My Art is inspired by the gardens surrounding my studio. There is a complexity to my work in both the spiritual and technical parts of my mind. Enjoy this meandering journey with me. The highs, the lows, inspiration, ideas, techniques and general musings about the complicated creative life of an Artist.
Recently I took an abstract realism workshop with a master painter. I had never done abstraction and but wanted to incorporate another style into my own paintings. For the first time in my long schooling career, which spans decades, I found that I was not doing the exact homework assignments. It felt somewhat naughty, I guess a throwback to childhood.
So much of what he was teaching reawakened in me the knowledge and experience I’d learned over 40 years ago in art school. It reminded me of the many lessons in color, value and saturation. Lessons in composition and layout. All the many lessons in technique. Conversations I’d had with myself but hadn’t heard out loud in too many decades.
When the workshop began, I’d been in the middle of an oil painting in my studio. Instead of doing the homework assignments, I began, at first unknowingly, to apply them to the painting already on my easel. I changed the composition of the piece. I altered my color selections to focus on the clarity of modern colors. I added attention to value plus the placement of cool pigments and warm pigments.
My painting began to take different turns, it zigged and zagged as new ideas and focus resurfaced in my brain. These switches in reference really stretched out the time it took to complete the painting. I began to think of Picasso’s transitional piece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and how it took him forever to complete it and how clearly you can see the major transitions he made. My painting wasn’t even close to his level of redirection, but for me personally, it was as dramatic.
Usually, there is so much to learn and to relearn that it can’t be absorbed in the 8-week duration of these workshops. But this online program is available for access, practice and review for a year. It will take longer than that to truly grasp the many nuances of his teaching. Daily studio time will ultimately allow the lessons to flow in and around me until I am so accustomed to the process that I can roam freely and more widely on my own as I’ve done for years but now with a twist.
Over the years I had a thin but important relationship with the famous artist, Wolf Kahn who passed away in March of 2020, just when the Covid lockdowns began. His wife, the artist Emily Mason whom he was married to for over sixty years, had died three months earlier leaving me with romantic undertones of love and commitment.
When I was studying art at Queens College in the late 1970s, my painting professor Robert Birmelin, invited Wolf Kahn to our painting class as a visiting artist. With an explosive personality quite opposite from each other, Wolf let us up to the roof of the building and gave us a very short blast of time to capture the sunset, perhaps fifteen minutes or so. We then returned to the studio for the intense critiques that followed. Apparently, my sunset painting with quick bold brushstrokes and vivid color moved Kahn enough to use my painting as the model for all the other paintings that he eviscerated. I felt rather proud of myself, to say the least.
Queens Village 1 – 1976 -Oil on Canvas.
Instructed to return on Monday with two more paintings, I worked diligently over the weekend to paint my own environment. These paintings were diametrically opposed to the style of the rooftop painting, they were smooth, measured and detailed in my own personal vision. At the Monday critique, Wolf, not knowing or caring who any of us were personally, savaged my two paintings to the same degree that he’d lavished praise on my work just three days earlier.
I must have looked horrified. I know I was in anguish. I felt that my guts were bleeding and hanging outside my body for all to see. Just then Robert Birmelin, invited me into the hallway, outside the studio to speak with me about my work. He told me that I had my own style and it was valid. That I needed to continue to explore it myself and not take what Wolf was saying about my work to heart. It was only his opinion. I know he said more but that’s the gist of it. That conversation changed my life. I knew I had something to say, and my own way of saying it and Mr. Birmelin knew it too.
Chester Massachusetts 1993. Oil on Canvas
Fast forward about 25 years. I apply for an art show at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington NY and who are the judges going to be, Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason. Well, imagine how vindicated I was to have my work accepted into the show by them. Actually, I don’t think you can imagine. This validation for my art didn’t come from Wolf but from Robert Birmelin who saw in my work something that resonated. He was someone who transformed my life. Someone who helped me gain the confidence I needed to pursue my own vision. It wouldn’t have happened in the same way if I hadn’t brushed up against Wolf Kahn and I thank him for being that trigger.
What made me think of this brush with Wolf Kahn this weekend was reading this article about the two foundations set up to support artists by Wolf and his wife, Emily Mason.
