Living with the Artist

The Year in Review (Life on the Road) / Dec. 21, 2005

I wrote part of my dissertation on the Victorian novelist George Eliot, who was really a woman named Marian Evans. One of the reasons she wrote under a pseudonym was that she was cruelly shunned as a fallen woman because she lived out of wedlock with the already-married George Henry Lewes. He was also a writer (of nonfiction), but he increasingly devoted more and more of his time making it possible for Marian to write her books. In those days I wanted to be a novelist myself, and it would never have occured to me that in the course of time I would end up not as the artist, but as the facilitator. We each find our fate, no matter where we start looking for it.

It is my intention to use this section as an occasional journal to describe the life of an artist and that of her assistant, to discuss some of the aesthetic questions and issues we face, to bring you behind the paintings to the people who create them.

Everything, of course, revolves around the art show schedule. We celebrated New Year’s Eve in Naples, Florida so that the dawn of the new year could find us squeezing through streets cluttered with vehicles and exhibitors to unload and set up our booth among them. Shows in Florida, Tucson and Chicago require early morning set-ups, providing a built-in deadline for finishing and long, groggy days; those in Houston, Carefree, Arizona and Castle Rock, Colorado permit chilly evening set-ups after driving all day by street- and battery-powered lamps. Many shows, however, give generous allotments of daylight the day before. At these shows we take our time, especially if it’s hot or the van is parked far away and everything needs to be dollied, so that a three hour set-up can easily stretch to six or more hours. Take-down is almost always at night after a long day at the show. The good news is that our booth is so complicated and Gail brings so much work that by the time we’re packed and ready to load, half the exhibitors have left and we can get our van close. We often socialize while setting up, but at take-down everyone is focused on getting out of there. We are usually one of the last to leave, dirty-handed, weary and hungry.

Of the 23 shows we did in 2005, I only remember it being really rainy and miserable at the Boca Raton show. That was the second worst show of the year (ranked by sales), but we got to spend time with dear friends visiting from D.C. I’ve known the husband since high school, and seeing his mother again—the last living mother of my childhood friends—was as close as I’ll come to seeing my own mother again. And the next day, I spent our earnings getting fitted with a new set of golf clubs. (Priorities!) We did a show in Cincinnati (our first time) where it was so hot and muggy that the radio was advising people all weekend to stay home. In the first hour we sold Gail’s largest painting, a 4’ x 5’ canvas that I had to deliver to an beautiful stone mansion set amid a few acres of rolling Kentucky hills, ponds and outdoor sculpture. We’d been accepted to the show at the last minute from the waiting list, so it was all the sweeter when the judges came by with trumpets and banners to award Gail best-of-show for painting. It was pretty hot in the Chicago suburb of Buffalo Grove, too, and the show was frustratingly slow. But our neighbor was the most extraordinary furniture maker we’ve ever seen. Each desk or table was made of dozens of pieces of various exotic woods, each turned and inlaid with fossils or other woods: stunning sculptures that happen to be functional. Gail’s birthday present looks great in our living room.

There’s always an adrenaline rush when we’re doing gangbusters (this year all the Texas and Colorado shows were like that), when people are connecting with the work and excited to take it home, and I have to keep re-arranging the walls to prevent them from looking spotty. At such times, Gail looks forward with glee to getting into the studio again. After all, her reward for selling a piece is getting to paint another. Can we get more work framed in time? we wonder. Do we have canvases on hand? If only they could all be like that! We’re fortunate to have had only three bad shows this year, but even the middling shows (clustered together throughout the summer) tended to be slow and dependent on a few big sales. Though we can see that people feel economically insecure or, worse yet, are made blase by the number of art shows and though we know that most exhibitors are also having a tough show, it’s hard not to question each piece.

Still, the best thing about doing the shows is having to sit out there in front of the work that you’ve poured your soul into while hundreds of people come by and look at it (or not). On the one hand, it motivates you to do the very best you can; on the other, it teaches you to see the work with someone else’s eyes and to let it go. We wait for those who are grabbed by the art. They don’t always buy, of course, but they look and are touched. And in their appreciation and enthusiasm, the many isolated hours that Gail has put into her art come to fruition. For the best thing about doing the shows is the people we meet. Some stand out for the intensity of their response, but mainly it’s the people who’ve become friends: not only other exhibitors with whom we share a lifestyle, whom we see intermittently, but also collectors whose children we’ve seen grow up, whose careers we’ve seen evolve, whose lives they’ve shared with us. Compared to what we do, painting for a gallery that stands between our collectors and us seems so commercial, so empty.

We’re usually too tired and have talked too much during the day to socialize after a show. (That’s also why we stay in hotels during shows rather than with friends.) There are, of course, a few exceptions to the rule, and dinners with show friends don’t count since we all have to eat, we’re all tired and ready for an early night, and we all have to do it again the next day. Such early evenings make up the vast bulk of our social life in any given year.

