If you have visited my blog before, you may be aware that I am a painter as well as a writer. My books have been published independently, but I have shown paintings at a number of places, most recently locally at Eiland Arts Center, Merchantville, NJ and Main Street Art, Maple Shade, NJ (now sadly moved to a new location). I have not pursued showing work since I left my job as an adjunct professor at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia in 2011, because it is a LOT of work, but since I LOVE railroad depots and hence I love Eiland Arts located in the old railroad station in Merchantville, I was enticed back into the gallery world. Also, I put work at Main Street Art Gallery because the curator was my old college pal, Diane Paul.
Anyway, talking about LOVE, Eiland Arts is inviting artists to submit work based on the theme: LOVE. At first, I was at a loss, then, an idea came to me, well, more of an image. Many years ago, when I lived in Collingswood and had just recently separated from my then husband, I was putting together a family heirloom chair. My parents had moved to West Virginia and my father was so tired from moving enormous truck loads of stuff from their very large Colonial, then he was on the brink of discarding a family heirloom a black mahogany deck chair that had belonged to his father, a Merchant seaman. The chair had been in our family for as long as I could remember. It was disassembled and stored in the attic because it had an ungainly shape that made it impossible to move from room to room. It didn't fit through conventional doorways, so it had to be disassembled, moved and then assembled again. Anyhow, I loved that old chair and I took it to my temporary apartment over a drug store on Haddon Ave.
Finding it impossible to re-assemble, I walked down to the family owned hardware store and was chatting with a young man who worked there, Chris. I told him my dilemma, that no matter how I worked it, I couldn't get the chair together. Intrigued, he agreed to come and have a look at it. Mystery solved, a piece was missing! Too late! The old family home was sold and emptied so the piece was gone forever. Fortunately, Chris, an enterprising man, was able and willing to fabricate the appropriate piece. He even stained it for me, the whole thing an act of such kindness and generosity, I am still warmed by the memory of it. He put the chair together and it has been with me ever since.
That makes me meditate as I often do, on how things remain with families over the generations, and how they get lost when people move and can't carry any more stuff, so they have to leave it behind. It makes me think of voyages crossing the Atlantic from their European homelands like my paternal German ancestors and my maternal Scots/Irish ones. What did they leave behind?
Back to Art and Love: In those days I didn't have air-conditioning, so Chris worked without a shirt, and as I was already a fledgling artist who had minored in Art when I took my first college degree in English, I saw the Classical Greek reference in the way Chris looked without his shirt, a young Michelangelo's David! So I took a photo. I am also a photograph maniac. I have one entire wall of albums of photographs taken over the many decades. So I searched through those albums for the years 1960-1970 and found the photo of Chris that I had taken so many decades ago.
During the search I came across some other photographs of men I had known and loved who were shirtless, not an unusual thing in those un-airconditioned days!
Eiland Arts new show, LOVE, had given me inspiration to do a series of portraits of men I had loved and to work on figure study while I was at it. It is easy to continue with things that you are good at and that come easily. I needed a challenge. It was time to leave my comfort zone and work on representational figure study, not something that I have done very much in painting, and not something for which I have developed any skill - as good a reason as any to accept the challenge.
For a week I had been working on a painting of an abandoned factory in Millville. Yesterday, I finished it so today, I worked on a painting based on the photo I had taken of Chris.
My usual practice is to draw out the image I am working on. Then, I paint in the major areas. Third, I start detailing. Finally, I look at it for a day or two and then I make corrections and fine tune it. Generally, it takes about a week for me to do a painting, now that I work small. When I worked on larger canvas, it took me several weeks to finish a painting.
I have my first figure study for the series "Men I once loved" which will have three portraits entered in the Eiland Arts show. Entries are accepted March 1st. I am not sure when the show goes up, but I will most certainly let you know!
For my next post, I will give you a list of other Art Galleries you may like to visit, or if you are an artist, you may wish to get on the mailing list and start entering their calls for work!
Happy Trails, if you like my paintings, you may contact me to buy them - wrightj45@yahoo.com. My 8x10 works sell for $100. Since I finish them more quickly, I can afford to sell them for less than people usually charge for original acrylic paintings on canvas.
Happy Trails!
Jo Ann
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