It’s a new year: Some may resolve to lose a few pounds, some vow to volunteer for a cause or get in touch with an old friend.
Fine art photographer Betsy McKean is going public with her resolution to revisit her first love, painting, in a show of new work that will open at the Center for Spiritual Care on Jan. 9.
But don’t expect oil- or acrylic-on-canvas paintings in this exhibition, which will include photographs and mixed media collages, some of which have nary a stroke of paint on them.
“What I’m trying to do is transition back to painting from doing the photography. I couldn’t do it all in one bold leap. I had to kind of creep my way into it,” McKean says. “That’s why I call this show ‘Transitions.’”
Fans of the artist’s award-winning abstract photographs will be gratified to see a handful of those works in the exhibition, including the never-before seen “Constellations.” Created before McKean entered the digital age, that one is a double exposure shot in-camera on color transparency film and printed in the positive-to-positive process commonly known as Cibachrome.
The photograph had its origins some years back when McKean and her husband Mac lived in Lexington, KY. Against the crystalline black surface of her granite kitchen counter, McKean arranged a child-like vision of the universe in which a cardboard planet and its moons (M&M candies) float among spiral-shaped galaxies (jelly fishing worms), nebulae (plastic bangle bracelets) and the Southern Cross (cocktail spears).
“We were snowed in for the weekend. I did nothing but shoot pictures for two days,” she says.
McKean began taking digital pictures about four years ago; her “film” is now a memory card and her “darkroom” is a photo editing program in her computer.
“Transitions” includes two digital prints from her “Converging Containers” series: “Floating Blue Bag” and “Floating Black Bag,” that were last seen at Darby Fine Art in 2012. The more recent “Color Rush” of 2013 features a bright array of paper strips overlaid with the crinkled folds of a sheet of pink tissue paper.
Creating abstract compositions in Photoshop is “fun to do, but I get tired of being at the computer so long,” McKean says.
About a year ago, she began to yearn for “actual textures, to have the feel of paint,” McKean says. She bought a raft of new art supplies: acrylic pigments and painting mediums and brushes, as well as adhesives and papers with which to add collage elements to a series of new works.
True to her desire to proceed deliberately into new aesthetic territory, photographic imagery is present in nearly every one of the new works.
For example, “Falling Leaves,” a composition in electric blue, hot pink, magenta and red, is a collage of cut-up photo prints of leaves that incorporates the lacy skeletons of real dried leaves along with acrylic paint and tissue paper.
In addition to breaking free of the computer, McKean is anxious to rid herself of the necessity of presenting her works under glass.
“The thing I hate about photographs is you always have to have that glass, and all the reflections in it,” she says.
To present her collages, McKean has taken to sealing them with matte acrylic medium, not only to protect them, but also to give the disparate materials she uses a homogeneous surface.
A work that has no photographic imagery in it is “Sextet,” a collage-painting composed of a couple of older artworks.
“You know how every artist has things that don’t work out? This was a watercolor painting that didn’t work. It was on tissue mounted on thick illustration board,” she says. After cutting up the painting into roughly square pieces, McKean got out her paints and made each square a small abstract artwork in itself.
“I sort of fell in love with them and thought, ‘What am I going to do with them?’ ” McKean ultimately decided to assemble the paintings as a single artwork, gluing them in two rows of three on a hardboard panel that bore another one of her earlier, and subsequently unloved, paintings. The success of “Sextet,” with its tiles of amorphous color arranged as a sharply defined grid, tempts her, she says, to do others like it.
McKean is not new to hands-on art making; with a master’s in fine art, she has taught at the college level in Virginia and Kentucky, including at the University of Virginia.
After receiving an undergraduate degree in art education she was a painting major at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where she earned her MFA.
McKean got into photography after she left graduate school and was teaching art at Richard Bland College in Petersburg, VA. She returned to Virginia Commonwealth, 20 miles north of Petersburg, for her training in photography.
That was back in the days of the f-stop, roll film and wet processing.
Like many a budding photographer before her, watching an image develop on paper in the darkroom was “magical,” and she was hooked.
Photography “teaches you composition like nothing else,” says McKean, who has advised fellow artists that “to bring more drama into their painting, they should study the great photographers, especially in black and white, to see how they use values.”
On a personal level, photography led McKean to develop her own unique vision.
“I used to ask my (painting) instructors, how do I develop a style of my own? And they said, ‘Just work.’”
But “just working” did nothing to help McKean go beyond the boundaries of her academic art education, which were reinforced when she began her own career teaching art.
“I think when you have taught art, sometimes you know too many rules; you know the rules too well, and it’s difficult to break loose,” she says.
“Some people like to paint people, some people like to paint landscapes. I didn’t know what I wanted to paint. But with photography, I’m constantly seeing something that triggers an idea. Or that I want to point out to other people. I mean, that’s what photography is, in a way – you are immortalizing the moment, and you are saying to somebody else, look at this, isn’t this neat?’ ”
Now that she is crafting her artworks physically instead of virtually, McKean says she “can’t stop the idea flow” that the photographic medium opened up for her.
As far as her layered, abstract compositions are concerned, it hardly matters whether she is holding a brush or a camera.
“I think of (them as) visual puzzles. That’s what appeals to me,” she says.
The Center for Spiritual Care is at 1550 24th Street in Vero Beach. “Transitions” will open on Jan. 9 with a reception from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. The exhibition runs through March 6.
