Invisible forces: Bernard Ethier paints the lines and in-between

By AVIVA LUTTRELL

Recorder Staff

Published: 10-14-2016 11:27 PM

GREENFIELD — One day, in 1962, Bernard Ethier was painting when he had a revelation — the world is full of lines. He wasn’t the first to notice this. In his writings, Carlos Castaneda calls them “the lines of the world,” radiating from all things and in 1910, the Italian painter Umberto Boccioni wrote of “force lines,” representing movements of matter along a trajectory determined by the structure of the object.

In his artwork, Ethier, of Greenfield, makes the invisible, visible, by painting lines of energy emanating from objects. His brightly-colored acrylic paintings feature trees, landscapes and buildings, and many lines connecting one object to another.

“They’re not lines you would ordinarily see, but they’re there,” he said. “Where do they come from? I don’t know. I think they’re a message from somewhere. It’s kind of a mystical subject here we’re dealing with.”

Ethier has been an artist all his life. Pen and ink was the first medium he began working in as a child, because it was so easily accessible. “I’ve always been kind of a whiz with pen and ink,” he said. “I like the discipline about it. You’ve got a sharp point and a black medium and nothing else. You cannot fake it, you cannot erase it, you cannot smear it. It’s just you and that little line.”

He began painting after buying a tiny set of oils from a stationary store on Main Street, replicating images from Christmas cards and magazines and hanging them above the mantle when he was finished.

One day, a woman stopped by the house collecting for United Way and noticed the paintings. Ethier was only 12, but his talent was already obvious. The woman told Ethier’s mother about local artist John Edward Phelps, a well-known artist and teacher.

“The rest, they say, is history,” Ethier said. He studied with Phelps throughout his school years.

“Since I was a little kid, if you asked me what I wanted to do, I wanted to be an artist, and there were a lot of really good artists in the area. Those guys were sort of my heroes when I grew up,” he said.

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Ethier wanted to go to college, but he couldn’t afford the tuition. After graduating from high school, he found a job at the Cabot Hydroelectric Station in Turners Falls. After a year, he had saved enough money for his first year at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. For the next few years he went to school during the day and worked in a hotel half the night. He was also at a disadvantage, he said, because many of his classmates grew up in big cities where the schools had much better art programs.

“They had portfolios that would knock your socks off, but I had one secret talent — I could outwork those suckers,” he said. That work paid off. Ethier graduated at the top of his class.

“One good thing did come from that — suddenly I found myself sitting with my pen and ink at MIT. In those days it was called the instrumentation lab. What it was doing was developing the initial guidance systems for missiles and stuff like that,” he said. “That was a pretty interesting place to work.”

Ethier went on to Assumption College, where he received a masters in teaching fine art.

Ethier took a job teaching art a Greenfield High School in the 1960s and eventually moved to Vermont, where he spent 10 years, and later northern California, where he began painting the sea and worked as the senior design drafter and photographer in the engineering department of a large jewelry company.

“I’ve been around the country, always doing my thing,” he said. “I have always worked in art-related jobs. Everything from teaching, which I did not like, to cartography, which I liked very much. … I’ve always been interested in maps.”

About 20 years ago, Ethier returned to Greenfield, where he continues to paint in a large studio behind his Bernardston Road home.

“I’ve made hundreds of thousands of paintings. There was a beginning once and there’s no ultimate end,” he said. “It’s something that’s always flowed out of me, and I’ve always nurtured it.”

An exhibit of Ethier’s work is on display at The Daylily in South Deerfield, 8 Sugarloaf St., through the end of October.

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