Women Helping Women: A Recipe for Success

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There were women who stepped into my life’s journey that changed the course of my life at critical junctures that I only realized in hindsight. I was raised in a very conventional household by strict European parents with very defined roles. By twenty years of age, I’d come to the pinnacle of my success with my prince charming of a hubby, a baby, and our own home. What a relief! I had it all. The American dream. Contentment personified.

Two Women Friends

Mary (L) and Roberta ~ 1977 Photo Courtesy: Mary Ahern

Until my beloved hubby rocked our little world by wanting out of our paradise. I had no life preparation beyond anything except the happy home, two sons, a dog, and a white picket fence. I didn’t know any woman who worked, let alone was raising their children by herself. I honestly imagined my sons, and I would starve to death without a man to work and earn the money to use in the supermarket. The windows in our home became a prison to me, keeping us silently and painfully apart from the world. My dark hopelessness led me on frightening trails of despair and death.

The emergency slowly passed. Life settled down a bit. But I was changed forever. I knew I needed to control the outcome of life for my sons and me. Then, I met Roberta at the YMCA Swim and Gym classes for our three-year-olds. She was a biology professor at Queen College and showed me I could get educated. Because of her, I went to college, got my degree in fine arts, and then got my divorce on my terms.

With confidence and a goal, I got a job at Barnard College, the women’s college of Columbia University, a bastion of feminism—an entirely new world of supportive women who opened up a vast world for me. Martha hired me as the office manager since, as she said, any single mother knows how to balance time and tasks. Since classes were free for employees, I studied programming in the School of Engineering, and Martha encouraged me to get into the then nascent field of computers. She also said to follow where a company makes its money, so I should go into sales or finance for my career. I took her advice.

Mary’s Office Just After Starting Her Own Business, Online Design (1995)
Photo Courtesy: Mary Ahern

Mary Ann had a Datsun 280 sports car, wore gold jewelry, and owned expensive houses. She showed me women on their own can be wealthy. I determined that if I couldn’t be home at 3 o’clock with the milk and cookies, I would make the most money I possibly could. She showed me it was possible.

I went into the sales field in the male-dominated computer graphics industry since there I would earn money based upon my own efforts while combining my art, graphics, and computer backgrounds. And I did. Until I hit my head on the glass ceiling. So, I started my own graphic design/marketing business.

As an entrepreneur, I controlled how I used my time, benefited financially from my own skills and efforts, chose the types of work that intrigued me and created and designed my own lifestyle.

And now is my time in my journey; I get to pay it forward. Using the models, the women before so wisely gave me, I am able to generously offer my experience to other women. Being an active member of the National Association of Women Artists (NAWA), I am in a position to share my business experience in sales and marketing with many other women to help them move along in their own journeys. Like having a delicious piece of apple pie with a scoop of ice cream and a cherry on top at the end of an exquisite meal, I’m finally having my dessert.

NAWA has been empowering women artists for 135 years as the first women’s professional art organization founded in the US. Like the women who helped me in my life’s journey, I’m comforted by knowing I’m also helping other women in theirs. As Isaac Newton said: “…if I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

My life is filled with gratitude for what I have experienced and learned throughout my life, and that I now have an opportunity to share with other women in my community of professional women artists. Life is sweet!

National Association of Women Artists (NAWA) 2023 New Member Induction Ceremony
Mary (Bottom Row, 4th from Right)
Photo Courtesy: Mary Ahern. Chair of Public Relations Committee

 

Originally published in Sanctuary Magazine March 2024

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A Virtual Visitor Had Me Contemplating My Lifelong Career in the Arts

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Judy Chicago

Photo of Judy Chicago  by Donald Woodman

A short while ago I had a virtual visitor enter my studio while I was standing at my easel working on an oil painting. The visitor was Judy Chicago who was interviewed for the 60-year retrospective of her work at the New Museum in New York. Out of the corner of my eye, as I continued to paint, I watched and listened to the live-streaming event for the exhibition “Herstory” (here’s the YouTube Video of the event) which was the first comprehensive museum survey of her work. Judy Chicago was born in 1939 and as I listened to this interview it was 2023. Eighty-four years is a long, long time to wait to have this type of recognition.

This juxtaposition of Judy being live-streamed into my studio as I painted was profound for me since Judy’s work and those of many other women artists whom I was fortunate enough to be made aware of during the 1970’s when I was majoring in art in college, are why I’m still creating my work. These women artists weren’t in my textbooks. They were instead presented to me by some of the women art historians and women professors I studied with when I was lucky enough to attend classes at the then, tuition-free, City University of NY. All these women changed my life. The women artists were showing a new way of working and the professors were exposing us to a reevaluation of the art historical canon.

