From the studio of Louise Marianetti

June 16, 1939, the year she left the Art Student's League in NYC, 23-year old Louise Marianetti stretched four linen canvases. She coated them, along with several panels, with white lead gesso, preparing them for paintings that, in the next 70 years, never made it onto the canvases. Which is not to say she stopped painting, for according to Cathy Bert of the Bert Gallery, Marianetti returned to Providence in the early 40’s, reconnected with her RISD friends (she earned a degree from RISD in 1936), joined the Providence Art Club and continued to paint and exhibit.

Why this sudden interest in Marianetti? It's because I am fortunate to have "inherited" those canvases along with oil paints with ridiculously low price tags still attached, brushes and assorted tools from her studio. Louise Marianetti died last year and her family is working with the Bert Gallery on an exhibit focusing on the years when she stretched those canvases. They wanted to pass along her unused supplies to artists who would use them. I was thrilled to be one of those artists. 

The exhibit will take place early next year. She doesn't have much of a web presence, but I've seen two of her egg tempera paintings, unframed and protected by yellowed glassine paper. They were portraits of women that reminded me of Botticelli, that is, if Botticelli had moved to South America and become a surrealist. I'm looking forward to seeing more, in the meantime, I will have to paint something really special on those canvases.

The Goodyear Welt

 Here's another memento from the shoemaker's shop, a 1945 manual of the Goodyear Welt Sewing Machine.

I love the elegant engraving of the machine, a nice contrast to my own interpretation.

• • • 

The weather is getting warm enough to wander outside on my lunch breaks, and last week I stumbled on a couple of good exhibits on College Hill. Both have a good representation of paint on canvas, rather shocking in this day and age.

The first, "Extreme Scale",  is at the Providence Art Club. Among the large pieces is Sue McNally's  "Paradise at Night" which I first bowled me over when I saw it at the Newport Art Museum last June. On the other end of the scale one of my favorites is a beautiful sculptural rendering of a tree trunk in frosted glass and wood by Kat Ely.

Just a few blocks away, The List Gallery at Brown has their Student Exhibtion. Despite the obligatory pile of stuff in the corner and annoying flat-screen TV spewing static, it also has some pretty nice paintings.

The shows will be up for about another week and a half, so if you're in the neighborhood, they're worth a look.

How would you like your rejection?

I can't decide what kind of rejection I like the best; an email message or the kind that comes back in the S.A.S.E dutifully included in the application.

I suspect the email version will become the new standard, as everything moves online. I do like how much easier it is on the application side, but after waiting forever to get a response, it's somehow more satisfying to open an envelope, see the nice thick paper with the rejector's letterhead, throw it aside, then retrieve it to add to the file of rejection letters. So what do I do now — print my rejection emails to add to my file? 

That would be silly. I think I will.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this because I got two email rejections in two days. The first was...sniff...the Denali artist residency (I don't really cry on my emails—it's not good for the keyboard).  In previous postal rejections I've had little notes slipped inside telling me how close I came, and to try again. This email began with "Thank you for applying..." Always a very bad sign. Then came the standard Don't-Feel-Too-Bad tag line... "We had many strong applications from all over the U.S. and abroad, making this year’s selection especially difficult." So after thinking I was ALMOST heading north for the last few application cycles, I'm now feeling Denali is further away than ever.

The second rejection was from a local group show, no big deal really, but it's a place I always feel a bit surprised to be rejected from.

But I still have my show at Bert coming up next month, and yesterday I was contacted out of the blue about another exhibit opportunity. More on both of those later...

Fragile atmosphere

One morning I heard a weather report during which the weatherman (Art Lake, for all you Rhode Islanders. For the rest of you, no, I am not making his name up...) said something unexpectedly poetic. He said "the atmosphere is very fragile today"...I'm not sure what that meant, but I liked it! I painted this on my lunch break.

NOT FOR NOTHING, BUT: I'm sorry that they rebuilt the interior stairs in the Providence Art Club. I loved the old wide wavy wooden stairs. I imagine they were the original 1880's treads, worn into smooth organic slabs by thousands of artist's footsteps.

Nice paint at the Providence Art Club

I caught a couple of good shows yesterday at the Providence Art Club. I went to see an old RISD teacher of mine Dean Richardson's work. I enjoyed the lushness of the paint, although I found the spirit of them as opaque as he seemed to me, a 21 year old transfer student, as a teacher.

In the other gallery (in the old art supply store "Oakes on the Hill" where I spent many days trying to earn my way back to art school) I was taken with the work of Melissa Brown.

I was not surprised to see by her statement that her images are based on nature, as I think the best abstractions are. Both through May 16th.