Art is Faith

Can I get an amen?

Studio Tour

Check out these photos of my studio (and me in it) by phabulous photog Erin Little!

Have you seen my studio? I've been working in this airy, light-filled space for the past 6 months. The address is 863 Main Street, rear entrance - which means you can't see it from Main Street! Head around to the parking lot behind the Frog and Turtle, and you'll see the door to my studio right next door to their entrance.

I love visitors!

Pretty is a walk in the park, but beautiful is more often the end
of a three-day road trip through ugly. I like beautiful.

I'm so honored to be one of several Maine artists that Erin has chosen for her interview series!

I have a fool life. (Read to the bottom, I dare you!)

So my especially dear friend Nancy told me years ago when I was juggling a stressful corporate career, a relationship, a social life and a house. Nowadays life seems infinitely more meaningful. I still have several balls in the air: kids, husband, home, painting, writing. So much more worth caring about. If I could have seen my life now when I was still in my thirties, it would have improved my perspective! It all begs the question: what will happen in another 20 years? It's hard to guess, but let me fill you in on a few things that are happening right this week:

1. This Saturday, November 2, 5-8pm, Saccarappa Art Collective in Westbrook Maine ( https://www.facebook.com/SaccarappaArtCollective ) opens its new exhibit with a wine-and hors d'ouevres reception.

Forest Dance, 16x16" acrylic on canvas, by Mary Brooking 2013

I'll be exhibiting several of my paintings from my week in the Bigelow Mountains last month. All our regular members will be there with new work on the walls. Our guest artists are Charles Thompson, Francine Schrock and Laurie Proctor LeFebvre - all three paint the world they see around them in the form of landscape painting - as I do. I've seen the show going up, and it's exciting and colorful. We always have the most wonderful openings - if you're local I hope you can join us.

2. I'm taking orders now for my 2014 calendar! 

It is 8x8", $15 + tax and shipping where applicable. If you want to order one, please leave a comment at the end of this post, or message me through http://www.marybrooking.com/ . Remember the holidays are coming! I had several people tell me last year that they gave my calendars as gifts.

3. If I ranked this list from biggest to smallest, this news item would be first: I'm opening a studio on Main Street! No photos yet, but I'll post some soon. For the first time in sixteen years, going to work will mean leaving my house! I'm over-the-moon excited about this amazing opportunity to become a presence in Westbrook's growing downtown. I move in on December 1. Is there gonna be a party? In time for holiday shopping?? With reduced prices on all original work??? And are my calendars gonna be on sale there???? Ya-baby!!!!

More on this later. Right now, it's Halloween, and I have one kid inviting a friend over to make costumes and have dinner before trick-or-treating, and the other one trying to convince me to let him go to a sleepover party. Fool life, remember? Celebrate safely, everyone.

Sweet Little Highway

Sweet Little Highway (in progress), 4x4"

Sunday morning I was up early, haggard and nervy after a night of very little rest. (I have teenagers. Untroubled rest is a luxury.) Nevertheless, the car was packed and I was ready. I hit the drive-through for coffee, and then I hit the road.

Magic is in the air at such an hour (it wasn't really that early, but it felt early to me), when you are off on an adventure - and I was decidedly pursuing adventure. I'd been invited to the mountain retreat of a collector of my paintings. At one point, I glanced off the highway to my left and saw a painting: gray clouds, strip of aqua sky, red-brown trees, ocher meadow and umber soil. I remembered the layers, one, two, three, four, five. And I drove north.

The deal was, I'd spend five days all alone at the house on the mountain, painting. My host would choose one painting to keep in return for her hospitality. It's a great deal. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

The house was sumptuous and pristine; I determined to live in it with as little impact as possible. I didn't unpack any more than I needed to wear or to use at a time. In the kitchen, I used one cup, one spoon, one knife, cleaning and returning everything to its place as soon as I finished. I found I enjoyed living this way: rootlessly, almost stealthily. All of me was in my painting, walking, eating and sleeping. There was no internet service. I was unconnected. It felt wonderful.

What sort of people trust like this: to allow someone they know so little to live alone in their private sanctuary for five days? Trusting that I wouldn't steal, or set fires, or fall downstairs and sue them? Wonderful people.

My surroundings overawed me at first. I wasn't ready to paint the views of mountains ranging away layer on layer. Instead, the first day, I painted the scene from the highway: gray, aqua, brown, ocher, umber, a tiny glimpse.

What state is so rich in beautiful scenery, that a glance toward the side of the highway is a painting? My wonderful state of Maine.

I sat listening for a while, and heard breeze-stirred leaves, and occasional bird calls. That's all. The mountains changed continually with the weather and the movement of the earth beneath the sun. The morning after the first night, I took a walk. I got out my easel. I painted. The next day I walked again, and painted. That night I heard a wolf howl in the woods. The third day, I saw a moose perhaps a hundred feet in front of me. It moved so silently, and disappeared so quickly, I was astounded. Talk about stealthy. So I walked, and I painted - for five days.

