Art Beat: Remembering 'Sig' Haines, artist, teacher, mentor

The SouthCoast art community has lost a much-admired artist and teacher. After a long illness, Severin Roijen Haines has found peace.

Rarely did I ever hear anyone call him Severin. It seemed too formal, too severe. Almost everybody called him Sig. And with the playfulness and affection that only a spouse could get away with, his wife Cindy — who he had met in high school — called him Siggy.

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that I first met him 45 years ago when I was in the foundation program at the fabled Swain School of Design. He was among the dozen or so instructors that made up a top notch faculty.  Sig had been a first year freshman at the school fifteen years earlier. Ten years prior to that, in 1953, he attended Swain’s Saturday morning classes as a child, which may constitute a record of longevity as to the relationship of any individual to the institution.

I took color theory with Sig. I was in his sophomore painting class. After Swain merged with Southeastern Massachusetts University (the precursor to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth),  Sig served as an advisor on my MFA thesis committee.

In the ancient past, Sig had some serious vices. He drank too much. He chain smoked unfiltered cigarettes.

Ray Feighery, a Swain alum, recalled, “I remember he smoked Camels and one day, he bummed a cigarette from a classmate and he broke the filter off. Asked why, he said ’if you’re going to have a bad habit, you should at least go all in.’”

But Sig put that all aside, and helped others put it aside, leaving only strong black coffee as his remaining minor vice. More importantly, as he formed new good habits, he knew enough to “go all in.”

Sig was a thinking man’s painter. A terrific landscape painter, he often noted that he “painted the landscape in service to painting” and he did “not paint in service to the landscape.” He elaborated that quite a few landscape painters — and contemporary figurative painters in general — were very conscious of who they are and where they are in relation to the history of painting.

He had a particular fascination with the action paintings of Jackson Pollock and how it relates to nature. He told me that a friend once mentioned to him that there was “space in a Jackson Pollock painting” and that revelation gave him a sense of how color creates space and that had a tremendous effect on his work.

Sig had a workman’s approach to color. I once asked him why didn’t believe in teal. His response, with a grin, was “Teal? I don’t know what that is…”  We agreed to call it bluish-green. And he continued “...for me, color is cadmium red and viridian and burnt sienna. Teal and these other colors don’t matter to me. They’re just commercial colors, commercial terms.”

The writer in me countered “Commercial? How about poetic?”

His response: “I’m not saying they can’t be poetic, but for my work, for my relationship with color, it doesn’t mean anything.”

Sig’s eldest daughter Liv once told me that when she was five, she asked him for a maroon crayon and he told her there was no such thing. I have to admit that I respect his commitment.

Sig has a tremendous impact on my life.  But also on many others.

He often spoke to me about a trio of painters that were in the first painting class that he taught at Swain. The three were Joe Loria, Scott Redman, and Mark LaRiviere, and they were eager and hungry and, consciously or not, they challenged him to challenge them.

LaRiviere, Swain class of ‘79 and Parsons MFA class of '81, had this to say of Sig:

“... I wallowed in my first year. I didn’t think I’d make it back, I was lost. The second year, I walked into  Sig’s class, he was so exciting. It was his first year as a teacher and my first year as a painter. He was completely moving. He spoke with such excitement, he made me want to do it more than anything else. I am forever in his debt …. he showed me how to be an artist.”

Benjamin Martinez, a wonderful artist and former Swain painting instructor, noted this of Sig:

“He was a kind colleague with no ax to grind unless loving painting counts as an ax, a master of that clear, hard light that was as bracing as the smell of the ocean on a bright day.”

A few years ago, Sig  and I sat over coffee one day and we spoke of aging and mortality.

He said, nearly welling up as he said it, “... I have decided to accept the thing that terrifies us all through life. You have to accept it. It is the only way … there is no doubting it.

“Let’s put it this way: I do think there is a higher power than myself. To think otherwise is pretty damned vain. If you think you’re the most important thing on earth, well … you shouldn’t think like that.

Acceptance matters. I don’t know what happens when you have no time left. But for now, I’m going to keep on painting.”

Well, Sig … my teacher, my friend … I hope that wherever you are you are painting.

And I wish I could have another cup of coffee with you.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Art Beat remembers SouthCoast artist and teacher "Sig" Haines