An oil painter talks while the camera faces the wall.
Five minutes at the cooperative gallery in Brattleboro, Vermont, in front of one artist’s stretch of wall. She talks the work through and asks not to be filmed, so the camera stays on the paintings for the whole tape.
The inventory comes first. “I do hand-painted cards and small original little paintings”, she says, plus puzzles and a calendar, and then the work itself: “there’s prints, and these are all oil. I do oil on paper or Oil on canvas.” One canvas is an archipelago, islands she puts in the South Pacific. Then the one worth a second look: “That’s Phoenix. And, um, this is Hidden Dragon. I don’t know if you can see the dragon.” The dragon takes a moment to surface. “And then the dragon’s all through here. It’s Hidden Dragon.”
Asked how long she has been at it, she gives a number, “I’ve been an artist for about 22 years”, and points at the bio hanging next to the work. What she wants next is scale: “I’m trying to get into large canvases.” Asked what stepping into that takes, “it takes a lot because you really have to pull in the pieces.”
Mid answer, the camera question comes back. Asked once more whether she is sure she cannot be on video, she is clear and not unkind about it: “I don’t want to be. I really don’t. I don’t photograph myself.” A joke goes around the room about the camera stealing her soul. The person filming settles it, “Okay, I’ll keep facing the wall”, and that is where it stays.
What she paints is mostly her own construction. “I do a lot of abstract, and some come from nature and my vision of nature”, the rest assembled out of colours and images. Twice she has to correct the camera: the pieces it drifts onto are not hers, they belong to another artist in the co-op. More of her own is coming, though: “I also do sketches of little creature guys. They’re not up yet.”
The last minute is a shout out. Her husband is an artist too, “He’s a writer, he’s a playwright”, and he does comics, “All different kinds of things. They’re funny. They’re little characters.” The day job is elsewhere: “Well, right now he’s a product manager for an IT company.” But “what he’s known for is he’s a director, theater person”, and “And he’s put on shows in New York”, work by people he knows and by new playwrights. Asked for a name so people can look him up, she gives one, Bob Ferrante.