On Friday morning, I packed the car early - truly early this time! - and drove back into my life. I hugged my kids (before they rushed off to their next social events) and kissed my amazingly supportive husband. I set up for my new class cycle, which begins Monday. That night I slept like a baby.

Art and life may seem to imitate each other at times, but really they are the same thing, I think. Either way it's all about perspective.

 

Yellow Trees (working title) (in progress) 18x18"

Creative courage

Reflected Glory, 20x20"

The other day in the studio I was listening to a Public Radio article on creativity while I painted. I'm sorry I can't credit the producer or any of the sources referred to in the article - I was in my painting brain, weighing colors and shapes, hearing the broadcast resonated through my own thoughts and intuitions about what I was doing. What I heard was that many CEOs nowadays seek employees who are not what we used to call "company people." Instead they realize that people who think and perform in ways outside the norm tend to have the ideas needed to propel their company forward through fast-changing times and technologies. Creative people. These people, they find, make lots of mistakes.  Who would have thought 30 years ago that people who do things in unusual ways and make a lot of mistakes would now be prized as corporate employees? Turns out, it's people who are OK taking risks, even if it means making mistakes now and then, are the same ones who innovate the billion-dollar ideas. And these smart CEOs are giving these creative people the license to invent new ways and risk making some mistakes without fear of being fired for it - and this is paying off. Think Zuckerberg, if you will.

That's why it's so vital to fund arts education in schools: it provides our children with multiple alternative approaches to life's problems. Frees them to search other parts of their brains besides the logical left lobe to look for new ways, and to experiment until something works.

Here's the thing: until we let go of our fear of failing - until we risk making a mistake, losing our way, having a great idea turn into a mess of soggy paper and a night of lost sleep, we aren't free to access our full creative power. Fear turns creative passion to icy sludge.

And I thought: That's what I've been telling my students. Well, maybe not in so many words - but it was what I was trying to give them: permission to listen to their creative intuition, and to try. And to fail. And to try again.

We've all been there. What creative people do - what you do - when faced with a problem, is look fear in the eye - and rock on.

Thoughts on Painting and Teaching

Pine Cone's View, 12x12"

I love balancing between realism and abstraction. I think for me it has a lot to do with the way I see the world. Our eyes supply basic information: color, shape, texture. The mind does a lot of filling-in based on what we already know. We don't actually see what we think we see. Maybe that's why everyone's truth is so unique. I attempt to bypass preconception. Sometimes I succeed.

I've got big walls to fill in August, so I have some 30x30" canvases in my studio.

I've cleaned and organized the studio. I've finished the little framing job I needed to do. I've written and edited my curriculum. I've gathered most of the supplies I need for the class I teach beginning on Monday morning.

I've heard heart-wrenching stories from students who used to paint but needed a job with health benefits. Or they went to art school and a professor wanted to know what the hell they were doing there. Or they've made a successful career in the arts, but don't know what they want to do now. They just want to paint but they are stuck, stuck, stuck.

"Will my lack of experience take up too much of the class's time?" "I have NO talent!" "I gave up so long ago, my paints all dried up." But they still want to paint. Some of us just do, that's all. But too many of us are self-effacing.

What I've learned from my students is that more than "how" to paint, many people need to learn it's OK to paint. This is sad - of course it's OK, it's just paint! I think what they're struggling to learn is that it's OK not to be perfect ... OK to make some mistakes ... OK to learn from them - or just to paint over them!

Which brings me back to my clean and organized studio, and the 30x30" canvases that are now looking at me. Blankly.

Pine Cone's View is a synthesis based on a series of plein-aire paintings I made at Pemaquid Point. It's on exhibit right now at Saccarappa Art Collective, along with the plein-aire paintings. This is the direction that jazzes me. It's both representational and abstract. But it's only 12x12". My canvases are 30x30". Deep breaths...

Students, I'm with you - so with you, in fact, I'm one of you! On Monday we're going to give ourselves permission to paint what we paint. Then we'll keep painting until we paint what we want.

Off to Pemaquid Point

 Monhegan From Pemaquid, 2012

I don't post nearly as often as I should. I haven't posted a word about the class I taught - and what it taught me. I will, pretty soon! But today, I'm packing for the retreat on Pemaquid Point. It's sponsored by the Pastel Painters of Maine, but they don't object to having me and my acrylics along for the ride. I went last year and it was wonderful: a little room in the Pemaquid Hotel and a big studio in the carriage house across the road.

What is it about artists - and writers - that we so often need to retreat from the world we usually inhabit? Our batteries seem to require a great deal of charging.

Speaking for myself, I find that working creatively both costs and pays a lot of personal energy. The getting-away thing is less about nurturing the creative mind than it is about shaking the Etch-A-Sketch to erase all the expectations that build up so quickly, about who we are and how we work, and how we allocate time.

So, I bid adieu for the weekend, to my family, and to the usual me. I'll open the windows, and let the sea breeze in.

"Can we come too?"