Mary Chiaramonte Speaks for Herself

The phone interview is split into two parts.  One part takes place in my car outside a concert.  Our connection is anything but stellar.  The second part takes place just after Mary gets back from seeing a concert.  I realize that it might not be the phone connection that's the problem at all.

Over three hours over four days I know Mary Chiaramonte well enough to write a little about her.  The questions I ask are too definitive in nature.  The either/or type question doesn't work with Mary.  Perhaps the choices are too extreme.  It seems like there's something just beneath the surface with her that I can't get to.  The conversations go well -- which is why I'm having a hard time believing that I don't have a more substantive article.

Throughout the interview Mary laughs a lot.   She laughs at herself, she laughs at our bad connection, she laughs when I ask her a tough question.  She laughs if I laugh.  I think there is a darker side to her, but I'm not privy to it.  Plus, says she, "I think I'm happier in my life now." 

I'm not sure that most articles written on Mary Chiaramonte accurately portray the woman, and I don't want to follow suit.  So, I'm going to turn this article over entirely to her.  Mary Chiaramonte is going to give you what she gave me -- insight into her world of painting, but not full admission.

 

STRAWBERRY

"It's kind of unlike any other feeling -- you just kind of drift off into another world, and nothing else really matters.  I feel like it's hard to sometimes come back to the real life when I'm done.  I definitely can't talk to anybody or paint with other things going on in the house most of the time.  I have to go into this little zone, or just get caught up in that place."

"I have to be feeling relatively okay to paint -- It's difficult when I'm upset about something -- that's not very often.  It's just like with anything – insane things that can make working less easy to focus on."

"Most of my inspiration doesn't really come from other artists or paintings even -- but music.  I like a lot of music, and good writers also. I'm kind of pleasantly obsessed with Modest Mouse."

"What they say of writing, to write what you know -- same goes for painting as far as I can tell."  

"I know that my drawings might not be as similar as my paintings -- they're entirely different things in a sense."

"I decided that I wanted to paint, that was in 2001.  And that was a slow start.  So now I'm pretty much self-taught as far as the painting goes.  I did that for six years and then went back to get my masters in painting.  I guess during that time it took me a year or so before I was really involved with exhibitions and a year before I was going to say that I was an artist."   

"I just wanted to do as much as I could do with it.  I worked very hard for the six years.  It was just something that I was pretty much infatuated with.  Just working on it all -- I loved it and there wasn't anything else I was interested in." 

 

 SOFT MEMORY FOCUS

"I save the photographs to work from, or otherwise I might just happen to catch something that's going on that is interesting."

"This is a painting."  [said as Mary took the photograph which became "Soft Memory Focus" on right] 

"[I take inspiration from] just everyone around me mostly.  I think that being an artist can sometimes be a bit lonesome because you're always just at home painting in the cave.  I guess you can feel a little isolated."

"I'm starting a new - -it's pretty much the same kinds of things, people and different narratives and the subject matter with the people."

"A lot of my ideas are also from imagination." 

"sometimes from memory"  

"What I do basically is draw from photographs just to get certain shapes and things like that down and the composition laid out and then I pretty much paint it however I want to, and change things up a little bit so it's not always entirely from photographs."

 

VIRGINIA

“My Lazy Bones / Funny Bones series -- it just kind of means a lot to me, because it's something that I've done once a year every year with my sister, my twin sister.  She means a lot to me, so I guess there's that sentimentality wrapped up with it."

"Plus it's something that I plan to do for years to come, however many years."

"My sister is a veterinarian.  She's good though -- she's good at drawing, yet I haven’t seen her do so much of it for a while now as she is often tied up with her working."

"No, not at all, and that was a thing I had to learn on my own that was really frustrating.  My mother, she knows everything, as they say, and she helps me out with some of the ins and outs of it, but that was something that I really struggled with in the beginning."

