Let's Make it Like Klimt!

There is a gorgeously odd still life hanging above my chair in the living room. It isn’t in the style of my artist daughter,  or any of the artists she buys and it is a mixed media mystery. So I asked for the story. Many years ago at the 1939 New York World’s fair a  young woman submitted artwork for a contest and was given an art school scholarship. But she never accepted it. Her family said no. You can imagine, given the time frame, all the reasons why. It was too far from home, she was too young, it wasn’t “seemly” any number of practical or cultural reasons why a young woman wouldn’t be permitted to go away to art school. Whatever the reasons she didn’t go. She got an education, though, and became a meteorologist. A scientific position quite remarkable for a woman of her time. But my still life?

When she was old, very old and in a nursing home, she went to a class and painted the beginning of a still life. Only a flower pot outlined with a few bare stems in the jar. That was all. All that was left of her creativity, imagination or possibly her energy on that day. Or maybe it was a contrived lesson and that’s all the farther she got. My artist daughter retrieved the unfinished still life and brought it home to Missouri on a piece of water color paper. After she color washed the background her daughter, the great grand daughter of the woman in the contest, who started the unfinished still life said. “I’ll finish it. Let’s make it like Klimt. “ And no one told her no.

No one told her, Klimt would have painted a whole landscape and not an indoor flower pot. No one told her she didn’t know enough about Klimt to parody his work. No one told her to go to the internet and spend another 6 months studying his landscapes and then come back. No one told her no. So she got materials, sat down, and turned the unfinished work of a woman who never became the artist she could have been, into a beautiful still life that for all the world acknowledges the colors, shapes, and to some extent the world view of Klimt. 

If you are (or were) a writer, actor, artist, sculptor, singer, performer, composer have you left your work because someone told you no? Did you walk away from the colors of expression and toward a science or a job that made a living for practical or cultural reasons? Would you like to find that creative part of you to say yes again? The part that can take the old unfinished dry stick of a work and bloom it into the beautiful expression of yourself you were meant to give? It’s possible. 

Join me in the Artists Way. A 12 week experiential journey to find the creativity that is in all of us. Starting  at the Paper Birch Landing Gallery on March 29. Come find the Masterpiece…that is you.