Storm Art
Uninvited Guest, by Margaret Schrimpf
By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor
The fifth in a year-long series of articles about local art, culture and creativity.
One can barely swing a cat in Glen Arbor without hitting an artist recording the landscape. Leelanau County is rich in the kinds of natural features that are catnip to creative people — verdant land, big sky and sweet water lakes carved out by the glaciers. These physical characteristics, preserved, in part, by the National Park — lure painters, and other artmakers, here in droves. It’s the region’s physical beauty that prompts so much creative expression.
But what happens to that same urge to make art about the landscape when the landscape changes dramatically? When the natural world brings about a storm that uproots old trees and rearranges them into insurmountable tangles? Or, paints the sky in eerie hues of green and black? Or, throws a spanner into the picture-worthy perfection depicted on so many canvases?
One makes a different kind of art.
Resilience, by Sherri McNamara
When the Glen Arbor Art Association (GAAA) organized “New Views: A Storm of Art,” it asked applicants to submit work that interpreted — rather than documented — the Aug. 2, 2015 windstorm, a little event that brought straight-line winds in excess of 100 miles per hour. That call-for-entries was answered by 43 applicants from Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Florida and Arizona. Twenty-seven works of 2-D and 3-D media, and writing were juried into the exhibition. Eight pieces were purchased. And, according to the GAAA, nearly 400 people went through the June 10-23 exhibition.
The GAAA’s exhibition sprang from the belief that art — visual, written, performance — provides a way to help people take on and explore impossible, painful, sometimes unimaginable realities. Perhaps this is because art making isn’t about creating a strict record of fact. Creative acts are responses, a digestion and distillation of the hard facts. And what comes out doesn’t necessarily resemble what first went in through the maker’s eyes, ears and mind. For instance, dramatic weather events — such as the Aug. 2 storm — provided early 20th century regionalist painter John Steuart Curry with the fodder he needed to paint “Tornado Over Kansas” — a 1920s-era picture of a Kansas family seeking cover with their farm animals from the storm. Curry, a native Kansan, returned to the elements with the 1934 painting “The Line Storm” — déjà vu all over again for anyone who experienced the Aug. 2 storm. Then there’s “The Sandy Monologues,” a 2016 stage play that chronicles the loss, destruction and slow recovery of Red Hook, a Brooklyn neighborhood, devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Red Hook residents’ stories of this deadly storm were collected by the Brooklyn-based Falconworks Theater Group, and used to create the production. In much the same spirit, “New Views” asked for Aug. 2 storm stories. It asked exhibitors to regard their storm experiences as a creative problem, and then come up with a solution that was not a direct transcription of the natural world.
Lake Leelanau painter Margaret Schrimpf and her husband were headed out-of-town on Aug. 2. They accelerated their departure when Margaret registered dark clouds gathering in the distance. “I thought, ‘This is going to hit soon, and we’d better finish loading up the car.’ I had no idea what those dark clouds held,” she said. The Schrimpfs were several miles south of Traverse City when the storm hit. Several days later, they returned to their Leelanau County home and surveyed the damage.
“When the email from the GAAA came about the (“New Views”) show, I thought, ‘Oh my goodness! I saw those black clouds. I can paint those black clouds’,” Margaret said. She went on to create two paintings, “Wild Thing,” an angry multicolored swirl executed in acrylic paint, and “Uninvited Guest,” a 40” long canvas, the length of which emphasized the menacing black clouds that hover over a very small house. Both paintings were accepted into “New Views.”
Margaret usually works in oil paint in a very representational fashion: a flower is a flower and a tree is a tree and there’s never any confusion. “New Views,” however, “pushed me a little farther into how I feel about the landscape,” she said. “It made me want to go in a different direction with my art.”
In contrast, Pamela Decoker’s “New Views” entry was a continuation of her approach to artmaking — a minimalist, “labor-intensive, quiet way of working that’s meditative, and allows for some reflection,” said the Ohio resident. “Aftermath,” a series of 9” x 9” prints represented what Pamela saw when she surveyed the storm days after it had happened. She and her husband, Gary, were at home in Columbus on Aug. 2, but planned to be in Empire by mid-August. “We had no idea how intense that storm was,” she said. “It was pretty overwhelming when we finally saw it, and it took a while to grasp the magnitude and intensity of the whole thing. There were piles and piles of cut logs on the roadway. I responded to these remains.” In specific, she zeroed in on the trees’ concentric growth rings, a graphic arrangement of ascending circles. To represent them, Decoker sliced an onion, inked it, and using a Japanese printing technique created a series of 18 rubbings. “In my work I do a lot of things with repetition, and, to me, they were really beautiful, those piles of trees.”
The work of visual artists is, among many competing challenges, the work of giving shape and physicality to ideas, thoughts and experiences. It’s a creative drive that compels one to turn slippery, personal intangibles into a 3-dimensional object. Lake Ann resident Cherie Corell’s artmaking is predicated on this.
Cherie watched the Aug. 2 storm in her rearview mirror as she sped west on M-72 toward home. “I’ll never forget the horrible color of the clouds,” she said. “They were green and purple and heavy, like a carpet coming across the sky.” Tree branches flew. Rain sheeted sideways. It was reminiscent of that time back in 1965 when watercolorist Walter Anderson lashed himself to a tree on Horn Island so that he could experience firsthand the wrath of Hurricane Betsy as she moved over his Mississippi island home. Cherie Corell didn’t lash herself to her car; but she got a good look at the eye of the storm.
“I’ve been working with an overarching theme for years,” she said. “It’s based on the impact of the environment on (human habitation) and the relationship between the natural world and the human made. That has pulled me in the direction of using found objects weathered by time and nature.” Some of these found objects — a car tire, a stump pulled out of her neighbor’s yard, other detritus — found their way into “Life Emerges Again,” a mixed media sculpture standing 64 inches tall. Cherie wrapped a section of tire — a long strip of rubber that could have been a retread flung off a truck tire — around the wood base of her “New Views” entry. It was topped off with shredded tire filaments “that suggest new life. I wanted the piece to be uplifting,” she said. “I wanted the piece to look like something from nature that was growing up again and again; like a metaphor for the (Glen Arbor) community coming together and moving on.”
Cherie Corell’s sentiments are echoed in “Resilience!” It’s a disarmingly eerie piece painted by Traverse Citian Sherry McNamara. The painting was given a second prize award from the “New Views” jurors, Sheila Stafford and Barbara Krause. In the foreground is a small child, dressed in yellow rain slicker and rubber boots. This little person is in mid-leap, poised to drop into a flooded spot on M-22. At first glance “Resilience!” reads like a charming, nearly-nostalgic vignette from childhood; but then the eye travels back into the painting where Sherry has depicted two mature trees: one down across the road, the other hung precariously overhead in widow-maker fashion on another tree.
“A child looks at the world so differently than an adult,” Sherry said. “Children don’t process as much of the damage, or what’s going to happen in the future, or what happened in the past. They look at the moment, and say, ‘Hey! There’s a puddle to jump in!’ It’s an attitude adults should adopt.”
The day before the storm, Sherry had been painting in Glen Arbor, part of the GAAA’s Plein Air Paint Out event. Her response to the storm was one of heartbreak. But as she moved through the process of creating her “New Views” entry, she found a way to adopt the hopeful attitude her painting conveys. “I hope it provided someone, even if only one person, a sense that this will be OK,” she said. “Time and art heal things.”
