Katherine is in her element when she teaches. “Th is is my sandbox,” she likes to tell her students. “Th is is where I get to play.” She has been cutting back on her teaching commitments but had been looking forward to visiting Gloucester again and working with students in Masella’s spacious, well-lit and airy studio.
OPPOSITE: Katherine Chang Liu with students Laura Jackson (TOP LEFT), Deanna Chillian (TOP RIGHT), Joyce Hill (BOTTOM LEFT).
ALL STUDIO PHOTOS BY ANITA EASTER
Bahamas toward the Atlantic seaboard, 25 artists from as far away as
Washington state converged on Gloucester, Mass. for Katherine Chang Liu’s painting workshop at Kat Masella’s Northeast Art Workshop Retreat.
The largest city on Cape Ann, a rocky promontory at the northern limit of Massachusetts Bay about 30 miles north of Boston, Gloucester is America’s oldest seaport and the setting for The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger’s chronicle of the Halloween Nor’easter that devastated the area in 1991. With meteorolo- gists issuing dire warnings of cataclysmic rain and wind from the Carolinas to New England and banks of monitors at the airport transmitting satellite images of what must have looked like the Vortex of Doom to nervous fl iers, it seemed possible that the workshop could be disrupted by the unpredictable storm.
Katherine’s workshop sessions are generally divided into slide lectures, where Katherine discusses the work of a range of contemporary artists with a unique voice, and the painting studio, where students receive personalized attention. For the fi rst two days, Katherine devotes her attention to individual critiques.
She asks students to bring images of their (previous) work in order to discuss their ideas, to examine what’s working and what isn’t, and to help them develop strat- egies for meeting the challenges and goals they want to set for themselves. For the duration of the workshop, the artists meet with Katherine throughout the day, with time set aside during the painting studio for “talk,”
“talk-talk,” and “emergency”—informal categories that correspond to a student’s ascending level of need.
During the morning slide lectures, Katherine expands the conversation beyond the inspirations and infl uences of the artists whose work is on view into a broader discussion about the nature of art and fi nding self-expression, sprinkled with witty and sometimes tangential observations about current events, literature and human behavior. On occasion, she will include a
series of slides to illustrate the transformation of her own work from the representational to the abstract, from the pure lay- ers of transparent color to the multidimensional complexity of
mixed media, as she matured from a young, self-taught painter into a seasoned professional artist. Katherine attributes her evolution as a painter to a conscious deci- sion she made early on to educate herself about art and to be appreciative of the myriad ways in which other artists develop the ideas in their work.
At the same time, Katherine cautions her students about being unduly infl uenced by other artists: “Study their work, absorb the lessons and then fi le the infor- mation away somewhere in your subconscious.” Her workshops are not about technique or learning to paint like someone else; they are about individuality and discovery. Some of her longtime students call her the
“Art Whisperer”—a label that seems to embarrass and amuse her in equal measure—because of her ability to understand what they are trying to say with their work,
“At every turn, there was yet another rocky inlet, another tableau of moored fi shing vessels, another velveteen marshland dotted with a soft confetti of snow-colored egrets whose wings sparkled in the sunlight.”
ABOVE: The tail end of Hurricane Joaquin at Halibut Point State Park in Rockport, Mass.
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Never feel precious about your work.
Be peerless. Pay attention to your own mind. Generate your own ideas. Don’t keep other artists’ work around for reference or inspiration.
Your work is a refl ection of who you are. Consider it your
“self-portrait.”
Art is about growth. You should be constantly striving to grow, evolve and improve.
Learn to appreciate the variety and creativity of other artists without judgment.
Look more deeply at other art- ists’ work, beyond the surface.
Instead of inquiring about medium or technique, study the work for what it has to say, for what the artist is trying to achieve.
Put Post-it notes on your painting with comments at the end of the day. The notes will provide a starting point when you return to the studio the next day.
When you do a series (20 pieces, at a minimum), the fi rst fi ve are the easiest.
Beginning around number six, the real work begins, when your imagination is put to work.
On the “left brain versus right brain” question: Every decision you make as an art- ist is a combination of “left brain” (analytical, systematic, orderly) skills—what colors to choose, for example—and
“right brain” (intuitive, instinc- tual, subconscious) abilities—
how to use those colors.
LEFT: Katherine with students (clockwise): Catherine Maunsell;
Barbara Kellogg, B.J. Arnold, Joyce Homan, Everett Webber.
even if they can’t quite articulate it themselves, and to visualize the path they should take, even when they’re not quite sure of their destination.
