ART TALKS at The Artistic Forum

Marieluise Hutchinson at her easel with ©"Fires of Winter".

When she was a girl living in Hanover, Massachusetts, Marieluise Von Colln didn’t harbor secret dreams of one day being a noted artist. Her aspirations were far simpler: she wanted a husband, security, and the American dream ─ a home of her own, preferably with a big old barn nearby. The daughter of a successful commercial artist father and homemaker mother, she says she often watched her father work from his office in their home and was aware of the talent he possessed not just as an artist but, she adds, pointing to two copper sconces hanging on each side of the fireplace in her Yarmouthport home, as a coppersmith, as well. “There was nothing on earth I didn’t think my father couldn’t do,” she said.

As much as she enjoyed watching her father work, however, following in his footsteps was not the kind of career she saw in her future.

Her life growing up in the fifties was pretty much like that of any other kid growing up in that era: it was filled with innocent adolescent adventure, fond memories and simple dreams. Her family lived on an eleven-acre homestead in a 150-year-old home with a large barn next to it. “I was in the barn as often as I was in our house”, she says, noting that the barn was a popular gathering place for her sister, brother and she. They even named one of the stables The Silver Spike ─ a homage to The Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers. Marieluise’s fascination with barns was natural, she says, describing how on one occasion she hid in the hayloft and watched the barn sway in the wind while a hurricane raged outside, a pretty exciting experience, she says with a hint of mischief, looking back from a little safer distance today.

©"Winter Sets In" by Marieluise Hutchinson

While she may not have been aware of it at the time, or for decades afterward, the powerful influence of a country life in the quiet rural setting of their Hanover homestead, and the years she spent playing in the big barn that both fascinated and excited her imagination as a child, not only had a profound impact on her life then, but would eventually define her art in years to come.

A time of change and growth

Although she spent eighteen years of her life in Hanover, and would have been quite happy to remain, that was not to be the case. While in her late teens her parents decided to leave Hanover and build a smaller home in Cummaquid on the Cape, a move that didn’t sit well with her. “I felt totally out of place on the Cape. I knew no one and had no friends. It was awful.” To compound matters, a marriage that began a couple years after the move, ended seven years later in divorce, leaving her with two daughters to raise on her own. It was at this point that the stark realization of life as a single mother set in: it was sink or swim. If she harbored a fantasy of painting one day, it would have to take second seat to earning a living. But second seat is better than no seat.

Undaunted, she worked part time at a bank to earn enough money to survive and meet the mortgage, and painted evenings as a hobby. “It was kind of recreational to me after being home with the kids as a single mom. I was always challenging myself to get better,” she says of her early efforts, dismissing the discomfort of working in a cold, unheated basement, writing it off as dues she would have to pay if she hoped to succeed. Determined to develop her skill, she refined her talent not in art classes, but painting by painting, night after night, year after year, one step at a time. “Everything that I did, I did from trial and error,” she said of the early years.

An artist emerges

When her children were older, and her skill as an artist improved, she decided to enroll in an adult art education class at the Mattacheese Middle School in West Yarmouth. It was an experience she found unfulfilling. If the classes didn’t meet her expectations, they did at least provide her with the opportunity to paint with others, socialize and talk about art. The years of trial and error began to pay off. Indeed, the quality of her work improved so much so that her friends encouraged her to seek a wider audience. At the time, she says, she resisted. “I didn’t have the confidence in myself that others had in me.” But clearly, she had a talent.

In spite of her self-doubt, she began showing her work at weekend shows sponsored by the Yarmouth Art Guild. “I worked during the day, painted at night and sold on weekends.” Not surprisingly, the sale of her art boosted her confidence and created a loyal following of buyers who eagerly sought what she produced. It was the mid-eighties. With a subject matter and style that seemed popular, and steady sales validating her talent, she approached Roy Hammer and Jim Hinkle, owners of Cummaquid Fine Arts in Cummaquid, Massachusetts. They were impressed enough with her work that they invited her to display full time. Hammer says that while he doesn’t recall whether they asked her or she called them, by the time they met, they already knew something about her work through a display at the Cape Cod Art Association. “We were interested,” he recalls, “because her work was different. It was simple, almost naïve, and had a quality that was appealing, very New England.”

©"Sandy Neck" by Marieluise Hutchinson

The deal was cinched when Roy’s mother noted: “She’s a nice lady. Maybe she ought to be here.”

Being accepted as a gallery artist was a major step for this emerging artist who, in return for being given her first big break, brought to the Cummaquid gallery a unique focus, a unique style, and a unique vision of Americana that to this day defines her art. She didn’t paint traditional landscapes. She didn’t paint still life or marine art. Hardly ever is there a human figure to be seen in her work, although they are cropping up occasionally in some of her newer pieces. By and large, she paints homes in scenic, peaceful settings, winter and summer, and always, always, with a barn next door and a flag to be seen hanging somewhere. “I was interested in painting barns and buildings. There’s something about buildings that I’m attracted to ─

clapboard, dark windows, almost like eyes looking out at you, mossy green roofs and shingles.” Her country theme became her Hallmark, and her Hallmark grew steadily over the early years as a drawing card for the Cummaquid gallery.

There was another feature about her paintings that emerged, more stylistic, natural and enduring. Almost from the beginning, her paintings conveyed more than color and subject, they conveyed a sense of peace and comfort. A Marieluise painting is a slice of pure Americana that is reflected not just in her work, but in the way she describes her feelings about her work. “I still get a lump in my throat when I see a flag on Veterans Day.” Indeed, she once almost ended an interview with a writer from New York who asked, flippantly: “So, what is it with you and all these flags in your paintings?” It was the wrong way to start an interview with this unabashed patriot.

