54 years, Itsy Brody Kliman of Greenbelt; another son, Andrew Kliman of New York; and a grandson.
Although he never made much money as a painter, Ted Kliman experienced a profound sense of satisfaction.
Todd Kliman recalled two letters his father received years ago within a few weeks of each other -- one from a priest, the other from a prisoner. Both were expressions of gratitude for his work.
"He read and reread those letters for weeks," Todd Kliman recalled. "They moved him deeply. What was a few thousand dollars, he said, when you could receive a letter like this from a stranger -- two strangers, actually, and at opposite ends of life -- that was testament to the fact that your vision -- your deepest, most personal expression -- shook them to the core?"
By Joe Holley |
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