TAKING RISKS “Above all,” Katherine says,
“don’t be precious with your work.” In other words, don’t cling to the familiar. Be objective about what works and what’s grown stale. Allow yourself the freedom to explore and be willing to search deep inside yourself to discover something new. “It’s all about the ideas,” she says; “art is just the end result of the ideas.”
Early in her art career, an unplanned detour from her job as a pharmaceutical chemist, Katherine found success with a lyrical style of landscape paint- ing that often favored the pro- saic details—rocks, twigs, roots, the reeds at water’s edge—over
dominant topographical features. With her usual self- deprecating humor, she says the color palette of her paintings fortuitously matched the trending shades in sofas at the time. It was a lot of sofas; to keep up with
TOP AND ABOVE RIGHT:
Gloucester Harbor ABOVE LEFT: The former
Paint Factory is now the headquarters of Ocean Alliance, which studies whales.
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review in the local newspaper. I was searching for a way to paint landscapes in my own voice. Chatter (on the right) was painted this year. Chatter refl ects our “new normal”—a life bombarded by too much unfi ltered information.—KATHERINE CHANG LIU
on paper, 36x36) by Katherine Chang Liu
ABOVE RIGHT: Chatter (2016; mixed media on panel, 36x36) by Katherine Chang Liu
demand for her work, Katherine became a “painting factory.” Over time, she grew restless with the work she was doing and decided to take a break—to the consternation of her gallery, which had a waiting list for her paintings.
After a lengthy hiatus and a period of creative rediscovery, she developed a more abstract direction in her painting that felt like a better fi t. Th e new paint- ings were well received and the audience for her work grew. Since then, her work has continued to evolve so that it feels more authentically true to herself—as all our work must, she tells the group.
A REMARKABLE RANGE Most of the artists in the Gloucester workshop used water-based media for practical reasons related to travel and transport, but the variety of ways in which each utilized their materials is a testament to the imagination and diversity of human
nature. A workshop can be a cauldron for experimentation.
Some of the artists use their own biography as a starting point for their work; others use the process to generate meaning as their paintings progress. One
artist with a background in photography incorporated digital elements into her mixed-media collages; another photographer with a vast library of botanical images used them as the basis for gelatin prints.
One artist was at work on a series of paintings inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses; another combined her poetry with collage in a booklike format, one of which took the form of a travel journal inspired by a trip to Egypt. An art instructor used gelatin printing techniques and an extensive variety of found elements to create texture in collages with a saturated palette.
Several artists used Yupo to achieve diff erent eff ects;
one layered paint to create abstractions of color rela- tionships, and another used pigmented inks to achieve a resistlike eff ect on the glossy surface. In a corner of the studio, Kat Masella worked on encaustic paintings in between answering to the demands of running her business and baking healthful treats for the workshop participants. And one brave artist worked in oils.
EXPLORING THE TERRAIN Th e demands of the workshop didn’t allow much free time beyond dinner at the array of neighborhood restaurants. Th ere is apparently not a bad meal to be had in this area:
Th ere’s a reason that “lobster” rhymes with “Gloucester”
ABOVE: Sunrise at Cape Ann’s Marina Resort, overlook- ing the Annisquam River.
ALL PHOTOS OF GLOUCESTER BY JUDITH FAIRLY
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and some of the others used the time to explore the area. Th ankfully, Joaquin moved out to sea, sparing New England from all but a few days of heavy rain and churning waves that drew a pack of hardy surfers to Cape Ann’s outer beaches, along with a single parasailer, invisible among the low, gray clouds but for his rainbow-striped canopy.
Saturday morning was an opportunity to lin- ger over coff ee at a lovely location next to the Cape Ann Museum (which includes in its collection works by Gilbert Stuart, Winslow Homer, Milton Avery, Cecilia Beaux and John Sloan, along with native son Fitz Henry Lane); to visit local galleries (“Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt” at Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy was noteworthy);
to experience the tempestuous confl uence of sea and rock at Halibut Point, or to browse the quaint shops in Essex and Rockport. Th ere was a group dinner each week and Katherine gave an invited lecture one eve- ning at the North Shore Arts Association. As usually happens, time seemed to speed up the second week, and the end came much too quickly.
CRITIQUE, NOT CRITICISM Th e students all gathered on the last day for a group critique—as opposed to “criticism”—and Katherine discussed each artist’s work, sometimes off ering suggestions but always encouragement; she gave each person a fi nal opportunity to ask questions. Katherine conveys great confi dence in the potential of her students and optimism that they can achieve their goals. Most progress will be achieved after the artists return home and begin the real task of putting what they’ve discovered to work. “We paint because we must,” she tells them. ■
JUDITH FAIRLY writes about the arts and makes art, as she travels around the country and the world.