Susette Gertsch . . . from page 1
Like those limners of old, Gertsch wanders the countryside to find her subjects. Unlike her predecessors, she is highly trained and highly skilled, having earned B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from BYU, and having taught art in high schools in Australia and Salt Lake City for many years. But all of that training cannot compare to the lessons she’s learned (and is still learning) since 9/1/09.
As a warm-up to her project, Gertsch first challenged herself to do twenty-four 15-minute paintings.|1| Knowing that she has a tendency to get lost in details, this exercise forced her to quickly identify shapes and values to capture the essence of the scene. As a second warm-up, she painted fifteen 24-minute paintings. In this series, she had time for more information in the paintings, but still too little time to fiddle with a lot of detail.
Loaded with new confidence, and plenty of equipment, she took on the big challenge – 300 paintings in 365 days – painting in nearly all weather conditions (except lightning), and all outside, with only a large umbrella for shelter. Let the learning begin!
Paints, for example. Both acrylics and oils have their own benefits and challenges. “The advantage of the acrylics,” says Gertsch, “is that you can put the painting in the car immediately and not worry about wet paint. It also allows adjustments as the light changes. But sometimes the stroke of paint dries as I lay it down. I’ve learned to paint with a spray bottle in one hand and a paint brush in the other.”
Gertsch also has experimented with different mediums to keep her oils fluid in cold weather, and even improvised a heating element (Styrofoam topped with a heated gel pack) underneath the palette.
Painting in temperatures as cold as 17 degrees called for creative adaptations of clothing, too. Gertsch fashioned a head-to-toe suit from waffle-looking foam (think mattress topper) between layers of fabric used for athletic gear.|2| Calling it her Michelin suit, Gertsch’s improvised outfit includes pants, top, hat, and booties. When it’s windy, she tops it with a windbreaker. Her car, she says, serves as a wardrobe, with several different layers of clothing she can put on or take off as the weather changes.
If all this sounds terribly uncomfortable and inconvenient, Gertsch will quickly list the benefits she has experienced fulfilling her contract. “I’ve learned so much about myself as a woman,” she says. “And I’ve learned so much about nature. My sense of color has developed far from what it was.” Artistic growth has also come from just getting out there nearly every day.|3| “A lot like ‘butt in chair days for writers,’” says Gertsch. “There’s a discipline that you can’t get other ways.”
Joys include encounters with nature and with people. One of her favorite moments was a day painting near the Provo River in 20 inches of snow. Across the river in a tall tree perched a bald eagle. As she painted, the bird swooped down and flew up the river, soon returning with lunch, which he took back to his tree perch to eat.|4|
She’s learned to welcome the occasional passerby and engage in conversation as she paints. She even invites them to take up the brush and add a stroke or two to the painting.|5| As they do that, she takes their photograph to post on her blog. (Gertsch’s marketing tip: give them a card and invite them to visit your site to see their picture and the finished painting. It could easily result in a sale as well as more traffic to the web site/blog.)
Gertsch refers to her plein air work as “sketches,” but the average size is 16 x 24 inches, with some as large as 30 x 40 inches. Her painting time ranges from 90 minutes to as long as seven hours; three and a half hours is about average. While some may appear sketchy, others have that fresh but finished appeal of plein air work. “One painting,” she recalls, “was almost like a haiku poem; not as many strokes as other paintings. It’s simple, almost abstract, but it’s complete.” She resists any impulse to add finishing touches in the studio.
Painting #96, painted on January 20 and titled “Wild Turkey Day,” was accepted into the Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of Art.|6|
As Gertsch anticipates the exhibition of her first 10 months of work, she’s faced with the challenge of displaying it. Will she show it all or only select pieces? Will she frame them, or display them another way? The exhibit will open on June 25, the eve of the Wasatch Plein Air Paradise competition and exhibition, an event she has helped plan as president of the Midway Art Association.
Her opening reception is June 25, 4-8 p.m. at Midway Town Hall. The exhibition will also be open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday, June 26, and 4-8 p.m. on Monday, June 28.
Gertsch will also have a booth at the Park City Arts Festival in August, with even more project progress to show.
What advice does she have for artists interested in creating their own creative contract? Gertsch offers these tips:
1. Get clear about what you want to accomplish. Set a goal that is ambitious but won’t kill you.
2. Find a friend who will do a similar contract or who will mentor you through the tough times (and there are tough times!). Suncage has served as mentor and cheerleader for Gertsch, always there via email or blog, even though he’s thousands of miles away.