I don’t wear red. I don’t even like the color red. It hurts my eyes. And my soul. I don’t even plant red in my garden. There, every flower is either pink or purple or white. Girlie girl. Sweet. Flouncy.
I don’t know why I don’t like red. Perhaps it was my 6th grade teacher who said blonds don’t look good in red. I’m a natural blond BTW. She said her sister wore red and that she died that year, thus scaring all of us little girls who were in her sewing class. Coming to think of it maybe that’s why I don’t sew at all either. (I will add, that was the last year that particular teacher was seen in that school.)
So I was rehanging my studio after having the wall repainted and a hanging system for my art installed, when I looked around and saw far too much pink hanging on the walls. Pink peonies, pink roses, pink hibiscus. Way too much pink. Time to do a color I’ve never done before.
How about black. I never even put black on my palette. But that’s not the greatest color for a flower. I wanted to use a color that I’ve never used, never been comfortable with and don’t like and then make a beautiful painting with it. Red. That’s the color I knew I needed to work with.
It was hard for me, day after day looking at the various shades of Red on my palette and canvas. My eyes felt contaminated. I used more and more eyedrops to give me some relief. They didn’t help. But as the weeks went on, I began to adjust to the color Red and it became less upsetting to my psyche.
Many weeks into the painting I knew something was off about the work. I looked at it every day. Multiple times. I popped into the studio to catch it by surprise. I photographed it & played with it in Photoshop to try to figure out the problem, turning it upside down and backwards. Trying different filters to see if color was the problem.
And one day, POOF, and it was clear. The color Red demanded action. Movement. Swirling. Twisting. Bending. This Red demanded Passion. Energy and Power. This wasn’t going to be one of my sweet pink contemplative flowers perfectly centered inside a square frame. This red flower was going to stir you up, move you to new experiences, push you to live more fully, more energetically.
I took out my opaque white paint and obliterated the center of the failed painting and began again in Red. With energy. With vision. With Passion. And quickly the painting came together and was done. After all that time. All those hours of trying to force my will onto the canvas. It had a mind of its own & apparently knew what it wanted to be. And now it is.
Naming her was easy. She’s “Passion – Red Dahlia” and she’s a 30×30” gallery wrapped canvas. I’m not in a hurry to paint in Red again. My eyes need a rest. But I do know that I need to give over the responsibility of what the outcome will be to the painting itself. It has a mind of its own. It knows what it wants to be even if I don’t. I need to trust the process. Trust the collaboration between myself and the artwork. I need to let the painting bring itself to life.
Passion – Red Dahlia. 30×30 Oil on Gallery Wrapped Canvas $3,500. . See this on my website:
One of my accountability buddies had challenged me to do abstracts as a way of loosening up my paintings. Having been a digital artist for decades I’m used to being able to control my images right down to the pixel level. Also, since I studied and worked with Botanical Illustration for years, wearing magnifying lenses over my glasses, I tend to be tight and exacting. Since I normally paint and draw with much detail, she thought that maybe the abstracts would loosen up my style. That 15-minute sketches would encourage more freedom in my surfaces.
A 15-minute sketch of an energetic red dahlia.
After a few days of playing with various mediums and substrates, I truly began to enjoy myself with the freedom of not worrying about the lines and adjoining edges. So, of course, I bought 3 books on abstract painting to study what I should be doing. When I mentioned this to her, she threw her hands up into the sky, rolled her eyes and sighing deeply said that this was exactly what she wanted to avoid me doing. She wanted me to use the right side of my brain and experience the freedom, not my left & and bury myself into studying the experience.
I understand what she was suggesting. But didn’t she know that for me, the more books the better? Why watch 6 YouTube video tutorials when 15 might break the ice.
The more I played and the more I read I began to realize that my flower paintings are a type of abstract painting. Not all abstract painting is completely devoid of figurative imagery. My layering over layering, capitalizing on the mark-making beneath each, is my form of abstraction. Some paintings have more visible marks and some less. And some of my paintings show these marks more and some less so. But they all have them hidden underneath the many layers of pigments. It’s like a secret life.
