In the Chairmaker’s Wake

2001

19" X 28"

Oil on Panel

Original SOLD...but Prints are Available

The original notes are buried somewhere in the studio I think.
Peggy, who owns the painting, looked and doesn’t have a copy either.
Which is fine, because I remember everything about doing this painting.

     It was early in 2001 and I was preparing for my first solo show which was planned for
September. I had just turned 40 and every job in my life up to that point had been about trying to make a living so that I could paint. Chairmaking was one of those detours. For a decade or so I practiced the art of traditional woodworking. Using hand tools exclusively, I fashioned everything from rocking chairs to walking sticks to spoons. A yard full of oak logs and hours on the shaving horse with drawknife in hand produced mountains of shavings. Useful for burying the chair parts to keep them from drying out (this is a green woodworking process ) and also for kindling in the log cabin stone fireplace. Making chairs was a wonderful occupation but, as the saying goes among craft show veterans…we’ll keep on doing this until the money runs out.
So, when Pat encouraged me to give painting my full attention, (as a hospice nurse, she knows all too well how preciously short time our time can be) I traded chisels and planes for brushes and paints. By the early spring I had 10 or so paintings finished and we took a break on my birthday and went to Chadds Ford to visit the Brandywine River Museum. They had just opened the NC Wyeth studio for tours and we joined the small group for the bus ride over to the old family homestead.
It changed my life.
As a young artist, I had been influenced by my mother’s devotion to Andrew Wyeth and her study and mastery of egg tempera and she was encouraging me to try that medium as well. But
sitting in his father’s studio, with giant window to bring in all the light that he could as it was built prior to electric service, and the contraptions designed to hoist him up to paint mural sized works, and the gritty earthy smells of woodsmoke from the massive stucco covered fireplace, and the colors of paint splattering a patina on the wooden planked floor, the dusty bottles and jars with bold primary pigments, and the prop room with costumes and objects familiar from his paintings…I felt like I was seeing in color for the first time.
I went home and buried myself in copies of NC’s paintings. Full of color and energy and motion illustrating the action stories of the day, they wrenched me sideways. It gave me permission of a sort, as his son Andy had done by choosing egg tempera over his father’s oil paints thereby working with a drastically different palette and technique… and I felt freed to reverse the process and choose oils as my medium.
So, I brought one of the first chairs I had made up to the studio. And, actually had to ask my friend Peter (the only other traditional woodworker I know) to send me a box of his shavings which was a laugh. And I let the light and the color and the movement back in.
Taped to NC’s desk in his studio is a tiny piece of paper cut out of a very old book or magazine. In faded ink it reads, Multum in Parvo.
I taped a copy of the same to my easel and it keeps me pondering.
Much in little.

Postscipt –
I’m writing this on the 6th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. That first solo show I mentioned took place two weeks after that tragedy. It almost was cancelled but the people planning to attend overwhelmingly asked for the opportunity to gather in support of each other and of art and probably to have something else to focus on for a couple of hours.

     6 years later I have a new studio and my very own prop room. Thanks in very large part to those original patrons whose support continues to make it possible to keep working at the easel every day.