Alice Griffin
Standing on the sidewalk next to the 14×60-foot wall in Carrboro that’s getting a new Community Rose Garden mural, I realized that I’m allowed the most fun of all, painting roses. Chapel Hill artist Emily Weinstein designed the mural, funded by Strowd Roses and the Orange County Arts Council, and when I came to volunteer Emily and Volunteers for Youth had already done the hard work of priming, graphing and layout.
Some pedestrians almost bump into me, oblivious on cell phones and iPods. Others compliment the ongoing work, and during my 1,000 thank-yous I smile to myself as if I’ve done all the best painting.
Yesterday, in a Zen-like state, I produced roses that were pronounced “gorgeous.†Today, however, my efforts look pitiful. Assaulted by noise from air conditioners, growling buses and surrounding traffic, I stuff my ears with Kleenex. It’s so hot the acrylic dries too fast and sweat drips off my elbows from my latex-gloved hand. Nearing dehydration, I seek shade.
I’m beginning to wonder if this outdoor, urban-mural painting scene isn’t strictly for the pigeons, not a woman in her seventies who’s a 5-year breast-cancer survivor and tends to get dizzy on ladders.
When I moved to Durham in 2001, I missed the creativity and encouragement of the art community of my former town, Fayetteville. Soon, though, I met Emily, my Pied Piper neighbor at that time. Then entering my seventh decade, I had no idea I’d become a mural painter’s assistant.
In the 1960s, as I neared completion of a master of fine arts degree, severe allergic reactions had forced me to stop oil painting, block printing and silk screening. With my coursework completed, all that remained for me to do was my one-man show with oral defense, but I could no longer paint. Also, subsequent marriage and the rearing of two athletic boys took a lot of cooking, housekeeping and PTA time. We did travel and explore, and the boys knew a visit to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was as likely as a Red Sox game or a Tall Ships viewing. Thus I was always seeing, absorbing and learning, but I was still not painting.
I began volunteering in the school art programs in Concord, NH, where we lived for 12 years. One gratifying project was with the integrated program for fourth-graders. During the annual hawk migration, students used binoculars to observe and identify the raptors as they kettled in the thermals rising over the city. Then they drew and cut a silhouette of an observed hawk and screen-printed the original image on a t-shirt. I was thrilled to be awarded the first “Order of the Hawk,†a framed hawk feather.
In 1980, we returned to our native North Carolina. I discovered the Fayetteville Museum of Art and responded well to the excellent instruction of master colorist Tom Moore. With less-toxic materials available, I could again oil paint. I also studied watercolor and monotype printing with Petra Gerber, who now teaches at Georgetown University. I became entranced with the brilliant hues of permanent watercolor and liked the monotype process: getting the right moisture content in the paper, neither too little nor too much paint on the plate, printing before the oil dried, etc. The technical challenge was worth the effort — I rejoiced in the depth of color and enhanced texture possible with monotype. A Fayetteville/Cumberland County Arts Council grant enabled me to purchase an etching press producing prints 18×36 inches or longer!
I had found my artistic feet again and entered a happy creative phase, producing color-saturated watercolors and oil and watercolor monotypes. Through my many visits to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, now augmented by visits to the National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and London’s Tate, among others, I continued observing and absorbing. At long last, I could accept the accolade “artist†after my earlier loss of confidence. Landscape painting, a tribute to my love of nature, is now my joy, while my favorite artists are Cezanne, Van Gogh and Mark Rothko.
My husband and I landed, exhausted, in Durham during a snowy January 2001. Soon I was painting plein-aire with neighbor/artist Emily Weinstein. When some of our favorite painting places become threatened by development, we worked with others to bring New Hope Creek Preserve into fruition. I helped her record much of that remarkable effort by hundreds of private citizens and public officials of four jurisdictions in her fourth book, Saving Magic Places.
Emily has painted many murals in Durham over a 25-year span, including the Black Wall Street Hayti Community mural, the Eno River mural, Vega Metals mural and, more recently, an interior mural on three walls in the Lincoln Health Center, on which I assisted.
In college, I summered at camps in Canada, Michigan and Colorado; as a high- school art teacher in the 1950s, my summers were still fancy free. I motored up Pike’s Peak with another teacher in her black Model A Ford. We never stopped, except to picnic, but passed new cars with their hoods up and radiators boiling over. I wrote my name in the metal canister proving I had climbed Mt. Vigil; from Key West to Canada, from the Garden of the Gods to Niagara Falls, I reveled in the splendid natural beauty that we have inherited in North America.
Most recently, as well as painting plein-aire and murals, I’ve exulted in drawing and painting with colored pencils and watercolor a fantasy environment with children, animals, characters, imaginary creatures and scenes. Perhaps a video game? I also have reality-based drawings evocative of life in the 1930s and ‘40s that could be shaped into a children’s book.
Not too shabby for a creaky old gal who grew up in the Great Depression, remembers blackouts near the North Carolina coast in World War II, wandered at will in the woods and swamps with deer and ducks, went barefooted into the sandy fields as soon as she could wield a hoe and got “yellow jaundice†(hepatitis A) after the Roanoke River flooded and water sat over the windowsills of our house for two weeks.
I’ve rested, so now I’m ready to get back to this mural, and indeed am now looking forward to the next one.
The artist Alice Griffin (Alice Griffin Myers) can be reached at griffinart @nc.rr.com