Two artists ditch traditional employment to work as painters
Two artists ditch traditional employment to work as painters
Two artists who traded stable careers for the freedom and risk of putting color to canvas helm a Weems Galleries show opening Saturday. Albuquerque’s Sarah Blumenschein and Algodones’ Kathy Glidden are hanging a series of landscapes and still lifes in the gallery at 7200 Montgomery NE.
Blumenschein creates pastel illuminations of flowers, while Glidden will show landscapes veiled in feathered brushstrokes veering on the abstract.
Blumenschein left her job as an Intel systems engineer in 1998, fully intending to study art and paint. But the constant interruptions of three children under the age of 6 put her passion on hold. It wasn’t until her youngest son Matthew was in preschool that she began attending workshops and taking classes.
“When they would take naps, I would paint,” Blumenschein said. “I started in pastels because I talked to an artist at one of the art fairs. She had a 3-year-old running around her booth. She liked oils, but with young kids, you can put (pastels) down and it doesn’t dry.”
As her brood grew into school age, she attended more demonstrations and workshops and joined the Pastel Society of New Mexico. In 2004, she added an upstairs home studio.
“That helped a lot,” she added. “Before that, I was painting in the
guest room and I was down in the garage.”
Placing second in the New Mexico State Fair in 2003 cemented her certainty.
“I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I can do this,’” she said. “Engineering was fine, but it wasn’t something I was passionate about. I thought, ‘This is who I am.’”
Look closely and that engineering background surfaces beneath her representational work. She discovered intellectual rigor applies to art as well as science. Blumenschein plans out her paintings before making any marks. Still lifes became her chosen subject matter because they required no travel. She usually depicts flowers, vegetables and sometimes ceramics. Their lush petals and leaves seem like a massive leap from tracking computer chips for a factory.
“I have this really old copper kettle,” she said. “I like the way the light moves around and bounces. The still life and the objects all reflect off each other.
“As an individual I’m very sensitive to the world around me,” she explained. “In some ways, that sensitivity shows up in my art because I see things other people wouldn’t notice.”
Glidden traded the classroom for a paintbrush when she left teaching after 10 years. With a little coaxing, you might decide paint runs through her veins.
“My mother was an artist, so we had the dining room table full of paints,” Glidden said. “I started out in pen and ink and pencil, then added watercolor.”
She settled on oils because she loved the brushstrokes and the freedom to move the paint around, thanks to its longer drying time. Across the years, her brushes have depicted figures, animals and landscapes.
“Landscapes free me up to be more creative because I can make them more abstract,” she said.
Living in Algodones, the Rio Grande flows behind her home, while the mountains loom in front. Animals and cottonwoods abound. She sometimes does a rough sketch before putting brush to canvas; other times, she takes a photograph. But Glidden is no photo-realist.
“Camino de Caballos” shows a trail of horses crossing a river beneath an impressionistic landscape of mists, mountains and clouds. The painting emerged from a photograph taken by her son in Patagonia.
“I took all kinds of liberties with the colors of the mountains and the horses are more impressionistic,” she said.
A finely detailed image of a tractor, its serrated wheels nearly turning, stands against what may be the outline of a church against the sky in “Iglesia.”
“I focused a little on the details of the tractor and the wheels and really softened the walls of the church,” she said. “I think it’s fun to interpret. You interpret whatever expression and emotions you bring to the work.”
The sheep peering out of a barn came courtesy of her neighbor.
“Our neighbor has sheep,” Glidden said. “They’re convenient and they’re fun and they have that wonderful texture and color.”
Glidden’s influences include her mother and portraitist John Singer Sargent. She started with tight, nearly microscopic realism before opening herself up to experimentation.
“Joie de vivre comes to mind,” she said. “I love what I do.”