Having such wonderful hosts made my visit to New Orleans earlier this week so very easy. My intention was to see how plein air works were displayed in fine galleries. Bill and Saramae Dalferes welcomed me into their home and Saramae chauffeured me up and down Magazine and Julia Streets to galleries we knew to carry plein air works, as well as a few more along the way.
(Because I write my blog as a record of my progress, it becomes a notebook of sorts, if anyone is wondering why I link so much. Some of my links are to give a thank you to people or places which have given an experience to me; I link others so that I can go back and look up people or places I don’t want to forget.)
Saramae Dalferes is the career coach who helped me make the transition to becoming a full-time artist 2 days a week, a year ago last spring. (Her email address is in the last paragraph, below.) Saramae helped me identify the roadblocks that were keeping me stagnant, and then, once identified, helped me to remove them by changing the way I think and speak, by removing words that limited me. One of the biggest changes was effected by using a relatively simple tool, a calendar. When I put my future painting dates on a calendar, they are 99% certain to happen. If I don’t, then they are about 10% certain, even today, and back then, 0%.
Saramae had finished a lot of research before I even arrived last Monday. A few galleries were open Monday afternoon, but Tuesday was the day to remember! We started at the Cole Pratt Gallery where the assistant director of the gallery, Cristin Cortez, graciously and expertly talked to us about every artist in the gallery. We had specifically gone to see the works of Phil Sandusky, a prolific plein air artist and author of New Orleans en Plein Air and New Orleans Impressionist Cityscapes as well as many other books.
But I was thrilled with all of the work displayed at the Cole Pratt Gallery. I especially enjoyed Denyce Celentano’s Everyone At The Beach Drives The Same Car, and Susan Downing-White’s Songs for the Gulf Coast Ballad. The front gallery held an exhibit of exquisitely impressionistic landscapes by John Stafford.
The plein air works by Sandusky were presented in wooden shadow box floater frames, which display the panel or canvas all the way to the edge, where the “reveal” of a standard frame hides about 1/4 to 3/8″ around the edge of the painting.
We stopped at the Garden District Gallery where we met the director Jim Adams, a fascinating guy whose wife, gallery owner Patti Adams, was showing amazing works with a number of other artists in the front gallery exhibit, “Drawn – Exploring the Line”. Jim and Patti also play for the symphony there in New Orleans. We had gone in to see plein air paintings by Elayne Kuehler, but apparently that show was over. She has a drawing in the “Drawn” exhibit. As an aside, it puzzles me why drawings command prices that are so much lower than other media, even though they may demonstrate far superior technical skill and expression. Carol Peeble’s work is a perfect example, an amazing large piece selling for only $1200, her 50% probably including the expense of the framing. (I do not begrudge the gallery’s share, the gallery having all of the overhead expenses as well as advertising — the relatively low price of the media probably has more to do with an archaic perception of drawings being less permanent, bu with today’s archival materials and presentation, that no longer is true.)
Saramae also took me to the Soren Christensen Gallery where the director brought us plein air works by Libby Johnson out of the back room where they were waiting to be hung for an upcoming show.. The Jean Bragg Gallery of Southern Art was displaying a number of plein air artists, but when I asked how artists were selected, the director said that they were partial to local artists showing work painted in Louisianna.
We happened upon the Callan Contemporary Gallery, which had eye-popping optical illusions by James Flynn, and in a back room we discovered a piece by Sibylle Peretti, Holding Birds, from her show there last April, which completely blew me away. 72″ wide, it included a fantastic drawing floating underneath thick engraved, smoked plexiglas, with imagery created over the drawing, and feathers underneath and other feathers engraved and silver-leafed within the plexiglas. No plein air works at the Callan, but what a visual feast!
The rest seems like a whirlwind — Betsy Stewart at Octavia Art Gallery; Lemieux Gallery, where Margaret Tolbert’s impression of a spring felt like home to me; at Guy Lyman which is showing many plein air paintings, in the back room sitting on the floor, a beautiful ink and conte drawing of a Dancer holding her ballet shoes, by Wilfred R.E. Fairclough, $1200; glassworks artist Dale Chihuly at the Arthur Roger Gallery, works priced from $40,000 to $225,000, and last but not least, the stillifes of Amy Weiskopf, small works priced generally $6000, framed in beautiful shadow box floater frames that looked like they were made of bronze, with no visible seams at the miter joints.
My plan last year was to begin plein air painting and regain my long dormant skills as a painter, intending to become a full-time artist at least two days a week. This year I have been taking as many workshops as I could afford, sort of a post-graduate refresher course in painting techniques and style, and next year I intend to focus on marketing. The purpose of the trip to New Orleans this week was to get ideas my subconscious can mull over for next year, while I trek onward with this year’s goals.
Presently my plein air paintings are shown at Grayt Grounds of Monet Monet in Grayton Beach, Florida, and my figure drawings are at Bohlert Massey Interiors in the Village of South Walton in Seacrest Beach.
If you want to contact my career coach, Saramae Dalferes, for her help with your own aspirations, her email address, given with her permission, is sedalferesatyahoodotcom, which I have translated out of standard email address format to discourage spam.
Below are a few other images from my visit.
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