Betsy Eby @betsyeby - Tumblr Blog

With @alyssamonks @thebobartlett opening @525w22 in front of "Halloween"

Steinway Performance Hall. Tried my hand at recording on the Spirio yesterday. What an incredible experience and incredible piano. Thanks everyone who made it possible #mikesweeney #elizabethsweeney @staceylevitan and the sound engineers @steinwayandsons

#elizabethsweeney #mikesweeney

I have a thing for Hellenism. #Pergamon @metmuseum

#pergamon

Open letter to Georgia Governor Nathan Deal Dear Governor Deal, Please veto the campus carry bill. This article states sound arguments for a veto. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/philosophizing-with-guns/ Kant spoke of A Kingdom Of Ends, as a way of describing a healthy society where people were not a means, but the ends itself. Where individuals were valued. Guns impose a culture where humans are obstacles and threats, whose opinions and concerns are enemy from which the self has a right to defend. Let's start healing our country from divisiveness and let's once again value civic discourse. Guns were created for one thing and one thing only: to kill. They impose death. And that grave finality, a consequence of someone's else's impulse, should not be condoned by any sane member of society. All policy makers who condone this bill will hold a heavier and heavier conscience with every young adult losing their life at the end of a barrel. Betsy Eby

Betsy’s show “Southern Spirituals” is up at Winston Wachter Seattle now through April 15. http://seattle.winstonwachter.com/exhibition/betsy-eby-southern-spirituals/

#art painting encaustic artist abstract

World of Wheaton - Maine Magazine

World of Wheaton

October 2014

By: Sophie Nelson Photography: Greta Rybus

Artist Betsy Eby at work in Maine.

It is not difficult to learn about Betsy Eby. There are books. There are articles galore. She and her husband, artist Bo Bartlett, recently released a documentary film called See, which follows them on a highly visual cross-country adventure gone ironically awry. Over the past year the traveling exhibition, Betsy Eby: Painting with Fire, has been moving viewers in Columbus, Georgia, Augusta, Georgia, and most recently, in Maine, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in Rockport this past summer. After poring over her work, I went, equipped with my own questions, to Wheaton, the Maine island where she lives and works with Bartlett in the summers. I wanted to hear her speak about her art, but also about her life. I wanted to see this woman in action, in silence, at work in her studio on a speck of land in the Atlantic.

To get there, I have to take an airplane to Matinicus, traversing the 20 miles out to sea across the sky. When year-round resident Ann Mitchell picks me up from the Matinicus International Airstrip and I put on my seatbelt, she laughs. “You’re not in Maine anymore,” she jokes, which is to say, “seatbelts are not necessary here.” While we bump along beat-up roads to “Chris’s dock” I ask Mitchell questions. She and her husband returned to the island, where he grew up, after he “retired.” Now, at 70, he manages 800 lobster traps, the state maximum. “Is there a state-run ferry service?” I ask. “Yes, but it only makes four trips a month.” My question, “How many people live here year round?” is met with a pause. Finally, “Not many.” To be clear: after a decade in Maine, none of this seems especially extraordinary to me. The wild part is what happens next.

Mitchell stops the car at a row of century-old fishing shacks. She points across a narrow inlet to an island. “That’s Wheaton,” she says. “And there’s Bo.” Bo Bartlett. The artist. Rowing across the water toward me in a small white boat while his wife, Betsy Eby, stands upon a dock in the distance, her hand across her forehead to shield her dark eyes, her yellow dress blowing in the wind. If you’ve never seen Bartlett’s work, I suggest you seek it out—now, if possible. Then, let me tell you: in this moment, I feel as if I am living inside of one of his paintings. I feel as if I’ve gone to an alternate universe, but I have only come to Wheaton.

