It’s rare to get a phone call from a fan; it’s totally unprecedented when the caller is Mort Kunstler, one of the premier artists of Civil War themes, and one of the premier illustrators of his era. Kunstler has been reading the Disunion series in the Times, and much to my delight, offered me a guided tour of his Civil War paintings now on exhibit at the Nassau Country 
Museum of Art. What a treat! To hear Mort talk about his method of selecting subjects, his approach, and his technique and attention to detail was illuminating, to say the least, and to hear him talk about the earlier stages of his career, when he was illustrating magazines and movie posters, was just a delight. Here’s something I did not realize: although Mort has been painting Civil War scenes for twenty years, relatively little of his work depicts battle scenes; a surprising large portion shows moments of emotion, and a lot of paintings are quite romantic. A majority of his work shows southern themes, but that is not a reflection of his personal sympathies as much as commerce: there are more buyers down south. Mort’s approach, meanwhile, is quite simple: “I just like to paint pictures,” he told me. “I don’t care of what.” The exhibit continues through January 9th.
