Retrospectives

Are you an artist?  How will your art reflect you long after you are gone?

This past week I had the pleasure of thinking deeply about this when I attended the retrospective of a major regional artist in the Mid-Hudson area. The walls of both exhibits were hung in salon style, because literally there would not be enough wall space to show the hundreds of paintings.  Nothing in Margaret Crenson’s world was ordinary – she painted the mundane items of a kitchen in full swing canning tomatoes to the ethereal Hudson Valley landscape with the same brilliant artist’s eye.  The work utilizes a good amount of palette knife painting, which shows off her sure placement of the paint.  This prompted my thinking about how a body of work can reflect back on the life of the artist, as well as stories from collectors, neighbors and family.

I felt fortunate to be included among the group of those that knew Margaret Crenson as a person, which helped me makes sense of the artworks surrounding me.  She seemed to have a keen wit, and a close connection with nature and animals. All of the signals coming out from her art, from the sly placement of the unexpected animal in the picture frame, to the elevation of the industrial building as an object of portraiture, makes me understand that she was an artist that lived her life to the fullest – loving the world that she was a part of and leaving a world with her artistic interpretation of all that she touched.

What could be better than that?