“Let’s go to Portugal,” Betsy Eby says soon after my arrival, plucking a straw sun hat from a wall in the living room. The house is simple, bright, light. Wind blows through it like a porch. Over the past one hundred years, this structure has sheltered squat- ters, goats, and a couple called the Schultzes who lived in it from 1940 to 1960. Bartlett purchased the island in 1999. Eby joined him in 2004. “Portugal” is their name for the east-facing side of the island, where nothing but ocean separates them from Europe. There are large, smooth rocks for yoga in the morning. There is a bench for sitting in the evening. This is where she begins and ends her days, Eby tells me, as we look out to sea. Then, it’s back to the studio.

Almost everything in her studio is white— even the strips of cloth that have been shoved in the rafters for decades were painted in a renovation. “I wouldn’t let them touch the bird nests though,” she says, pointing to three bundles of twigs. Getting to work on a paint- ing currently hanging in her studio, Eby, in fluid movements that betray her decades- long yoga practice—and possibly her attraction to encaustic, a significantly physical painting method—ties an apron around her waist and slips into adorably clunky shoes. Encaustic uses heated wax, damar resin, pigment, and fire. As she heats wax the room fills with a warm soil smell. She takes down a panel from the wall and gets to work torching the surface of the painting behind a black mask, taking it off to mix and apply more pigment. A master of these earthy materials and this ancient method, Eby builds histories as she coaxes out abstract forms, mark by mark, layer by layer, creating two-dimensional expressions of mass and line and motion with detectable pasts. Like trees with their rings, it’s as if her paintings on panel have lived lives by the time she’s through with them. They have tremendous depth. Her paintings tell stories, and I can’t help but wonder if, while we talk, our earnest, heady, hearty conversation is becoming a part of the life of this one.

The musicality of her work has been discussed in multiple articles, including the introduction to the book Betsy Eby, in which Tom Butler writes: “Her encaustic paintings reflect not only windblown natural elements, but also fleeting musical notations that are liberated only to be eternally captured.” Our talk touches upon composers (Eby is a clas- sically trained pianist), childhood, process, inspiration, philosophy. I get the sense that all conversations with Eby cross genres this way—she has the wonder of a perpetual student and the insight, intelligence, and generosity of a good teacher. I could listen to her all day—not just because of the fascinating things she says, but for the way she says them in her soothing, alto voice.

As with most artists, light is a serious concern for Eby. During my visit we spend a good deal of time on the subject, especially because recently, she and Bo gave up their residence on the West Coast because there wasn’t enough of it. Now, they split their time between Columbus, Georgia, where Bartlett grew up, and Maine. Nature is another of her obsessions. Eby spent the first years of her life in northwest woods of old-growth timber, but around the time school began she moved with her family to the suburbs. Now, she is forever trying to get back. As a young girl in Beaverton, a suburb of Portland, Oregon, she retreated into music instead of the woods, but remote Wheaton has nature in spades. Life here is so weather dependent, and daily chores so time consuming, that she doesn’t miss her piano as much as she might otherwise.

“To be surrounded by the water like this, you have to slow down and you have to put a lot of effort into everything that you want to do during the day,” Eby explains, although in only a couple of short hours I’ve already gotten this sense. There is a lot of talk of tides. To furnish the home, Bartlett salvaged as much as he could— even their dining room table is made of a wooden door that washed up on shore. “This place is like the best summer camp for adults imaginable,” Eby says, “but with lobster. And blueberries. It’s rugged, so you have to stay strong.”

And you have to be willing to ask for help: “Living out here you rely on a lot of people. Considering that we live on an island by ourselves, it’s amazing how many people we end up interacting with.”

Over tea and blueberries picked along the path to Portugal, Eby and Bartlett recall some of the many instances when their small but steadfast Maine community offered them help without even being asked. Recently, when their refrigerator broke down, local fishermen dropped by with coolers filled with lobster. They’re still not sure how the word got out, but it always does—that inlet across to Matinicus is narrow, and the docks are often filled with fishermen and families. They also have strong connections to shore. Within the vibrant, artistic community of mid-coast Maine, they’ve made good friends who visit when they can, and who probably wonder, often, how these two pioneering artists are faring on their island. Mostly, though, Eby and Bartlett seem to enjoy the solitude, the time and space to make art, and the time they have with each other.