And for those embarking on a plein air contract, she offers additional tips:
3. “Read my blog.” (http://www.themidwayartist.com) From start to finish (ultimately 300 entries), the blog contains details about what works and doesn’t work, specifically in the arid Utah climate.
4. Take a class from one of the many fine plein air painters in Utah (Google “Plein Air Painters of Utah).
5. “Just get out there. Work small. Take limited colors and a few brushes.”
6. Design your own warm-up contracts. “Hide these warm-up paintings under your bed and don’t look at them until you complete your contract. You’ll be amazed at your progress.”
What’s next for Gertsch once this contract is complete? “I may do a contract with myself to do figure or portrait paintings, though I might not do 300. The important thing is making a commitment to myself and following through. I really want to see how far I can go. I want to get as much mileage out of my life as possible. This has been the best thing I could do for myself.”
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Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
The Art of Obsession
Julie Lucus & Jeannie Hatch at Sugarhouse Gallery
by Geoff Wichert
The Art of Obsession, a duet for gallery by sculptor Julie Lucus and painter Jeannie Hatch, will have closed by the time this review goes to pixels, though according to director Scott Waters some of the sculptures will remain in the Sugarhouse Gallery during the next month’s show of photographs by Greg Sumner.
If the twentieth century’s flirtation with “mere crafts” as fine arts is over, the word hasn’t reached Julie Lucus, possibly because living in the West has allowed her not only to see assemblage and other demotic expressive forms, but freed her from the need to stick close to the mainstream in hopes of leap-frogging whoever’s up front into the history books. So she re-fashions witty, satirical comments on current events from found objects, often covered with mosaics. Some, like “Play,” a dog whose head is modified to do one thing—catch the ball—are exquisitely crafted, while others, like “WMD–Wallaby of Mass Destruction,” may prove as ephemeral as we hope their subjects do. It’s not a problem, though, any more than it matters that the responses they re-present aren’t particularly deep or original. What’s important is that they give direct visible and risible form to feelings that precede words and sentences.
Jeannie Hatch’s paintings hang well with Lucus’s shaggy dog sculptures, not least because they display as many varieties of medium and style. While she occasionally renders a subject in the round, her typical mode owes more to cubism and the graphic breakthroughs of Toulouse-Lautrec—with a twist. “Rapture,” with its balance between anatomy and design, signals a role for voyeurism with its focal eye. Something far more complex goes on in “Heartless Trinity,” in which three circles make three heads but one face, while a second face doubles as a hole where a heart should be, and three falling drops could be tears or something more seminal. Given the ambivalent but clearly present sexuality—a welcome treat after having to contemplate too many sacramental indulgences—the possibility of more sophisticated stories cannot be overlooked. He wants her, but so does she.
Exhibition Spotlight: Park City
Into The Blue
Randall Lake at Gallery MAR
by Shawn Rossiter
This month at Gallery MAR you can view Randall Lake's "Blue" paintings, a group of work first explored in our profile of the artist in the January edition of 15 Bytes. These deeply personal and stridently polemical paintings reveal a rarely seen aspect of the Utah artist best known for his genteel landscapes and still lifes.
Gallery owner Maren Bargreen decided to exhibit the works after reading about them in 15 Bytes, where Lake described himself emerging out of a difficult personal period by using his paintbrush as a "cudgel." The new works are angry paintings -- filled with skeletons, suicides, references to death camps -- that mix the personal and the political. They are shown together with Lake's smaller works in a traditional vein, the "bread" of the show's title "Bread and Blue." Bargreen realized that to exhibit Lake's new works was to invite controversy but felt compelled to do so. "[Lake's] story as an artist isn’t complete without the 'Blue,'" she says.
The "bread" of this show is found in the wings, with Lake's paintings about war, death and homosexuality taking center stage. The artist's stylistic approach, where some areas are only roughly blocked in, and figures suggested rather than depicted so that they are more phantoms than flesh and blood, may be suggestive of his guttural approach to the subjects. While the paintings pack an emotional punch, detail and nuance are hard to achieve with a cudgel, and as sociological commentary the paintings lack both.
Margreen says response to the show has been mixed. Some of the casual visitors to the gallery have been in and walked right out. "Others
who 'know' Randall are either thrilled or disappointed," she says. " Very little gray area! It’s been a study in human nature on many fronts."
"Bread and Blue, new works by Randall Lake, is at Gallery MAR through June 12.
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