Now let me tell you what happens when I paint. I start with the inspiration of a real flower, one that may or may not still be alive but one that I have taken numerous photos of, that I’ve grown and that I’m intimately familiar with at each stage of its growth. I sketch a few on paper with a pencil or charcoal, sometimes on my iPad using Procreate and sometimes on my Mac desktop using Photoshop or Painter. If I’m in the mood I make a full tonal drawing in one medium or another. Once I’m satisfied that I’ve got the idea of what I’d like to paint, I transfer my outline to canvas using either pastels or charcoal and begin to paint with the full intention of staying true to the flower, the shapes, and the colors.
But somewhere in the process of painting layer over layer, a change in control happens. My careful plans are put aside and I relinquish control of the process to the painting itself. At this point, the painting becomes an abstraction to me. It may not lose its form completely and may or may not still look somewhat like the original floral inspiration. But the intention has shifted. Sometimes the form itself changes, at times radically. At other times, the colors become abstracted, leading away from the original source.
There is a freedom that comes over me when this power shift occurs. When I’ve relinquished the power to the painting rather than maintaining dominance over the process is a source of freedom for me that I’ve had a difficult time defining or describing. But then again, I don’t even know what to call my style of painting.
Lately, I’ve come to find that some are calling this type of painting, Abstract Realism. That sounds as good to me as any other label, none of which I’ve ever felt comfortable with until recently stumbling upon this definition.
Labels or no labels, I’ll continue to explore, experiment, and push the boundaries while I decide into what niche my work actually resides. If any. It really doesn’t matter since I’ll just keep letting my paintings speak for themselves.
15-minute sketch of hydrangea petiolaris growing on my garage roof next to a dogwood tree in the fall.
Mary Ahern painting the red dahlia in her studio.
The most frequently asked question when I’m discussing my art is: How Long Did It Take You to Paint That? Well, it seems like an easy one to answer doesn’t it? But the problem is, I don’t know what they’re really asking since no matter what I answer they say, “Oh” in response. Here’s why it’s a confusing question.
I don’t know what that person really wants to know. Do they mean how many hours did it take me to paint it? Or how many days? Or weeks? Or months? I’ve tried asking them what their real question is but people don’t really know why they’re asking it. Is it a form of legitimacy? A value judgment on the quality of the work? Perhaps it is a question about fair pricing for the quantity of time allotted to the work.
I wonder if they’re asking me how many hours a day (a week, a month) do I work? Or is it how many hours a day (a week, a month) do I paint, which is different than how much I work at being an artist? I think the life of an artist is a mystery to most people. I think they’re trying to get a handle on what it takes to actually make a work of art.
If, when I answer, I mention that it takes time for me to search in my garden for inspiration, it doesn’t seem to register that this is part of the time I’m working. Let’s not even mention growing my plants which are the models for most of my work. And does the time count that I take to make the preliminary drawings and sketching on paper or screen that I do to create the composition? How about the time it takes to transfer that sketch to the surface I’ll be painting upon, which lately is the canvas. Not until then does the actual painting begin. Does all that prep time count into “How long did it take you to paint that?”.
So, it seems by people’s reactions that all the preliminary work doesn’t count. What seems to only count is the time I’ve spent putting brush to canvas.
My last painting took me 8 months to complete. This timeframe did not count growing the plant, the photography, sketching the composition and the transfer to canvas. I’m a procedural painter so I actually have a timeline in my notes I keep of each painting. I list the day, the number of hours I worked and a line or so of what I worked on during that session. The notes ended on the day I signed the completed artwork.
But did it really take me 8 months to paint that particular Red Dahlia? I began the work in the dead of winter but was interrupted when spring arrived, and the garden demanded my attention. Generally, I can’t paint after I’ve worked in the garden since the small motor skills required for me to paint are too exhausted by the effort. I would not be able to control my brushstrokes to my satisfaction if I tried to cram too much physical work in a day.
So 8 months is not really an accurate answer is it?
In my notes I can see that I worked on this particular painting in 41 sessions, meaning 41 different days during those 8 months. And not to be outdone with carefully tracking my work, I painted for a total of 151 hours by the time I painted the signature in the lower right corner.
