In 1947 she came to the United States from Italy as a War Bride. Louisville, Kentucky had been her new home for thirty years. During the last ten years, she had been enjoying the camaraderie and prestige that participating in local art festivals and competitions provided.
When the nation’s economy began to spiral downward in the late seventies, art sales were harder to come by leaving artists like herself to rethink their priorities.
“I’m going to stop painting!” she told me in a telephone conversation early one morning. ”People aren’t buying a lot and I don’t see much sense in painting anymore. I may as well just stop.”
Her declaration caught me off guard. As director of a non-profit gallery that promoted the works of local artists, I wore the hat of confidant on as many occasions as one of hanging and rehanging the gallery’s many paintings.
“Please don’t do that,” I begged her. Like so many of her contemporaries, although financial gain from artwork was not immediately necessary for daily survival, the applause she most often needed to hear for personal satisfaction was the well-timed ringing of a cash register chime.
“Sometimes the last thing you paint is the first thing you sell,” I told her and then recounted to her my own experience from a festival the previous weekend.
Early in the week, before preparing to pack for that festival, I was moving items around in my studio area and almost pushed aside a painting that was near completion. When working in oils, I respect drying time and do not immediately finish a work in short order. Instead of shoving the painting into a corner where it might have languished for a month or perhaps longer, I reached for my brushes and worked on the canvas.
Satisfied with having one more landscape to hang on my display units, I was very pleased when my newest work became the first sale at the festival.
It was fortunate that the valuable lesson I had recently learned could help bring that depressed artist through a hard time. She kept painting and added many more canvases to her credit.
And that mini-lecture I used for her came in handy for many others, and myself as well, to hear when, through the years, giving up would appear to be the most sensible and easiest art path to take.