Thank yous to Tim Baehr, Elsa van Bergen and Donna Anderson
In late March I came across an article (“Reader’s Ideas for Finding Cheer at Home”) in the New York Times (slide 1) that struck a chord. I kept thinking about this first submission “An Artistic Exercise in Patience” and returning to it with intrigue- also captivated by the accompanying illustration.
“As a child, I was taught ink drawing and I rediscovered my love for it. It requires a lot of concentration and patience. It helped me through a difficult time in life where I felt very anxious about not understanding what’s happening around me, This resonates so strongly today.” — Andre Williams, Montreal
I had taken lessons in Chinese Calligraphy for several years in the late 70’s and early 80’s in Queens, NY and the many hours of practice required determination and patience!
So after 10 days of chewing on this Montreal fellow’s reflection – on April 3rd- I climbed up into my past on the 3rd floor of the barn via library ladder and started to clean an area dirty with neglect after 30 years! Up there were a dozen portfolios containing about 600 works: lyrical Surrealist paintings, abstracts, Chinese Calligraphy, figure drawings, and envelopes filled with small doodles, scribbles, and larger automatic drawings. Also the materials and supplies: brushes, inks, water-based media, palettes, drawing supplies and stores of paper. Roughly 18 years of work- from College, Grad School, private study, and fellowship. I hadn’t looked at this body of work in 30 years!
Since moving to Portland from Virginia in the summer of 1988, I had been painting almost exclusively from the Maine landscape “en plein air” as my abstracts were not selling. By the early 90’s I was making headway with galleries, getting reviews, beginning to sell, and developing a body of landscape sketches and pastels.
Things shifted dramatically in 2013 with the publication of the book Art of Katahdin. By 2018, after the 4th book Paintings of Portland was published, I was honestly burned out from giving book talks and needed a break from R & D and the pressure of deadlines. And I had been so tied up in with the books that I hadn’t been able to concentrate on landscape painting.
By March of 2020 with the pandemic and lock down, despondency and anxiety had taken hold bundled together with complacency and procrastination. The gym at USM was closed, the OLLI class I signed up for “Great Choral Pieces in Great Spaces” was cancelled, and the volunteer work I had done for several years as a history docent, co- leading a sizeable OLLI class on tours of artists buried in Evergreen Cemetery was postponed indefinitely.
So- the act of cleaning off the flat work tables, opening boxes of art supplies, and beginning to explore the file drawers and portfolios sparked a “reset”, revisiting my past. That same day- April 3rd- I broke the ice and started painting, working on 4 or 5 small watercolor studies! The NYT article triggered a vague longing to look back & see if I could somehow pick up where I left off. The “reset” helped me fill the vacuum created by the pandemic and kick start a review of my past that included reading my journals and diaries. One exciting re-discovery was that much of my fascination with shapes and textures, organic and geometric forms was inspired by listening to classical music! I made a decision to organize my older work anew, and start filing my writings chronologically in preparation for starting a 2nd project: an art book/memoire of the struggle to build an art career!
In the 10 months that have passed I have produced around 30 collages and over a hundred mixed media works on paper- most of them experimental, and now have the confidence to begin reworking many of the unfinished works from years ago. The silver lining is that during this strange and extended period of time, I have been totally engaged in my work, so excited to climb the ladder to the small attic space and let my fantasy and imagination run free.
I would like to close with a quote from a book on artist Ralph Steadman, titled Ralph Steadman, A Life in Ink. His early abstract watercolors evoked the playful canvasses of Joan Miro- one of my favorite artists with his “Constellation Series” of graphic shapes. Steadman wrote, “Your white sheet of paper, it’s really an adventure playground, isn’t it? There’s no such thing as a mistake. A mistake is an opportunity to do something else.”
Thank You