Earl Gessert original watercolor on paper, still life, signed. 

Watercolor on paper. 24" x 18 1/4"

About the Artist:

Earl Gessert (1918-1997) was a well-known watercolor artist and teacher in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, also known as “the painting milkman”, and was also my grandfather.

He graduated from Layton School of Art in Milwaukee and taught evening classes there for 25 years. He also taught his own classes throughout Wisconsin. From 1953 until his retirement in 1977 he drove a milk delivery truck for Golden Guernsey Dairy, and became known as “The Painting Milkman”. The early morning light was inspirational, and the work hours, 4:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., allowed him, after a quick nap, to paint in the afternoons before his kids returned home from school.

He has won numerous awards and contests in Wisconsin since his first in 1941, at the age of 22, when he won a purchase award at the Wisconsin Painters and Sculptures Show. In 1960 he won the grand prize in a nationwide show, “Public Employees at Work”. His work has been purchased by Milwaukee City Hall and by many local businesses in the city. His work has been exhibited in the Corcoran Biennial, Washington, D.C., and in major galleries at Baltimore, New York City, Amsterdam, and Hawaii. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York chose his painting “This is Where I Have Lived” for a European tour of American art, which was bought by a collector and given to an Amsterdam museum.

Born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Earl Gessert was encouraged in high school to pursue art professionally. He enrolled part-time at Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, but paused his education in 1943 after joining the U.S. Army’s Red Arrow Division and serving a tour of duty in France as a rifleman in the Battle of the Bulge. While there he kept a sketchbook and produced over a hundred sketches but lost them all during battle. He received a medical discharge in 1945.

Upon returning and after rehabilitation he and his wife moved with their two daughters to Milwaukee, and he completed his degree at Layton School of Art in 1949, and began to teach evening classes there. In 1952 he got a job delivering milk for Golden Gurnsey, a job he kept until his retirement in 1977. The job provided enough for them to raise a family, now with five kids, and in 1956 they purchased a home in West Allis, and converted it’s two-car garage into a painting studio. He drove his milk route in the early morning, painted or prepared for his classes in the afternoons, and taught classes evenings at Layton. He loved to teach, and loved the moments when his students suddenly grasped what he was teaching, in his words, an “explosion” of understanding.

In 1953 he co-founded and became the first president of the Wisconsin Watercolor Society. He had a unique style of painting on wet paper and adding details as it dried. He could create straight lines using a ruler and wax paper, known as a wax resist technique, and frequently employed a sgraffito, or scraping of the paper’s surface with a razor blade to create various shapes with thin, dark outlines. He also typically liked to work with a limited palette of seven colors.

He preferred watercolors to oils and acrylics because of the “transparency of the colors, the depth they impart to the subject.” He said that he even “studied the chemical composition of the paper and paint, working to understand why certain things happen and then to make them happen with predictability.”

His early works were inspired by scenes from his milk route, especially in the Third Ward of Milwaukee, an industrial and warehouse district that was beginning to look run down. Moody scenes of aging factories, decaying frame homes, buildings, and railroad tracks were some of his favorite subjects, along with abstracts that included architectural elements and still-lifes. Later subjects began to include brighter colors and softer treatments frequently depicting landscapes from rural Wisconsin. When he and his wife retired to Sun City Arizona he found new inspirations in the Southwest, with subjects ranging from ghost towns and abandoned mining communities to Native American artifacts, rock formations, and desert vistas.