Eby lives so much in the present, she is almost surprised by questions about her past, and smiles to remember a second-story flat in an old Victorian in Seattle where she taught herself to paint. Eby had studied art history in college, but didn’t begin to make art herself until after a near-fatal car accident in her early twenties. “I came out of [the accident] with a hunger to make art and to dedicate myself again to music,” she tells me. “And this was 1990 in Seattle. It was in the time of grunge. The city was so raw. As an artist you felt like anything was possible.” She worked a series of odd jobs, saved up enough money to take night classes at Pratt Fine Arts Center, and created a makeshift studio in the bone-chilling basement of that house. “I was so hungry. All I could do to survive was express myself this way.”

She speaks in the past tense, but even today, so far away from an old Victorian in Seattle, her obsession is palpable. “I think that making marks is my way of making sense of the world,” she says. Her voice is reaching now, question- ing, as if this explanation is still new to her. “There’s so much that doesn’t make sense to me. You turn on the news and it’s ugly and cruel and violent. The things we create, at least, we have that much control over.”

At the golden hour, we take one last walk around the island, scaling giant swells of rock and watching the ocean crash against them. Again, I feel as though I am inhabiting a Bo Bartlett painting. Except that I can not forget that there is the rowboat waiting in the rising tide, and Ann Mitchell in Matinicus, and the pilot in the Cessna 206 making his way across Penobscot Bay to scoop me up.

At the last possible minute, I pile my things in the rowboat, say my goodbye to Betsy Eby, and Bo Bartlett pushes off the dock with an oar.

“It’s been real, Bee,” he says, smiling up at her. And, amazingly, it has. http://themainemag.com/people/profiles/2589-world-of-wheaton.html

"Painting with Fire" exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art

Mood of Living Profile

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BETSY EBY

AUGUST 8, 2014 | MEREDITH COLEMAN

Artist Betsy Eby creates works of rhythmic abstraction that evoke the sensations that people experience in their lives.

Born in the small coastal town of Seaside, Oregon and now spending time in Columbus, Georgia and Wheaton Island, Maine, Eby’s beautiful, kinetic artworks blossom within the sounds of music and the tempos of nature. She creates a physical, painted ethereality; as Eby puts it, she desires “to make all these intangibles tangible.”

A painter, classical pianist, and filmmaker, Betsy Eby explores the magnificent realm of the arts and the expressions of existence.

Mood of Living Q & A

MoL: Occupation? BE: Artist

MoL: Occupation description? BE: I paint paintings, play classical piano. I recently made a movie

MoL: Before your current occupation you were? BE: I have always made art.

Eby’s Georgia studio (Swift Mill Lofts)

MoL: What and/or who inspired you to become an artist? BE: I started playing piano at the age of five. My training in classical music shaped me toward a certain perfectionism and work ethic required to learn and interpret the works of composers. My parents taught me the value of working hard and seeing things through. I had a grandmother who loved beauty and felt that objects carried resonance and meaning. At a point in my life there was a convergence and I felt a need to make all these intangibles tangible. You know, that place where classical music lives, and how it rushes in, fills you then leaves you affected, and that place where nature can take your breath away. My husband who is also a painter, Bo Bartlett, is my biggest advocate and collaborator. We constantly lend ourselves to each other’s work with crits and ideas. The life we live together is a wellspring. If there was one Ah-Ha Moment where I felt called to totally commit myself to painting, it was when I was in my early twenties when I was standing in front of J.W. Turner’s “Rockets and Blue Light (Close at Hand).” It’s a large, enveloping painting that hinges between realism and gestural abstraction. It was at that moment that I knew what I was supposed to do with my life.

MoL: Where and how did you learn your craft? BE: From endless experimentation. I recall the book Formulas for Painters by Robert Massey as being particularly helpful when I was researching the interaction of materials. After getting my BA in Art History, I took night classes from Pratt Art Center in Seattle.

