The Art Show—and Sale—That You’ve Been Waiting For
Over the past few years, since Julie’s death in August 2009, people have asked me if they could come out to the studio to look at her work, seeking a piece of her art that they could have for their beach house, or their office at work or, perhaps, the apartment in the city. I wasn’t ready. It took me a year or two to get to a place where I was able to let go of her work, and almost another year to find the right space to have a show, so thank you for your patience in waiting. Julie painted because she loved it, and she wanted people to see her art, to be able to enjoy it. The greatest gift I can give her now is to allow her legacy to continue, to share these last works. It’s time.
Please join me in July at the Mispillion Art League in Milford, a beautiful space big enough to hold all of her works at once. The show will be there all month, from July 5-28, with an opening reception on Friday the 13th from 5 to 8 p.m. The gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 5 North Walnut St. For more information, contact the Mispillion Art League at 302-430-7646. In keeping with the spirit of Julie’s desires to have people enjoy her work, there will be a wide variety of prices to help make things affordable for everyone.
For the better part of 25 years as her partner, we traveled together, photographing places near and far on our vacations. I helped her with much of the non-artistic part of her work— downloading photographs and printing them out from the computer, offering critiques, helping with framing and matting and shrink wrapping, drafting press releases and preparing mailings, helping to load and unload the car, and hanging shows. I’ve grown quite attached to a lot of these paintings and it’s been an interesting journey to rediscover some of them. I found familiar pieces; I found pieces I hadn’t seen in years; I found sketches—wonderful sketches—that I had never seen before. Julie had always strived to paint with an open, loose feeling. While her finished pieces, the ones that went into the shows over the years, were often much more detailed, these sketches that she had done so quickly just to capture color and form and value are actually some of her best work!
Julie had always been interested in art. Her father, also a fine artist, and an art director for the Saturday Evening Post, had allowed her to use his oil paints when she was in elementary school. He entered one of her still lifes in a show in Philadelphia where, according to an article in Art Scene, “they thought it was a primitive and put it in with adults’ works.” No one knew she was just eight. Her interest in art continued, and after graduating from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and a career in graphic design, she finally returned to fine art in 1996 at the age of 62.
It was such a pleasure to watch her art unfold over the years. She first worked in watercolors, and experimented with water oils, finding what time and space she could in our bed and breakfast in Milton. When she invested in a small cottage in Prime Hook Beach, she had all the space she needed. The challenge then was to make time. We tried giving her Mondays, when she could get away and spend all day long just painting in her new studio while I handled everything at the inn. She was ecstatic, but it soon became apparent that it was an awfully long time from one Monday to the next. Then she tried Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings so she could work several days in a row, but it still didn’t feel like enough time.
Finally, in 2000, when we sold the bed and breakfast, her schedule morphed into creating art virtually every day. She loved all of it—painting and drawing and sketching, from getting new ideas to varnishing a finished piece and framing it. She immersed herself in it for hours at a time, lost in the play of light and reflection, color, shape, and form. Making up for lost time, she was quite prolific, creating some 300 numbered works (from the time we thought to start numbering them) and perhaps another hundred before that.
She won a number of awards, and her work was accepted in nationally juried shows. It was such a pleasure to see her face light up upon discovering she had earned a ribbon, or to learn she was the featured artist at the Rehoboth Art League’s outdoor show. In 2002, she was granted a fellowship by the Delaware Division of the Arts, a year later a residency Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She spent a month there, experimenting with creating a new style. She found she could sketch in conté—a sort of waxy pastel— and then use transparent acrylic washes and glazes much like watercolor. It was the best of all worlds—loose and free, with bold strong colors that she had been striving for with water media, but on canvas.
Julie was an active member of the Rehoboth Art League for years, and honored to be invited as a founding member of the Artists’ Exchange, which meets monthly to share ideas and critiques of their works in progress, and to host group shows. She was also one of the founding members of the Delaware Watercolor Society. She supported a number of local charities with donations of her artwork.
Ironically, a few months after she donated one of her large paintings for the lobby of the brand new Tunnel Cancer Center in Lewes, Julie was diagnosed with breast cancer. She enjoyed three more years, painting right up until the last few months with confidence, calmness, courage and grace.
Although we are no longer together in the way we had been, I feel her presence very strongly and I feel honored to be able to help create one more show—to be able to reframe or mat some of her bigger works, to shrink wrap her works on paper, to load and unload the car one more time, to allow all of you who have been waiting to have one more opportunity to own and enjoy her work.