Maggie Mailer undertakes residency at
By JUDITH FAIRWEATHER
Visitors to the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield this summer might
see Pahat the mummy in the Clues from the Ancient World Gallery or the 18
species of frogs in the “Frogs — A Chorus of Colors” exhibit.
Visitors also might expect to spend time with the fine art crafted
by artists ranging from
But in addition, they can also expect to see something brand-new
this summer — an actual artist at work.
Maggie Mailer,
Mailer’s grant-funded residency, which began July 2 and is
supposed to run until Aug. 7 (although now that she has started, she said, she
doesn’t want to leave and may seek an extension of her project), is an
outgrowth of several different things.
First, last summer, Mailer had an exhibit at Ferrin Gallery titled
“Volcano Sitters.”
“I was working with reproductions of masters, copying from books
and photographs,” she explained as she painted in the Crane Room of the museum
on Sunday.
Then, this past winter, she had the opportunity to take a copying
program with painter Ben Tritt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“To go from that (working with images) to working with an actual
painting was a great transition,” she said.
Mailer, who has had no formal art school training, said the
program provided her with very valuable experience.
“His work (Ruisdael, the Dutch 17th-century painter she was
copying) is nothing like the work I’ve been focusing on, but it was a
discipline,” she said. “It’s very detailed work.”
Mailer said the goal of the program, which met for six four-hour
sessions, “was not about finishing a painting, but about seeing as much as
possible.”
And now she has the opportunity to see as much as possible of the
“The idea was to go through the museum collection and find some
angle to talk about … to have an artist look at the collection from an artist’s
point of view,” she said.
Mailer spent the beginning of her residency exploring. “The first
two weeks, I just went from gallery to gallery making drawings,
like a wandering naturalist,” she said. “Now I’ve kind of settled here,” she
said, glancing over her shoulder.
Mailer was working on Francois Hubert Drouais’ 18th-century
“Portrait of a Lady.” Although the replication of the woman’s face was
astounding, the background and coloring was much different, deliberately.
“I’m not going for precision, I’m going for attitude,” she said.
“It’s more about the differences that come up when you paint it, because every
painting has its own personality.”
But her copy and the original are different in another fundamental
way — the canvases they were started on.
“I’m interested in taking pre-existing canvases I’ve been working
on that are abstract and meshing them with 18th- and 19th-century landscape and
portraiture. So really, I’m creating a dialogue between what I’m bringing in
and what I’m working on,” she said. “There’s a disconnect
between the background and the character. I’m just fascinated with the way
people pay attention to their environment, or don’t pay attention, more to the
point, so I guess I’m making a commentary on being oblivious to your
surroundings.”
This disconnect to one’s surroundings is also evident in the
subjects Mailer is choosing to paint.
“I’m drawn to portraits of women, usually who are aristocratic and
have a vacant quality,” she said. “When you’re painting, you have to be
present, so I find I keep making images of people who think they’re present,
but are actually in a dream world. It’s a dialogue between those two states,
because you’re always navigating between them.”
Mailer said that, at heart, she believes she is more of an
abstract painter, but the more she defines herself as an abstract painter, the
more character studies she finds herself producing.
“It’s actually kind of freeing — if you think of all of it as
abstract,” she said.
Mailer said she has found working in the museum to be a true
pleasure, for both the unparalleled natural light available through the Crane
Room skylight to the ability to get up close and personal to the work she is
copying to the helpful focus brought on by working with distractions.
The experience has not only been pleasurable, it has been
enlightening, too.
“I’ve learned how to slow down in my work. I have a tendency to
work with a kind of aggressiveness and a tendency to disregard what I’ve
already done,” she said.
And she hopes that when visitors view her work, which will hang in
the Berkshirebase gallery outside the Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation, they will
slow down, as well.
“You spend so many hours with a piece when you’re making it … that
you hope when someone sees the work they will spend time with it, that it will
arrest them, reveal itself, the few moments they are seeing it,” she said. “I
would love people to slow down. It’s about not having a set idea of how the
world is, but actually seeing it. Essentially, it’s a kind of meditation.”
Maggie Mailer’s scheduled days in the museum are Thursdays and
Fridays from