MoL: What medium do you like to work in? BE: I’ve formulated my own way of working with encaustic which is a material made of damar resin and beeswax.

Left Image: Damar Resin (left)/ Beeswax (right)

MoL: How would you describe your artwork? How would you describe your creative process? BE: My work is a form of Lyrical Abstraction which comes about from an intuitive painting process. Within that process, I’m responding to the elements within each painting, guiding them into balance.

MoL: Where do you look for inspiration? BE: My work taps both inward and outward sources. I often joke that I’m a nineteenth-centurian because I love music from the late 1800s and early 1900s. I’m inspired by Rachmaninoff Preludes, Brahms Intermezzi, Dvorak, Debussy and later composers like John Cage and Alan Hovhaness. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending” is melodic, ethereal, mysterious – all the qualities I love in music. Lately I’ve been looking at the paintings of Joan Mitchell. She was a force. I look also toward Asian landscape paintings for their restraint and rhythmic placement. For formal, compositional elements I might study the patterns in nature because they teach proportion, rhythm, line and mass. For example yesterday I was looking out across the water to the rock ledge and drawing the cracks and spaces between the boulders in a continuous line. Weekly figure drawing also helps me study natural form and proportion.

Eby’s Wheaton Island studio

MoL: What is your favorite hobby? BE: Classical Piano.

MoL: Do you find that there are strong connections between painting, nature, and music? If so, how do these relationships engage you as an artist? How do they awaken your senses and emotions? BE: Within that intersection lies poetry. It’s about reduction of information, reduction of specifics in order to convey a message of the senses and feelings of motion and cadence. I respond to calligraphic gesture, organic line, the musical legato and tremolo. Although this is a baroque term, I think about the notion of “forward spinning” where ornament loops and loops propelling forward without division.

MoL: It says on your personal site that with your current work, “each painting serves as a visual document to a classical music composition.” What is so magical about giving music an image, a visual quality? BE: In the Fin de Siecle period in France, composers, artists, philosophers, and poets borrowed from one another’s disciplines and senses to create their work. Debussy wrote musical pieces titled “Images” to impart a feeling. An example is “Footsteps in the Snow” where the pianist is asked to dampen all traces of percussion and have the piano imbue the quietude of a snowfield, the soft rhythmic cadence of shoes breaking the snow. Whistler painted Nocturnes, for example “Nocturne in Blue and Silver,” nodding to a musical Nocturne written in a certain key. It is a rich world, borrowing from all senses and ascribing music to image, image to music, scent to image, feeling to form. Today in the scientific community this would be called synesthesia. I would call it a sensual life.

MoL: What is your favorite quote? BE: Claude Debussy was standing near a pianist who was attempting to play one of his pieces. Debussy apparently paced in dissatisfaction, stopped the pianist and said, “Dewier! Dewier!” For me that sums up the constant yearning to transcend a medium. I was working on a piece with my Russian piano instructor recently when she said, “The music is already in the universe, all you need to do is pull it down.” That’s true about art. The feelings are in the air, I just have to be a funnel, so to speak, and guide them in.

MoL: How do you achieve a peace of mind and spirit? BE: By painting and playing the piano. I also do yoga. Peace of mind and spirit comes from a combination of being present in the moment and also keeping your eye on the horizon. I balance the Eastern philosophy of Emptiness with the Western philosophy of fullness by having enough alone time to create while also acknowledging that I live in this world where achievement is satisfying.

MoL: We find that people who make beautiful things are more likely to lead an artistic lifestyle: Do you spend much time creating a beautiful home? BE: I am intentional about my environments and like to shape space. I keep things spare so that my surroundings are more about light and space rather than stuff.

Do you entertain? BE: Occasionally, yes. A few months ago I hosted a classical guitar and cello trio concert in my studio. Paintings were hung all around and the musicians played a Brazilian program. And yes, we host dinners for friends. Living in the South, we’ve taken to hosting Wednesday Night Supper for the Thinking Folk.

