Nursery owner Robert Kramer cultivates career as watercolorist

ROBERT KRAMER'S small studio illustrates the ambiguity of an artist's life. In addition to the usual paint brushes and tubes of watercolors, the easel and his light box, you'll find stacks of seed catalogs here, and a cash register. That's because Kramer's studio doubles as an office for the nursery business that he and his wife, Gayle, run in Springfield. For seven months a year they grow and sell plants, mostly perennials, to gardeners who shop at their Little Red Farm Nursery at the corner of Jasper Road and 42nd Street.

But come fall, the nursery business slows down and Kramer's metabolism speeds up. That's when he takes brush in hand and spends his days producing big, moody, realistic watercolors, somewhat in the style of Andrew Wyeth: images conjured up from white clapboard buildings, open fields and brooding, isolated people. His paintings are carefully constructed, each detail woven into an overall image - a ladder here, a shadow there, all coming together in a tight composition. "I am not a scene painter," he says. "I find some image and take it out of its context and amplify it to romanticize the meaning that caught my attention." Kramer insists that his painting is more upbeat than Wyeth's. "I want to exult a little bit more in life than he does," he says.

Kramer, 47, was born in Wyeth country in eastern Pennsylvania but grew up in Oregon. He studied art in college, getting a bachelor of fine arts degree from Cal State Fullerton in 1972. Then he came back to Eugene and helped found Brothers Cleaning Service, now the largest janitorial service in the county. He threw himself into nurturing a small business for the next 15 years. By 1988, though, he was ready for something else. He sold his half of Brothers to a partner for an amount he figured would support himself and his family for the next five years.

Then, with no other income and a limited track record as an artist, he began to paint. In his days as an art student in California, Kramer had created nonobjective art. "I created environments, a theater-of-the-mind type art," he says. Now he wanted to change all that. "What was drawing me to art was images that were strongly tied to important experience and emotion in people's lives,' he says. `I couldn't control that experience with nonobjective art. I couldn't guarantee that response in the mind of the viewer."

One of his first efforts, a large painting of a canoe sitting in a barn, won an award at the Eugene Mayor's Art Show. That led to a call from Alder Gallery owner Candy Moffett, who still represents him. Kramer's work can also be seen at the Lawrence Gallery in Sheridan, and he's had a solo show at Eugene's Jacobs Gallery. Realizing they needed more income with two small daughters in the house, Kramer and his wife started the nursery six years ago. Kramer sees the business as transitional - he still hopes to get back to full-time painting and get out of the nursery business. "It's a lot of physical work and managing a lot of detail," he says. "The nursery business is going to kill me off."

Kramer works entirely in watercolor. "There is a graphic quality to watercolor I like," he says. "I like the things that happen in watercolor by mistake." In a world where many artists make their income off reproductions of their work, Kramer markets no prints, only original paintings. They sell for $1,200 to $5,000 each.

Sept. 13, 1998