I’m pretty sure that any of those answers, the number of months or the number of painting sessions or hours would receive the same “Oh” reply from the person asking me the question. An artist’s life and work are a great source of mystery to many people. And I respect that. Actually, I kind of like that. Being and working as an artist is often a mystery to me as well. There are many times I look at a painting from my past and think to myself, Gee, I wonder how long it took me to paint that? Sometimes I wish I knew. That’s one of the reasons I now keep notes.
Allotted time doesn’t define the quality of an artwork. Time does not ensure me of a successful outcome. My art takes as long as it takes to satisfy me. That’s really how long it takes for me to make a painting. I have to be satisfied with the artwork to put my signature on the work.
Passion – Red Dahlia. Oil on gallery-wrapped canvas. 30×30″. $3,500. Available on my website here.
Joseph Raffael
February 22, 1933 -July 12, 2021
One of my heroes died this week. Joseph Raffael was an artist who spoke and will always speak to my soul. We lived in different places. Lived different lives. Worked in different mediums. He was famous but left the NY art scene to live quietly in the south of France. I never made it big enough in NYC to have to leave it. But I live in the quiet town of Northport on the north shore of Long Island. We have each experienced different successes in our lives. A man, a woman, so different but so the same.
His own garden was his inspiration as mine to me. The whole garden and the individual flowers he grew there were his references. My garden too supplies me with the imagery and stories I create from. He worked in watercolors, me, not so much. Give me digital, give me a computer and stylus, give me my oil paints and I’ll paint you some flowers.
He studied with the greats. He went to Cooper Union and Yale School of Art. I went to the State University Queens College for art and the New York Botanical Garden for botanical illustration. He won a Fulbright fellowship & studied two years in Florence and Rome. I was a single parent painting when the kids went to sleep.
Every other year or so Joseph would have a solo show at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in Chelsea that I would make a pilgrimage into Manhattan to see. I would find myself immersed into his world. Not just his garden, his flowers, but more importantly, his spirit, his thoughts, his beliefs. It was a spiritual journey I engaged with on those visits. His spirit resonated within me. I took my camera to the shows and from that I made videos to pay homage to him and his work. Perhaps you will understand if you watch them.
Joseph wrote books too. I have them and read them from time to time when I want a renewal. They are a touchstone to the thinking that he and I share. His words speak the thoughts residing in my mind. We both experienced deep and life-changing loss which turned us to search inward for answers to our questions.
Joseph and I never met in person but every single morning I wake up to his “Pink Peony” hanging on the wall opposite my pillow. He signed it to me with my name and with his. He appreciated what I had created for him. He wrote to me from France to thank me and the package arrived at my doorstep.
Joseph Raffael lives on in his paintings, his writings, his spirit, his very being. I do not mourn his passing, I celebrate that he lived!
“April” A pink peony by Joseph Raffael in my home.
His books are available from Amazon. (No affiliate compensation)
Over the last few years, my art has shifted away from painting what I think will be popular. Selling lots of prints, in lots of sizes both online and offline, I knew I could make piles of money in my sleep. What fun!
That thinking is no longer my goal for making my art. Don’t get me wrong, I love selling, it’s in my blood. It was my career for many years. But times have changed for me. Circumstances have changed too. I’ve stepped out of the rat race. Out of the business world strictly speaking.
I stopped painting for cash. Stopped picking the most popular flowers, in the most popular colors, in the sizes that sell the most.
I’ve turned inward. I’ve begun writing about what matters in my life, in my world. I care more now about my work being a form of meditation. An opportunity to ponder our place in the universe. My flowers are to me a symbol. A microcosm of the universe.
Since my art starts in the garden, I’m now seeking to translate lessons I’m learning there that inspire my work. I’m learning to write the stories, the messages, the ideas that motivate me to dedicate a painting to them. I care about what the painting will symbolize for me and perhaps for others.
Writing is helping me to find the language to express my thoughts. These thoughts are embedded into the artwork I create. Each painting is a manifestation of these ideas. I am now working towards a deeper interpretation of my work beyond just the visual.