MoL: Who is an influential figure in your life? BE: My husband, Bo Bartlett. He is an amazing painter and has a superhuman capacity to synthesize psychology, wisdom, history and visual story telling. He is patient and he is generous.

MoL: If you could have a conversation with any artist of the past or present, who would it be and why? BE: I’d like to talk to Joan Mitchell or Cy Twombly. I’d talk to them about how they gathered their energy and got it in the paint. I’d ask them if they have similar concerns as I do about a painting’s tipping point between sparseness and expression, poetry and overtness. I’ve met someone recently who was Cy Twombly’s friend and confidant. He is involved in the Cy Twombly Foundation. I met him shortly after Twombly’s death and he has promised me some good stories. So in a way, I’ll be able to have a conversation with him, via a surrogate. Several years ago, my husband and I had lunch with his best friend Andrew Wyeth and Kenneth Noland. They’ve both since passed away. It was like being at the table with art history and they were telling old stories about how they curated a show at the Met together. I was influenced and inspired by the post war abstract expressionists and colorfield painters. I’d be interested in hearing about the time when art wasn’t so driven by the market.

MoL: What period of art do you most admire? BE: While I say I was mostly influenced by the school of Abstract Expressionism, I respond to art that has soul, art that has the artists’ life energy in the paint and art that conveys feeling, irrespective of era. That being said, that expressivity must be met with some level of discernment which guides the work to cohesion.

MoL: When was the moment you realized you could really do this? BE: That day in front of the Turner.

MoL: It says on your personal site that “painting isn’t about capturing beauty, but it is the ongoing process of finding it. The results are always shifting and the act is never static.” Why is it so important for painting to be an act of exploration, of mesmerizing inconsistency? Why is it so important to have this sense of exploration and movement within a work of art? BE: To transcend the limits of our ego and of our imagination. We have to be comfortable with the unknown in order to wake up and get in the studio everyday. Neil deGrasse Tyson said something to the effect recently that if there is a God, you’ll find it at the frontier. I think the frontier is the cusp, no matter how big or small, of decision making, when we’re following the invisible thread to manifestation or knowledge. I think this is why I’ve met so few artists who would claim to be religious. Artists question reality and artists create work based on their individuation. We don’t operate from rigid icons or old paradigms. Artists seek the next answer. If you think about it, if all of society were to live this way we’d be on a quicker evolutionary path.

MoL: Where do you see yourself in 10 years? BE: Continuing to paint, evolving the paintings, and expanding my repertoire of music. I might have some more film making projects in me too. I have some ideas for sculpture I’d like to fabricate someday. We never know what the future holds, but I trust I’ll be making things.

MoL: What is the message you hope to project through your artwork? What feelings do you hope to convey? BE: Someone told me recently that my paintings invoked in them a sense of longing too deep to put their finger on. Another person told me that one of my pieces brought form to a reoccurring dream he had in his childhood. My grandmother was a deeply passionate woman who interpreted the world through superlatives. As she was nearing the end of her life, she had lost her ability to articulate fully these opinions and superlatives. A few months before her death, my mother brought her into my studio and parked her wheelchair in front of a painting I had on the wall. She began to sob. I said, “What’s wrong Nana?” She uttered, “It’s me. It’s me.” I asked, “How do you mean?” And she lifted her arms in the air and like a conductor, moving left to right in a cursive pattern with her wrists and murmured in a sing-song fashion, “Oh, you know…. Da dat da dat da dat la la…” And in her lyrical, sentimental tone, she delivered the whole thing: The feeling, the weightlessness, the need to transcend her expression beyond the world of words. It reminded me that we enter this world in the unsayable, and we leave the world in the unsayable. That’s what I want to tap. To steal from Mark Rothko: “I want to paint the place where music lives.” I want to paint that dimension.