"Well I think it's just sort of a generalization of our lifestyle growing up.  It doesn't really have to do so much with no TV but that we lived in this very remote area -- and you know I pretty much spent a lot of my time drawing and painting or just... We didn't have neighbors right next to us it wasn't suburbia or anything close to that.  Our parents wanted us to grow up with a good set of values maybe, or they were just done with the downtown Baltimore thing + sought its opposite."

"We just pretty much worked and lived off the land."

"They've always been really supportive of anything that we three have wanted to do."

"Being around friends and family -- That's the favorite thing of mine." 

 

HANDSOME

"Sort of loses an element -- more avenues a viewer could go down with their thinking by just seeing bodies and not faces. There could be too many answers with the facial element there. I don’t have intentions to place a certain idea onto anyone, or guide them by hand to this or that place, rather that they take with them what they will."

"She has that, I don't know, just a certain look about her face that kind of drew me."  [On Jessie Mann]

"I asked her if she wanted to do that because I knew she like modeling -- she seems like she has a blast with it.  She has this bold personality about her.  That's why I wanted to do that."  

"With the Camille Claudel series, my brother proposed this thing where I made the same image differently each day for a year by media and technique. I just started thinking more about other things, somewhere along the time line of working on those and I began making more work about narratives, whether mine or other’s.  Prior to that I think I was just making portraits - a lot of portraits and things that didn't really have anything to do with anything."

 

 

SELF PORTRAIT

"I feel I need to work with people on a daily basis -- [I'm] joining school to be out of the house more or in order to just learn what I can about anyone else. I have a lot of questions for them, whether they go unasked or not, just watching them is sometimes enough. The person I live with says I do this with our animals too. They are all some curious things.”

"I've been trying to paint outside myself as a way to see where other people are coming from. I am pretty much dazzled at how someone else is going to view a thing."

"I hope to teach studio art as well as keep some of my work in painting" 

"Those are the plans. [laugh]" 

"I guess on the average I'd say four to five hours a day and five or six days a week.  I spend a lot of time doing that [painting]."

"Um..that's a good one...these are some pretty tough questions [laugh]."

"I mean anything I've done, any little place I can go is rewarding. It’s sort of, you know brick by brick, it comes in little pieces at a time.  I just want to keep going with it as much as I can -- do whatever is a possibility."

"There are certain ones that I can be satisfied with when I'm done.  But I feel there's always room for improvement.  I mean that's just part of it. It's kind of a never-ending learning process I guess."

"It doesn't really matter to me so long as I'm living it up. [laugh]" 

 

Mary recently went back to school to get her MFA from Radford in VA.  She received her bachelor's degree there in 2001.  Her undergraduate concentration was drawing.  Her goal is to teach studio art, which serves two purposes.  First, and most important, it lets her continue to paint.  Second, it makes sure that she doesn't get caught up painting all the time.  There is not necessarily a favorite piece in her collection, though there is a favorite series (Lazy Bones / Funny Bones) for reasons that stretch beyond any technical element.  There are some things you are not allowed to talk about with her.  She'll be very pleasant when she asks you not to mention them.  She whole-heartedly agreed with me when I said there was a child-like element to artists when they slip into their world of creation -- a don't bother me, I'm playing - type mentality.  She loves her family, adores music, and is very easy to talk with.  While quotes from her contemporaries did not make the article, you can rest assured that there was nothing but positive things said about the woman and the artist. 

 

Upcoming events for Mary Chiaramonte include another year of school, a showing at Longview Gallery in DC (where she will make an appearance), and continued representation by Nevin Kelly.  The date of the Longview Gallery opening has not yet been set.  Please see either www. longviewgallery.com or www.merrysee.com for details.

You can view Mary Chiaramonte's work currently at the Nevin Kelly Gallery.  www.nevinkellygallery.com

Of course all things Mary Chiaramonte, or at least those things that Mary makes public, can be found at www.merrysee.com.

 

All Artwork ©2009 Mary Chiaramonte, All Rights Reserved

"Article" written by Chris Davis