I first saw Judy’s work in 1979 as thousands of us made a pilgrimage to the Brooklyn Museum of Art to view The Dinner Party. This groundbreaking installation was created with Judy’s vision and also the efforts of hundreds of women offering their skills in various mediums. This work helped to introduce fabrics, embroidery, stitching, ceramics and various other techniques which had been ungraciously removed from the category of “Fine Art” by those who were in charge of writing the history of art. These creative skills were those exercised primarily by women and now were finally being presented in museums.

Photo collage by Mary Ahern

We stood for what seemed like hours, quietly waiting for our turn to enter the site-specific art in the room which housed the installation. Most of us on the long line had dressed in better than everyday wear for the occasion. When we finally reached the doorway, we found the room lights were dimmed. We entered as if entering a house of worship. Continue reading →

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My Dual Passions – Art and Gardening

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At the age of 14, I was alone and lying in the summer grass on a hill in Brooklyn, New York, staring upward through the leaves at the passing clouds while trying to understand why a person I loved dearly had suddenly died. Without an anchor or language to explain the passage, I was at a profound loss and searching for an answer, an explanation. I clearly remember feeling the warm energy from the ground swell up and pass through my body and like a mist, mingle into the leaves and up into the clouds in that deeply blue sky.

At that moment, I recognized that I, as a person, was another aspect of nature, joined with the wind, the air, the plants, the trees, and all life teeming around me – just another form of energy. This gift has been with me throughout my life and is what I gather in my garden and express in my art.

1985 - Mary Ahern in the Cablevision studio working with the Chameleon electronic paint system.

1985 – Mary Ahern in the Cablevision studio working with the Chameleon electronic paint system.

Mary-painting-the white iris in her studio

Painting in my studio. The white iris blooms in my garden each spring. I glaze with thin washes using a fan brush and thinned paints.

My Zig-Zag Journey
Like most of us, our life journey takes many paths. For me, my twists and turns led me to a career that blended my fine arts training with my technical background. As a single parent with two hungry sons, I found a way to keep one foot in the arts by selling computer graphics equipment into the broadcast television industry. Creating graphics and fine art using the computer as my medium enabled me to have the financial stability I needed to live the life I envisioned for myself and my family.

Learning is a lifetime passion for me. Within the classroom, I have formal degrees and certifications in fine art, horticulture, botanical illustration, logic and computer programming. To this day, I continue to take online and offline workshops in marketing, writing, and various artistic mediums and genres.

Throughout my work career, I always maintained my studio art practice since it is the root of all that I do and who I am as a human being. At the present time, I have the good fortune of continuing to work independently without needing clients, creating my artwork, showing it extensively in exhibitions, and lecturing on art.

Woodland Garden entrance.

Entrance to my woodland garden. Throughout my garden there are round things to be walked through, around and over.

I am not just an artist. I am a horticulturist on a mission to transform my surroundings. Continue reading →

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I met a hero of mine, Audrey Flack

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My Audrey Flack-Books

Some of my Audrey Flack books.

Audrey Flack is a painter who, when I was in college in the 1970s, inspired me as I began my artistic journey. My art history teacher Patricia Hills at York College, which is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, introduced us to the many women artists who were pushing the envelope at the time. There was Audrey Flack, Joyce Kozloff and Judy Chicago. All of these women are currently Honorary Vice Presidents of the National Association of Women Artists. Since at the moment, I am Chair of the Public Relations Committee of NAWA it is such an honor to be meeting these artists who are still teaching us to keep working, keep pushing, and keep making our own artistic statements.

Roz Dimon, Audrey Flack, Mary Ahern, Susan Rostan

Roz Dimon, Audrey Flack, Mary Ahern, Susan Rostan at the Southampton Arts Center, November 2023 Photo credit: James F Dawson

Recently I went with hubby Dave and my friends Susan Rostan & hubby Bob to the “Heroines of Abstract Expressionism” at the Southampton Arts Center here on Long Island. Audrey had work in the show but so did a few other artists who had been members of NAWA, including Nell Blaine, Dorothy Dehner, and Buffie Johnson.

Since Susan and I are co-hosting the Historical Research Team at NAWA this was an auspicious occasion for us and opened up new opportunities for research and writing.

Audrey Flack-Southampton Arts Center

Audrey Flack at the Southampton Arts Center, November 2023 Photo credit: James F Dawson

Then another amazing event happened, Audrey Flack was scheduled for a talk at Southampton two weeks later, so we signed up and took another drive out east. It sure was worth it! Continue reading →

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The Start of my Art Journey

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In 1973, fifty years ago I began my artist’s journey. Since I’d majored in music during my Junior and Senior High School days, playing the trumpet and conducting, I hadn’t taken any art classes. It wasn’t until my youngest son went to pre-school that I began stretching my wings.