MoL: What advice can you give to anyone interested in becoming an artist? BE: Work hard. Push beyond. They say creation is ten percent inspiration, ninety percent perspiration. Stay focused and stay open. Be a student of life. When you stay open and say Yes, it’s in those interchanges of cross-pollination where the magic lies. I also think it’s important to develop your voice as well as your skill/craft. We are all unique in our biology and in our influences. Think about “what story do I want to live and how does my work convey it?” It’s not enough to annex yourself from the world like a purist. Feel the seasons, but be the constant. Have faith in your future self.

Eby’s traveling museum show, Painting With Fire, is currently on view at CMCA, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, until September 20th.

Venue Details

Location: Center for Maine Contemporary Art162 Russell Avenue, Rockport, ME 04856

Visit Betsy Eby’s website here

Photos courtesy of Betsy Eby

Thinking of Inness, Whistler, eternal twilight and night music

Melting pewter wax in the studio

Georgia Countryside, Dusk

Leaving Puget Sound

My sensibilities were hatched in the Northwest where dew, mist, and coastal fog hang like mysterious skeins between you and the world. Form is not crisp; it’s blotted. Edges bleed, boundaries blur. Light is silver and refulgent. The aesthetic temperament is mercurial. Urban landscapes are rarified, and nature is sacred.

Now I spend part of the year in my husband’s hometown, Columbus, Georgia. To move locations from the dewy Northwest to the sunny South comes with a welcomed aperture adjustment as I open to the light. My studio here is flooded with natural light. It sits out back in the yard of my husband’s childhood home where we now live in the winters. There’s a quality here I tap into. It’s about the light, the color, the people. Relationship and kindness are valued highest. At first I thought I’d be a fish out of water here. I mean, I’m kind of a feisty feminist and very independent. But I’ve fallen in love with this place that doesn’t care to be rarified, a place that enfolds the Civil War, forgotten industrial landscapes, abandoned mills, ancestral roots, plantations, patriarchy, racial strife, and daddy’s girls, along with a new generation trying to push things forward. The work I do has to do with movement and rhythms found in classical western music as well as the natural world. The music is in me, and I paint about it wherever I am. But the information in Southern light activates my paintings in a way that imbues them with a likened buoyancy, weightlessness, and transparency.

-Betsy Eby

Betsy Eby

Eby embraces big themes, and her work is pervaded by spirituality and sublimity, as are the paintings of Anselm Kiefer and Cy Twombly, two artists she much admires. Metaphysically inclined, Eby’s art attempts to transubstantiate paint, to make paint capture the sensory, sensual experience of meditation and be a vehicle for contemplation. Eby expressed a hope that her paintings might provide an entry into an alternate state of consciousness—and through the passionate conviction of subjective vision the universal might be breached. A gifted classical pianist, she often cites music as a source of inspiration. It is the pulse of the music and the immediacy of its effect—like the alternating surges of the sea and the rhythms of the world and the universe—that most informs her work, and she eloquently compares a rubato to a “quiet like the Sufi dervish who finds stillness in motion.” Her marks, too, are notational and seem to be marking time, each mark a trace, a remnant, signifying a moment in time’s unstoppable passage, like a musical composition. Eby’s point of view has much in common with the mystics and the romantics, where life—with all its joys and tragedies—is in thrall to nature and nature is triumphant, grandly summarized in the sonorously cadenced, biblical last lines of Melville’sMoby Dick:

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

–Excerpt from Lily Wei’s Metaphysics and Metamorphoses: The Paintings of Betsy Eby

Ten Things I Can’t Do Without

My talented, romantic, mischievous, husband, Bo

My painting practice

My Steinway B and most late 19th and early 20th century music

Green tea

Yoga

My amazing girlfriends

My stable family

Beauty

Nature and vistas

Adventure

Betsy Eby's contributions:

Summer 2012: Portfolio: Paintings

Driving the backroads of Georgia and scenes of Columbus.

Savannah: SCAD Museum. SCAD's expanded museum opened October 2011. Exhibitions: Jane Alexander, Ralph Pucci, Sigalit Landau.

On our way to Savannah we drive through an alley of live oaks. In Savannah, the Telfair Museum, the Telfair's Jepson Center for Contemporary Art, and SCAD Museum.

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