In thinking about my art I had always labeled myself a floral or a landscape painter. My work was very realistic, the more realistic the better. I loved creating the details.
However, the work I’ve begun doing over the last few years has changed. My mediums, my style, and my thinking. For the past 30 years I’ve been a digital painter, (yes, before Apple, before Photoshop). Now I’ve returned to my roots and I’m painting again in oils. There’s no $20,000 digital system between my work and my body. I am again, up close and personal.
This change in medium, this physical closeness to my work, this reawakening has given me an opportunity to re-evaluate what it is that I’m trying to do. To say.
As my forms become more simplified, more minimal, more stylized, my thinking has gone deeper. Richer. More meaningful. So this is why I now relate less to floral painters but more to meditative, more minimalistic painters, more abstract painters. It’s not really just about the flower. The colors. The form. It’s about what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling, what I’m learning. The garden is my tutor. These are lessons we can all learn if we pay attention quietly to what’s around us. The lessons carried to us on the wind.
Through the twisting paths and obstacles in life, the two constants for me have been my Art and my Garden. These are my anchors. They keep me balanced, complete, secure. The arrival of spring flings me from my studio where I’ve been creating my Art all winter, into the emerging garden surrounding my studio. The colors shout optimism to me. The joyous season has begun again. This is where I grow my subjects and gather the imagery for my work.
I’ve been an Artist for eons, exploring as all true Artists do, a myriad of subjects and with enough mediums that fill drawers and cabinets throughout my studio. I’ve been zigging and zagging throughout my journey with all the bumps and joyous bursts I could grab. Some of my work through the years has had autobiographical underpinnings, some of it was icy flat. I’ve worked big and I’ve worked small. But when it comes down to it, I love color.
I love studying Art History. I’ve been doing it steadily now for decades. My personal library still contains the first book in which I saw the work of Georgia O’Keeffe in the 1970s. I wept each time I opened it. I had to limit myself to 10 pages a day since I was exhausted from looking, from feeling, from studying. I remember stroking the large pages hoping to absorb something, something unknowable to me at the time. Her work somehow spoke to my soul.
Though I’ve absorbed some of Georgia’s iconography, when I’m painting in traditional oils I reach backwards to techniques of the Old Masters. I enjoy the process of grisaille painting with the painstaking layers of glazes but I do it with a modern flair. Speaking of modern, I may reach backwards to compositions inspired by Raphael’s Madonna del Prato but I may do the painting using digital mediums with Siberian irises as subjects.
My classical art education in New York City was probably the last gasp of formal training before the onset of conceptual and performance art took hold. My professors were all active and renowned in their fields, Wolf Kahn, Herb Aach, Robert Birmelin, and Louis Finkelstein. The foundation in color and design they taught is still the basis of all my work. I am indeed fortunate to have studied with professors who opened their SOHO studios and used the NYC art scene as an integral part of their classroom.
The proximity I still have with my studio one hour’s train ride from the array of museums and galleries in NYC is rejuvenating, inspiring, and jump-starting. My education never ends.
Once I recognized that I was an artist, I’ve always maintained a working studio even when at times circumstances prevented great productivity. Then I would sit in there and study my books of the masters, absorbing not only their techniques but also an understanding of the enormous obstacles most of them had to traverse in order to continue forward with their work. They kept me going.
I make lemonade out of lemons. To remain in the world of creativity and support my sons as a single parent, I navigated into the nascent world of computer graphics during the 1980s. Here I sold graphics and electronic paint systems to the Television & Production industry for use in on-air graphics and advertising. My Art training was put to good use as I demonstrated the systems to my target market of creative professionals who were just converting from traditional mediums to digital.
After receiving a concussion on the glass ceiling, I began my own graphic design business. Designing print media for my clients turned into repurposing their material once they recognized the value of the Internet. I built my first website in 1995, the year after the Internet became publically available. Having a low threshold for boredom has helped me shape my ongoing career in the Arts by pushing me to continually try new ideas, concepts, and mediums.