My first step towards discovering that my life’s work would be an artistic journey was buying a Jon Gnagy, Learn to Draw set and experiencing a sensation that the charcoal was an extension of my hand, my arm and my body. It was thrilling!

After completing his entire set of drawing lessons, I decided to take painting classes at the local YMCA where I lived at the time in Queens, NY. So, I arranged for a babysitter, signed up for the oil painting class and made my first foray into Jerry’s Artarama art supply store with my supply shopping list in hand. How electrifying to be exposed to so many wonderful and exciting new products, widgets, thingies, colors, brushes, papers and canvas. Oh, the possibilities!

 

And that began my art supply addiction ;-).

Peach Still LIfe Painting by the artist, Mary Ahern

Still Life with Peaches, my second oil painting which was completed in 1973

Along with the small tubes of Grumbachers, some brushes, canvas boards and mediums, we were instructed to bring some pictures from calendars or notecards that we could use to copy. My first calendar photo was of a brilliant orange sunset with the silhouette of a house at the bottom. I still have these early paintings, some on walls, some tucked away.
The second oil painting I ever did I copied from a placemat that I had borrowed from a neighbor.

I so loved the image, not knowing at the time that it was representative of the golden age of Dutch still life painting from the 1600s. I had no formal knowledge of art history but, being Dutch, and having spent time in Holland as a child I had been exposed to the art hanging in the homes of my extended family. That still-life image spoke to me in a way I didn’t understand at the time. It spoke to me of family, of my history, of roots, of connection. It is also part of my art journey, not just another painting but the beginning of a 50-year adventure with all the ups and downs, zigs and zags. An adventure that, I’m happy to say is still unfolding!

This is my studio wall from some years ago with artwork covering a piece from many decades. Some are now in storage, some have moved to different walls. All of them speak to me of my life and artistic journey of these exciting 50 years of creativity.

Studio wall in 2019

One of my studio walls in 2019 with work from before college, during college and after college. Various mediums from oils to pastels to needlework to watercolor.

 

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This Artist’s Dilemma. Storage.

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So I’m standing in my studio basking in the golden warmth of just having completed my one-month Solo Exhibition, which filled three rooms in an historic mansion at the Bayard Cutting Arboretum. I’d worked for years creating new work for this prestigious opportunity. And now the show was over, the work still owned by me was taken down from the walls, packaged protectively and transported to my home studio. I looked around me, surrounded by all this new artwork. I remembered the journey of discovery as so many new ideas had begun to seep into my new work over time.

Art in storage on shelves

Beginning the process of storing my artwork.

As I stood there looking around me with contentment at these 40 new artworks, a cold wave of concern trickled into my mind. Where would I put all my art? I’m a minimalist by nature. I can’t stand clutter and now every surface in my two-room studio is covered with piles of work. Canvases are stacked, leaning against the walls. All the walls in my studio and home are already full. A sense of claustrophobia was rapidly taking hold. The warm glow I’d been feeling turned a cold blue. Continue reading →

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Behind the Scenes Preparations for a Solo Art Exhibition

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Mary Ahern hanging artwork

Here I am on a ladder hanging my exhibition

Most people think the amazing artwork you created & have hanging on the walls at your Solo Art Exhibition is where you put all your energy. If you are like most artists who represent themselves as I do, this means that you are the person responsible for creating all the art as well as all the promotion that goes along with a successful outcome of your show.

When I had my third solo exhibition at the Bayard Cutting Arboretum in Great River, Long Island, New York, not being a prolific artist, I worked every day for years to fill three rooms in this historic Manor House with my artwork.

In the exhibition on display were my drawings, colored pencil works, abstract acrylics, painting in oil and mixed media paintings in acrylic and oils. Over 40 original pieces of art which I created in my studio, prepped for hanging, documented on spreadsheets, matted and framed when called for, transported and hung.

Most people think that an artist just creates in their studio but that’s only part of the process if you are a self-representing artist. There is plenty of creativity in marketing as well. Here is some more of the creativity that I put into an art exhibition.

 

Here is some more effort that I put into an exhibition.

