The artist behind new portrait of retired SRJC President Agrella

Virgil Elliott rides a 1968 BMW motorcycle a mile from his Penngrove home to his inconspicuous workplace behind an Aamco Transmissions shop at the north end of Petaluma. Inside, he settles into a wheelchair to resume work on his latest oil painting in an eclectically cluttered art studio, its wooden parquet floor blackened by tap and flamenco foot strikes from years as a dance studio.

His 71-year-old back no longer tolerates standing for hours, applying pigment to canvas, and an artist needs to step back frequently to judge the proportions of a work in progress.

“You want to be able to see the entire painting in one glance,” he said. “If there’s something in the painting that looks wrong, the eye stops right there.”

Rolling back in the wheelchair, Elliott easily gains that perspective.

Gray-haired with a matching full beard and mustache and wearing rimless glasses, Elliott resembles the central casting image of a professional artist. A khaki shirt, sleeves rolled up, black jeans and leather work shoes complete the look.

His most recent work, a portrait of Robert F. Agrella, the retired fourth president of Santa Rosa Junior College, was completed about a week ago and will be unveiled this morning during the 24th annual President’s Address to the Community by Frank Chong, the current SRJC president.

Agrella, a Santa Rosa resident who retired in 2012 after 22 years in office, will also receive the President’s Medallion from Chong.

His portrait will hang in the Doyle Library, along with paintings of the 98-year-old school’s first three presidents: Floyd P. Bailey, Randolph Newman and Roy Mikalson.

Agrella, 72, sat in Elliott’s studio four or five times for about 90 minutes each session. Because SRJC wanted a likeness of Agrella during his tenure, Elliott also took visual cues from a photograph of a somewhat younger Agrella and from his own intuition.

“It’s psychic science,” Elliott said. “To do portraits well you have to read people’s minds. You want to show a person at his or her most characteristic,” rather than a freeze-frame of the person posing in the studio.

“You want them to look well, too,” Elliott said.

To save Agrella more hours in the chair, Elliott draped his academic robe over a mannequin to work on the garment’s rich folds. The painting was financed by donations and support from the SRJC Foundation, with no taxpayer funds involved, a foundation official said.

Paintings should carry a subtle message, he said, pointing out a canvas that depicts a man and woman sharing what appears to be a loving kiss. “But if you look at it closely, you can see she’s lifting his wallet,” he said.

Born and raised in St. Louis, Mo., Elliott said he owes his artistic inclination to his mother, Dollye McAlister Elliott, who sat him, at age 2, in front of a blackboard on an easel and said, “Let’s draw your teddy bear.” She coached him to draw the big round shapes, representing the bear’s body, head and ears. For the arms and legs, Elliott drew sticks, and his mother, in a Socratic style of tutelage, asked him to look at the bear, look at his drawing and “tell me what’s wrong with it.”

He changed the bear’s arms and legs into “sausage shapes” and immediately recognized what had happened. “I was thrilled. This light bulb went off in my head,” Elliott said.

“I saw, ah-ha, I can draw.”

At 12, he was struck by a Rembrandt portrait that came to a St. Louis museum. “That man is alive. He sees me, He’s going to talk to me,” Elliott remembers thinking.

The Dutch master’s work set him on a course to figure out portrait painting, he said.

Elliott’s skills, he said, were enhanced by the feedback he got from instructors in the Famous Artists School, a correspondence program founded in 1948 by Norman Rockwell and other members of the New York Society of Illustrators.

At 18, he joined the Army and served three years, with a deployment to Germany. He migrated to Southern California in 1972, relocated to Sonoma County four years later and was delighted to find he could earn money as a guitar player in a Cotati bar, a guitar teacher, laborer and motorcycle mechanic.

He got into the soil percolation testing business in 1976, a trade that supported his work as a professional artist, which started in 1982.

Elliott’s yen for artistic realism - including 22 years of work, off and on, writing a book titled “Traditional Oil Painting” - makes him an unabashed critic of modern abstract painting, the style in vogue since the 1950s.

“It’s a fraud,” he said, asserting that artists who eschew well-defined figures are too lazy to learn to draw. Modern art, he said, enjoys widespread acclaim and fetches high prices because the art establishment - collectors, galleries, museums and art school professors - has not only embraced it but come to denigrate the intellect of those who question its value.

Elliott, who has done portraits for prominent families, including the Jacquin, Schlumberger and Destruel families, said he looks forward to having the time and money to hone his own art.

“That’s a process that never ends,” he said. There are masterworks inside his head, waiting to be executed on canvas.

“I want to be able to show what I’m truly capable of,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.