Chasing
Waterfalls
A Chat with Mariella Bissonet
By
Ross Riceeter
Aaron
After
graduating High School and spending a year in Europe, she
was off to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for a BFA, Mariella
recounts, “well, basically, I [thought I] knew everything.
I was clueless! But I loved Pratt, and they taught me what
I wanted to know; they taught me drawing, and they taught
me how to make a living, as an art teacher, or working in
art programs, and gave me professional skills. I was an intern,
an employee of The Brooklyn Museum, which launched me through
grad school, so it was a certain trajectory of support there.”
From there, she landed a plum gig: “I was the curator
for Prospect Park. That was a 10-year gig for the New York
City Dept. of Parks and Recreation . . . I was in the Union,
I drove a pick-up truck, it was great! Put up exhibitions
of contemporary art, opened up spaces to the public for the
first time, one of which was the Memorial Arch in Grand Army
Plaza. Those were fun years in the City [’83 - ’93];
there was money for things like that back then.”
After
that tenure ended, she started to feel less centered in the
City. Possession of a rent-stabilized loft caused tension
and outright harassment. Mariella took a friend up on an offer
to come up to Palenville, where she was “taken up to
Kaaterskill Falls. BAM! My life was changed in a day. After
that, I began to find any way I could to get back to the Catskills.”
Woodstock School of Art and Byrdcliffe offered artist-in-residencies,
as did many others, from California and Canada, to Tuscany
and Germany, but eventually, she made the move to the Hudson
Valley permanent, setting up shop at the Shirt Factory, and
later marrying attorney David Gubits in 2005.
Where
many artists use photographs as a visual reference, Mariella
begins with a field watercolor, capturing not only nuances
of shapes and colors, but also a general aesthetic of the
scene that took hold of her eye. On one wall of her studio,
an early black and white piece hangs with its accompanying
watercolor, offering an insight to the process...
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