Exactly 20 years after I graduated with my Fine Arts degree I graduated with a degree in Ornamental Horticulture with a focus on Landscape Design. I am combining my art and my love for gardening that was instilled in me as a child by my favorite Uncle Teddy. I am absolutely driven by these two passions. In fact, in 2000 I rebuilt my home and added two studios overlooking the gardens I’ve designed over the decades. These gardens that surround me in the quaint town of Northport on Long Island and beyond are the main inspiration for my Art.
I demand excellence in my work and continuously strive to be a subject-matter-expert in my fields of study. My expertise, not only in the mediums I choose but also in the subjects of horticulture and landscape design that I represent in my close-up florals and landscape paintings of gardens is critical to me.
I have a passion for life and learning. It is at the core of my being and who I am as a person and as an Artist.
Today I painted for four hours on a painting that everyone thought was finished but I hadn’t yet signed. Everyone loved it but me. I really liked the composition, a rounded peony in a square frame. What’s not to love?
But the edges weren’t working for me. Not the edges of the outside of the canvas, the edges where paint meets paint. Where does one color transition to another? Is the edge hard or soft? Does it blend? Does it pick up color from the adjacent color? Does it offer a stark contrast in tone to the color next to it?
Is that color warm or cool that it’s bumping up against? Warm colors advance, cool colors recede. Is one petal in front of the other? Where is the light coming from? Is there a shadow? If the petal of the flower is warm, the shadow would be cool.
In order to work on this, I need to paint in an all over manner since each part relies so heavily on the adjacent section. It’s so hard to know when to stop since the next time will be hard to recreate exactly where I left off. But I can’t paint for too many hours in a row.
Subtle Exhuberance – Tree Peony: Detail. Oil Painting on Canvas. To see the finished painting click here!
My arm gets tired. My hand holding the brush also. I become less precise and begin making small errors that have to be corrected. When the corrections start overcoming the progression I know I’ve reached my tipping point and have to call it a day.
Then I take photos of my progress, clean my brushes, scrap my palette and stare at my work. I spend a lot of time staring and studying the progress of the day. Planning on where to being again tomorrow. Strategizing on where I’ll begin again. I write the notes of my day in the book where I keep, what could be called, a diary of the painting. The date, the length of time, what I worked on and what colors & mediums.
I’m a very procedural artist. I go through a particular set of stages and processes to create my art. What I’m not in control of is what the painting will look like when it is finished. The painting itself determines that. I’m just the vehicle to get there.
Last week we had temperatures in the 30’s every day. The clocks changed and now it’s dark by 4:30 where I live. That may sound pretty grim but for me, it signals the opportunity to go into my studio to paint without the tugging and nagging feeling that I should be out in the garden, planting, weeding, pruning, and planning. Now, guilt-free I’m in my studio creating the paintings of the flowers from summer. And … Continue reading →
Throughout the year I spend time immersed in my garden in the warm summer sunshine and the deep winter snow. The myriad of colored petals, the exquisite architecture of a flower’s anatomy, the subtle shifts of green inspire me throughout the seasons. There are seasons I’m with my flowers in the garden and seasons where they enter my studio as inspirations for my paintings and drawings. Each art form is dependent on the other to … Continue reading →
I‘m that kind of gardener. The one who opens the windows to inhale the smell of the soil in the morning mist. A day isn’t complete unless I’ve walked the woodland paths, seen the changes however small, what has begun, what has passed its peak of perfection. Which plants are inviting their cohort of pollinators, the array of the birds and the bees? This is the half-acre of land I’ve designed, planted and tended for … Continue reading →
Long ago in the way back machine, I grew some sunflowers for my young sons. You know which ones, they’re the 8-foot tall ones that excite every kid. So on the day the flower was pitch-perfect, I pulled out my pastels and tried to capture its roundness, its color. And then it was time to light the barbecue and make dinner for the boys so I put away my pastels and paper while planning to … Continue reading →
Since the 1970’s I’ve been a collector, an observer and a thinker about round things. Currently, my garden is enhanced by round thing presences. Spheres of all colors and sizes. Sculpture with round themes. Round trellises. Round gateways. On my deck are round finials on the tops of the banisters. And large round concrete containers spewing forth their colorful floral additions all summer. I have reflective spheres so as you walk around the circular pathways … Continue reading →