©"Come Wintertime" by Marieluise Hutchinson

Her fascination with New England architecture, old country homes and barns with flags out front, and plenty of open space all around, dominates her body of work. Each painting captures the essence of what it is like to grow up in a place that nurtures warm memories ─ just like her childhood years in Hanover. She stresses, however, that while her paintings may evoke memories, everything she paints is a place she has been, sometimes at risk to herself. “If I see a place I want to paint, I’m all over it,” she says with some amusement of her subject gathering trips to locations in Maine and Vermont. “I cut through back yards, beat back dogs. I even had a guy chase me off his property with a cane once.”

She takes the risk, she says, because “people really like to know that the place exists. Those who paint like this are record keepers,” she says, noting that what she paints is part of the history of the places she visits. “Sometimes when I go back its [her original subject matter] gone, or vandalized or burned down. It remains only in art.”

A change in career:

By her second year at Cummaquid, painting part time, her work had begun to garner the kind of exposure and interest from buyers that signaled an artist on the rise.

It’s hard to say what might have happened were it not for a change in career in 1996, and a bit of bad luck, but as sometimes happens in life, circumstances can determine the course of our actions. In Marieluise’s case, it was a change in jobs that became the launch pad to a full time career as an artist. It’s not that her new job at the Hospice Foundation of Cape Cod provided her with a greater opportunity to paint, or that it became a focal point of her art, although, in addition to her work at Cummaquid, she did paint a popular Christmas card for the Hospice program that sold well; rather, the event that caused her to make the move to painting a full time, was the fact that her job at Hospice was cut.

©"Spirit of America II" by Marieluise Hutchinson

“It was traumatic and scared the heck out of me,” she says of her termination. She left her job of eighteen years at the bank to work for Hospice, she said, and when Hospice eliminated her job, the effect was humbling. “I felt betrayed when I lost my job. I was devastated. I started reading want ads and even took a computer course,” she said, but to no avail.

It was then that ─ well ─ she had a natural epiphany, of sorts, that would change the course of her life. “When I lost my job it made me think about being an artist full time.” She says that the prospect of earning a living from her artwork was something she thought about for years, but now, faced with a loss of what she thought was a secure job and steady income, she had an important decision to make: scramble to find another job, quickly, or rely on her talent as an artist to carry the day. She made the right decision at perhaps one of the most vulnerable periods in her life. She would devote her full energies to being an artist.

In the late eighties, in addition to showing at Cummaquid, where her reputation and exposure grew, she earned national exposure in Country Living Magazine from a Christmas card she produced for The Child and Family Services of Cape Cod. Over the next several years her fame grew through galleries. She was invited to participate as a gallery artist at the Craig Gallery in East Dennis. In 1990 she was invited to show at Gallery on the Green in Woodstock, Vermont, where her work is prominently featured today. In 1995 the Gardner Colby Gallery in Edgartown carried her work, and in 1996 she was invited to show at the Frank J. Miele Contemporary American Folk Art Gallery in New York, on fashionable Madison Avenue. “When I hit New York,” she says, “I thought I had made it. New York validated what I did.”

Marieluise Hutchinson today:

An accomplished artist whose larger work easily commands five figures, and whose simple, honest style and deft use of an imaginative “country” pallet, has earned admirers from near and abroad, Marieluise Hutchinson still frets about pricing and worries that those who invested in her when she was just starting out might not be able to afford what she paints today. A 24 by 36 painting that sold for $8,000 two years ago, for example, sells today for $14,000.

She accommodates the demand for larger more expensive paintings by providing one or two larger works at each show, as needed, and reaches out to long time supporters by painting prolifically, upwards of 100 paintings a year, varying the sizes of her originals to fit all price ranges. While one of her smaller pieces will never again sell for the $125 she got when she started, an original Marieluise can still be purchased on the lower end from between $1,000 to $4,000.

Her work has also been available through Christmas cards, a calendar, and an occasional print, making her art accessible in almost all price ranges.

Because of the pressing demand placed on her by galleries eager to carry her work, she has limited her exposure to three: the Frank J. Miele Gallery in New York, Cummaquid Fine Arts on the Cape and Gallery on the Green in Vermont. Each carry numerous originals and both the Cummaquid and Miele Gallery ask for a one woman show at least once a year ─ a request she it not always able to meet. She produces approximately twenty to thirty paintings per show, and the Miele Gallery in New York has just added her to a second of his shops in Manhattan.

©"No School Today" by Marieluise Hutchinson

Marieluise Hutchinson’s work is universally recognized today as being quintessentially and definitively true Americana. Her work stands unique from much of the rest of what might be termed country art ─ is identifiable immediately as a Marieluise, and because of it, can truly be said to have achieved the status of stylistic ─ meaning her style is rarely confused with others, and can only be copied. Her desire to communicate through her art even inspires an occasional page length narrative she provides about the titles she carefully selects for her works, adding to the uniqueness of those individual pieces. In No School Today she begins:

“Sometime, early in my existence, I learned that the three most important words in life were I LOVE YOU. . . A close runner-up to those three words was NO SCHOOL TODAY”.

Her thoughts about her paintings give us a brief glimpse into what she hopes we see when we view her art. “In art,” she tells me, quoting Emerson, “the hand can never execute anything higher than what the heart can inspire.” In Marieluise’s heart there are vivid memories of a warm and inviting place called home, a place in the country with a big barn nearby, lights in the window, a flag hanging outside, a place where all who pass are most sincerely invited to ponder. To own a Marieluise is to be able to visit that place whenever one likes, and stay a little longer than a while.