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Chasing
Waterfalls —A Chat with Mariella Bisson Sometimes
we take this place for granted. The beauty that we are exposed to on
a daily basis, from the Gunks and the Catskills, to the majesty of the
Hudson at Garrison/West Point, to the rolling hills and ridges of Northeastern
Dutchess, inspire many a local Sunday driver to remark “that looks
just like a painting.” But most of the time, we smile, blink,
and keep our eyes on the road. Mariella
Bisson is one of those who pulls over and paints it. As a longtime resident
of the Hudson Valley, she has embraced the influence of the Hudson River
School and has developed her own language and technique to express herself,
utilizing an inventive approach combining watercolor painting, drawing,
and collage. The results are remarkably powerful and modernist, yet
maintaining a strong connection to earth and sky. We
are invited to visit her Kingston loft studio, on the top floor of the
Shirt Factory, to get to know Mariella Bisson a little better. Her
connection to the Hudson River School started at a very young age, in
her hometown of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where the Fairbanks Brothers
invented and manufactured the platform scale, an important (and lucrative)
development in the Industrial Revolution. As a result, the town had
a large Romanesque factory, a museum of natural history, and a library,
St. Johnsbury Athanuem, with an art gallery fully stocked with Bierstadt,
Gifford, and Durand. Despite top grades and available scholarships,
she wanted nothing more than to draw and paint, and was encouraged to
do so by her father, John Aime Bisson who, though he made his living
mostly in the restaurant and ski lodge business, was a dedicated painter
and sculptor. She points out some of his work: a trio of what she fondly
calls “Post-Modernist duck decoys.” 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. Shapes,
shadows and colors are subtly shifted, bringing more depth and spirit
into the final work, which also employs paint density and texture, “moving
into a geometry, a mood. What is a metaphor for something greater depicted
than what I saw there? I see this constant flow of water, a beautiful
rock. The water will eventually wear the rock down, but it’s a
thing of beauty during that entire process of half a million years of
dissolution, a sudden shelf, a sudden shift, it’s a fall. There
are all kinds of things you can read into them.” A
need for more immediate texture took Mariella into a new direction:
collage, in particular the use of paper surfaces. “When collage
got invented, the whole idea was that collage breaks the picture plane.
I tried to make it so collage could describe Renaissance space . . .
a somewhat radical return to a painting space using a modernist media
that was designed to break the picture. Believe me, it’s an artist
in-joke,” she chuckles. It
is with this shift she has created a very personal and unique style,
instantly recognizable. Surrounded by bins of a wide variety of paper
textures and earth colors, she shows us two recent favorites, both with
iconic “Catskill shapes. Those hillsides tumbling down, cliff-face
going up. To me, I look at it, it’s in constant motion. Now some
of this motion is very slow. This tree is falling down very slowly,
just as surely as the rocks are in motion.” The paper gives a
3-D quality to the work, which, mounted on wood panels, now employs
more variety of colors, especially with oranges and greens, while maintaining the kinetic verticals and light/shade contrasts. A specially formulated polyurethane (exclusively made for her) is applied to the surface, bringing the piece “out from behind the glass,” as Mariella puts it. The effect is immediate and tactile. But
what is very interesting about the new pieces is that the shapes are
starting to gravitate away from realism toward the abstract, while maintaining
an earthy realness. This is not your Grandma’s landscape painting.
You find yourself having to move further back to see the“original”
image, which is intentional. This is where Mariella’s drawing
skill, underpinning the work, serves her well. Still, Mariella admits,
“When you stand up close, they fracture apart, as if you were
looking at a kaleidoscope. I just hope that there’s more to see
every time you look at it, just catch something a little different.
I don’t rush through them, I take my time, I mean, it’s
serious. To some people’s eyes it’s perhaps too academic,
but I had academic training. I studied drawing with a guy that studied
with a guy, who studied with a guy, who studied with Raphael. You know,
there’s a straight line right down there [through history,] so
I really believe in drawing, and taking your time, and making the thing
a quality object.” This
approach, as well as a savvy understanding of the grant/residency aspect
of long-term artistic survival, has generally brought Mariella continuing
success, but she has multiple facets to her personal artistic expression.
One such aspect is her Xenophobia Ruburbia series, a personal expression
of outrage, juxtaposing animal skulls over captions that pair local
animal ‘pests,’ such as white-tail deer and black bears,
with prejudicial quotations overheard uttered locally in reference to
migrant workers and recent immigrants. In another recent series, “Times
Have Changed,” shown in a small Knoxville gallery, she re-assembles
words and phrases from front page headlines (on page one) to create
seemingly absurd headlines that really aren’t that much more absurd
that the originals. But, these are mostly diversions from her main focus,
which continues to be an ongoing conversation with the natural world.
As well as the group show she is in this month at Elena Zang Gallery
in Shady (Woodstock), she has an upcoming month-long residency at Breckenridge,
where she’s excited about getting in some skiing, and some exciting
new vistas to capture. When
asked about what she thinks the future holds, she answers like a true
ex-Vermonter: directly and pragmatically. “The next big experiment
is to see if I can make these collage schemes work on stretched canvas,
and if I can, that will really be a breakthrough, because you can stretch
a canvas really big, and it’s not heavy, and it’s more like
a painting. And I’ve also been using water-based oil paint, which sounds like a complete contradiction of terms. The paint is new to the market, the company still working on their formulas for it and so forth. It’s getting better, and I’m getting better with it, so I’ve gone from watercolor to gouache [and] now I’ve introduced the water-based oil paint, I see myself coming closer to painting actually,all the time.” |
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