It’s easy to drive right past the town without even noticing it. A smattering of old buildings on Route 29 northeast of Greenwich in Washington County, Battenville sits beside the Batten Kill and was briefly the home of Susan B. Anthony, who taught school there in 1826.
In 1971, artists Robert Nunnelley and Gerald Coble bought an 18th-century house to serve as their country home and studio. Since then, the two men – now in their 70s and a couple for more than four decades – have slowly made the town into their personal arts colony.
First, they restored their four-bedroom house to its original simplicity by removing layers of wallpaper, dropped ceilings and linoleum floors. They filled the rooms with period furniture and choice works of art — mostly their own. Then came the gardens, the clearing of trees to allow a view of the river, and the planting of new pines to serve as a shield from the road. As the years have gone by, they also acquired several smaller neighboring houses, which have been put to use as painting studios or rental properties.
They hardly act like land barons. Retired from active careers, they are quiet gentlemen who spend the days tending their gardens, caring for their Siamese cat, and producing deeply personal works of art that regularly draw collectors and other artists to sleepy little Battenville.
Nunnelley’s colorful canvases are exuberant, but the artist himself is the opposite of effusive: His wrinkled face and brilliant blue eyes light up when he’s asked about art, but he doesn’t volunteer much. Coble is the more talkative of the pair, although his own art is more wistful, almost somber.
“I liked what they did from the word go,” said Solange Herter, an art dealer who has lived directly across the river from the two artists for decades. “Yet, I’ve never seen anything in their work that in the remotest way shows that they even know each other.”
Like Coble, Nunnelley came from the South. A native of Birmingham, Ala., he moved to New York City in 1957 as a protege of the sculptor David Smith. Nunnelley studied with Robert Motherwell and was associated with other greats of the abstract expressionist movement, including William De Kooning and Franz Kline.
“I came to be with that group, but late,” Nunnelley says.
Settling in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, he became a professor of fine arts at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, N.J., in the mid-’60s; he retired in 1996. While his teaching career remained stable, his art took some turns.
“Abstraction was emotionally demanding,” he says. “It’s a kind of involvement where you don’t know what you’re doing, and yet you have to structure it.”
“It was very unsettling because it took a long time to find another tradition to belong to,” he says. Eventually, Nunnelley found inspiration in the work of Matisse. His recent works share the French artist’s vivid sense of color and bold lines, but there remain hints of his roots in abstraction.
Although he mostly paints still life compositions, his canvases are large – four feet by six feet, or bigger. The pieces are worked out in advance in a black-and-white calligraphic style (reminiscent of Smith, his initial mentor). Nunnelley frequently spends years on a canvas, returning again and again to get light and shadow just right.
After working in a variety of studios around the property, Nunnelley seems particularly happy with his current space, which occupies the entire second floor of a historic barn that was converted into a tavern a century ago. After eyeing the property for years, he and Coble bought it in 2000.
A self-taught artist, Coble was living in his native North Carolina when he met Nunnelley, who was visiting friends there in the early 1960s. Within a year, Coble relocated to New York. When they bought the Battenville house, he began staying in the country while Nunnelley spent part of each week teaching in New Jersey.
“Collage construction” is the term Coble uses to describe his work. Within a large white field surrounded by a simple frame, he places seemingly random objects – broken crucifixes, old postcards and magazine clippings, antique clothing. Although the works are sparse, they are also highly evocative.
Coble often works on a theme inspired by the life and work of artists as diverse as Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust and Ava Gardner. The materials have been gathered, he says, “over a lifetime of obsessions.”
His work is sometimes compared to that of the American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, but Coble cites no influences other than the Italian countryside, where the couple has often vacationed.
It was, in fact, the way the unspoiled countryside and gentle hills of Washington Country reminded them of Italy that drew them to the area. Not surprisingly, Coble’s studio at the back of the main house looks out on the river.
Although their dining room table can seat 12, Coble and Nunnelley are typically modest about their social life, as well as their prominence as artists. It’s a viewpoint that seems to fit with the simplicity of their lives, and the focused clarity of their art.
“The older one gets,” says Coble, “the more one seeks to get to the essential and to remove clutter.”
This story originally appeared in the Times Union, July 4, 2003.
Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.