  • Solidify the venue, show dates, opening reception and artist’s talk dates and sign the contract, individual and shared responsibilities with the venue.
  • Internalize and create towards the general theme of the show that will be the focus of the art and the marketing.
  • Create a model of the exhibition space using accurate proportions for planning the quantity & sizes of artwork. Use either Architech’s drawings, graph paper, or a digital program.
  • Create a spreadsheet for a working model of how many works you need & where they are in the creation process
  • Analyze the amount of time you need to create the artwork. Be realistic.
  • Capture WIP images to promote the upcoming show, both stills and videos.
  • Continue to post about the progress of the work on social media to raise interest in the upcoming show.
  • Write about the work regularly. Some for publication and some for understanding your process & progress.
  • Create a postcard to snail mail and for handouts. Mail the postcards to the appropriate people in your database of contacts.
  • Create newsletter content to email to your mailing list with both images & text: I use MailChimp
  • Send emails to your list regularly months before the show opens, showing photos of the WIPs & talking about the process. Ie. the thoughts behind the work, the mediums, the tools, etc.
  • Continue to post to all social media channels about the preparations & creation of your work.
  • Write & send press releases to your publication list in your database well before the opening of your exhibition.
  • Create price lists to distribute with your letterhead and contact info. I use Excel and put images of each painting next to the title so it can be easily identified by potential customers.
  • Design business cards, handouts, bios, and takeaways & get them printed in or out of house.
  • Keep your website updated with info about the exhibition.
  • Post regularly to your blog to keep people informed about the upcoming show.
  • Create wall signs with the # of the piece, title and medium that corresponds to the printed price list. (more info about each piece if you have time & QR code if you have them)
  • Plan the delivery of your artwork, the protective packaging like bubble wrap or other protective material, the transportation, and the assistance you may need.
  • Once the exhibition is up, 
  • give yourself a well-deserved reward before you start working on your Opening Reception menu and Artist’s Talk Powerpoint.

Marketing an Exhibition

 

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Learning is Living

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Learning is living and since I’m still alive at 75, I’m still taking classes and workshops. I continue to grow in both technical skills and in mental comprehension constantly. Hubby Dave says that sharks have to keep moving or they die. Guess I’m a shark.

The hunger to learn is something I remember as a kid growing up in a non-intellectual family. Always the odd person out, nose in the book, tackling projects foreign to my foreign born parents. My drive was inexplicable to them and completely normal to me as water is to a fish.

Looking back on just the last few years there’s been an interesting assortment of topics. Two years studying digital painting with an artist in Louisiana which is interesting since I’ve been painting on electronic paint systems since 1986, well before he discovered the medium. But he had a different approach than I did so I learned quite a bit. I also learned more about southern culture during the workshops he held on a southern plantation. Hope he learned to appreciate some of my yankeeness too.

Purple-Phalaenopsis WIP

I could have signed it at this stage of the painting, but I knew it wasn’t speaking to me entirely yet. I didn’t work on it anymore for an entire year & then, after taking an abstract realism workshop I knew where it was taking me.

The next two years were spent learning about how to run my art business efficiently. We studied, websites, social media, marketing, blogging (like this and my garden blog), exhibitions, galleries, pricing strategies, wholesaling, licensing, retail and more. Traveling and meeting other artists who came from around the world to attend the MasterMind workshops was stimulating to say the least. For over 6 years I have continued to meet with some of these other working artists whom I met through this program. It’s so important to have people in your life who speak the same jargon as you do. I treasure these friends.

During Covid, I took two online workshops. One was on story writing and the other on being a creative person. These intensive programs had me sitting down and thinking, which was perfect during the isolation. They pushed me to question what I’m doing with my art and why.

What is the real meaning of the work I create? Where do my influences come from and do I have a point of view? How has it changed, where might it go? What other artists do I feel a connection with? A rhyming of thought? A riff on technique?

Last year I took another workshop, this time one focused on painting in abstract realism as a way to counteract the botanical illustration up close and detail work that I’d studied and worked in for years. It was a real challenge for me to splash paint, spread it with trowels, and get my hands and clothes covered in the bright colors I’m drawn to. It turned out to be very freeing and helped me transition into a new phase of my work.

What I’m learning is that I’m relearning. Revisiting some of the lessons I took over the last many years but this time with a lifetime of experience. Some of these experiences were good, others bad, and others horrid but all of them are what made me who I am today. My goals are different. My processes have changed. In some ways, I’m more open and in others more hyper-focused.

Maybe that’s the thread of my learning. I’m open to change. I studied digital painting although I’d been using that medium for decades already and I learned new processes that I hadn’t explored. I studied marketing after I’d spent a career in sales and marketing for business and expanded my ability to communicate with my audience. I study writing and creativity even though I’ve been writing and creating for most of my life. This practice continues to help me evolve and explore new ideas and thoughts hovering deep inside of me. And now I’m again studying painting which I began my studies with so many decades ago and my work is evolving in a way I never would have expected.

In each of these endeavors, I learned so much and reminded myself of lessons I’d forgotten or seen in another light. Learning is living for me. So maybe I am that shark that needs to keep moving through the water in order stay alive. Lucky me!

Cosmic Phalaenopis oil painting.

Cosmic Phalaenopsis is a 24×24″ oil on cradled hardboard. This is a combined inspiration from NASA space images and my purple phalaenopsis orchid.

 

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Remembering What I Forgot

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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.

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My Brush With Wolf Kahn

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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.

Mary Ahern - Queens Village 1

Queens Village 1 – 1976 -Oil on Canvas.

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