One of the perks of piggy-backing shows is having 3 or 4 days off each week in between. Not surprisingly, we seek out art museums wherever we go. The most memorable shows we saw this year are Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, a re-mount of Richard Avedon’s Western photographs and a home tour in Miami of an extraordinary private collection of contemporary work. We were deeply impressed by a retrospective of one of our favorite artists, Anselm Keifer, but the most astonishing thing I saw this year was BodyWorlds, an exhibition of about 40 meticulously dissected cadavers and body parts. A German anatomist developed a method of plastinating organic tissue to make it permanent, and using this technique he displayed entire systems removed from bodies (the dense red cloud of arteries was the most amazing), multiple cross-sections of organs, and the musculature of entire bodies in action, jumping hurdles or breaking toward a lay-up. Gail was with friends at a trunk show that day, happily buying an artsy wardrobe, so a friend and I spent hours marveling at the engineering genius of natural selection and the miracle that is our body.

We vacationed in some great places—biked and watched animals in the Everglades, strolled around Key West, celebrated my birthday at Wrigley Field, heard some remarkable student singers and the Dallas Symphony twice. We had memorable dinners (usually with friends) in Boca Raton, Vero Beach, Atlanta, Memphis, St. Louis, Houston, Des Moines, Breckenridge and San Diego. I got to play golf with buddies on some beautiful courses in Key Biscayne and Miami, Dallas, Breckenridge and Tucson. And since I discovered audio books, the 24,000 miles we drove this year flew by. I loved hearing some old favorites that I hadn’t read in decades—Anna Karenina, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Castle, Nostromo and The Odyssey—but the books that held us closest and spoke to us most deeply were Vann Martel’s Life of Pi, Alice Seybold’s The Lovely Bones and Jonathan Safar Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

One thing we rarely do is shop, so I don’t know what came over me in Cincinnati when I suggested that we stop by a Dodge dealer to look at the Sprinters, the new extra-large diesel vans that are really a Mercedes in drag. Just to take a test drive, I said, and get some prices. I’ll spare you the saga of how we got a silver one (“Not another white van!”), had it driven to us from Ohio and had the cargo area customized to suit our needs. One thing, of course, leads to another. Since the Chevy already carried more work than we could show at one time, why get a larger vehicle without getting larger tent? That means bigger and taller, more panels, heavier weights, a 3-step ladder, a completely new layout and learning how to hang it. The first times we set up, it took over seven hours; since then, thankfully, we’ve cut it in half. Our new display looks stunning, the art show analogue of Chartes Cathedral, with lofty ceiling and color everywhere. At our age, you’d think we’d want to downsize.

As the year winds down, there’s a crush of applications for next year’s shows that have to be done. While all the shows we do are juried, there are thankfully some that we can be confident of getting into year after year. It gets a little scary in November when you look ahead and don’t know for certain when you’ll get a chance to make some money again. Fortunately, by Thanksgiving results from the jury process begin to arrive, and I can breathe again. By March, the main application season is over, though there’s a mini-season (for January and February shows) around September.
Every year the show circuit gets more competitive: for most good shows, there are seven to twelve applicants for each opening—and most of them are good artists. We spend a lot of time pondering which pieces to photograph or upload for show apps, how to arrange the booth, what to say in response to the various questions we have to answer. We also spend a lot of time pouring over the pre-eminent trade publication and talking with other artists looking for promising new shows to do, and then trying to fit them into our established “anchor” shows. Since Gail doesn’t do any reproductions, we cannot be away from the studio for really extended periods.

One of hardest things about being on the road is the discontinuous nature of our life. This is especially hard on Gail, who is constrained to vacation for weeks at a time and then has to be creative and productive all of a sudden for a couple of intense weeks before the next trip. That means when we’re home, we’re really at home—especially Gail. Normally she will not leave the house except to take a yoga class (we’ve been practicing Iyengar yoga with the same magnificent teacher for sixteen years). The rest of the time, she’s in the studio. She goes to bed and wakes up thinking of her painting. One of our best show-friend couples lives in Santa Fe, but we’re lucky to see them twice a year in town. While there are some people on the show circuit who do it alone, both men and women, many exhibitors are couples. It’s not surprising because there’s so much to do. While Gail is in the studio, I’m photographing and cataloguing most of the artwork, applying to 40-odd shows, keeping the inventory database and financial spreadsheets current, sending announcements for upcoming shows, filing sales tax in nine different states, ordering supplies, choosing frames, keeping the van in good running condition, researching and booking hotel rooms and, not often enough, updating our new website. Though it’s a far cry from my father’s construction company, I feel his influence as I run our business. Those 20 years I spent as a teacher seem the expression of my youth, but this life has made me the adult I was born to be.

The life of an independent, itinerant artist is a lot of work compressed into limited blocks of time. And since the creation of artwork is at its core, it's work of emotional intensity. Everything is framed by generally inflexible deadlines, so advanced planning is essential (and working to the very last minute, inevitable). Between setting up and taking down and dealing with the weather, doing shows is also very demanding physically. The life is by turns extremely isolated and gregarious. But most of all, it is an extraordinary blessing to earn your living doing what you love, traveling together and working closely with your spouse while meeting countless wonderful people.