Carolyn Anderson: Up close and personal

Driving across the stark north-central Montana prairie on an early-January afternoon is, perhaps, the best preparation for walking into Carolyn Anderson's art studio that looks over the tail waters from Fresno Dam.

Something about the low winter sunlight scuttling into the infinite, muted tones of tan grass stalks - accented by white patches of snow and dark slashes of leafless trees and shrubs - that readies the eye to take in Anderson's oil paintings.

Anderson, a nationally recognized artist who describes her painting style as impressionism-expressionism, is predominantly self-taught as well as self-made in the business of art.

She said she showed aptitude for drawing as a child growing up in the Chicago area, but didn't work at it seriously until she was an adult. She didn't consciously choose to pursue her artistic style, she said, she just kept doing what appealed to her.

"I don't like tight realism," she said, adding, "If you have super-tight realism, those are your parameters, straightforward and everything is laid out in front of you. But if you want to change something then you need to find a different way to do it."

Which she did in her signature blend of impressionism and expressionism.

"It's more expressive," she said. "I like a painting that I can look at, that I can't figure out ... things are kind of just a little bit of a mystery."

Anderson said she attended Illinois State University for a time before signing up with VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, which brought her to Montana.

It was at this early point in the details of her life that she flashed a slightly pained smile at having to rehash old news for yet another in the long list of articles for which she has been interviewed.

She recommended just getting her biographical information off the internet because, as Anderson said - in the casual tone of voice one reserves for saying "I think that feature is explained in the auto maintenance manual" - she has been interviewed by every major art magazine in the U.S. more than once.

As a VISTA worker, she spent a year and a half at Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation in the late 1960s, working with different programs. She returned to Illinois for a time, but during a visit with friends in Havre, she accepted a job at Grigg's Printing, where she worked for about 15 years, cutting back to part-time for a while before quitting to work on her art full time.

This transition to full-time artist came after she made some solid contacts with gallery owners and other artists at the 1980 C.M. Russell Art Show in Great Falls. At the time she was working in pastels, but by the mid-1980s she had taught herself to work in oil paint.

Anderson said she also had to teach herself the business of being an artist, though she added she still doesn't know how tell people to succeed at it.

"Don't ask me about the business end of it, seriously," she said, laughing. "It's been a long haul and you just do what you have to do."

She credited Great Falls artist Steve Seltzer, among others, with helping her in the early years with advice, including taking her aside and telling her she needed to raise prices on her artwork.

Another artist, Ned Mueller, first convinced Anderson to teach an art workshop with Puget Sound Art League, an art school he was operating in Washington state. She said she's been conducting workshops regularly across the U.S. for 30 years now.

Workshop attendees are advanced artists and often professionals, she said, and the list of workshops includes the Fechin School, Scottsdale Artists' School, the Frye Museum and Walt Disney Imagineering.

She said her work with the artists at Walt Disney Imagineering in California was intellectually and creatively exciting.

Her artist bio for Wilcox Gallery in Jackson, Wyoming, said she was contracted to research and write about visual language while she was working with Disney.

"The problem is we really underestimate how language affects how we see information," Anderson said.

Her continued research into the art and science connection informs her lectures and workshop instruction as well as her blog, at carolynandersonartist.blogspot.com. Anderson writes on about any subject that interests her, from challenging concepts about how we see what is around us to practical pointers on how to improve art skills.

Her Nov. 5, 2016 post examines how an article on a new, more accurate way to create flat versions of world maps becomes a lesson in "visual truth."

She posted Oct. 14, 2014, about a study which concluded that doorways are an "event boundary" for the brain, explaining why we forget things when we walk out of a room. Anderson, then, connects the event boundary idea to the problem with using lines in drawings.

She wrote in the entry that too many hard edges in a painting create visual barriers for viewers, making it harder for them to see the painting as a cohesive piece.

LESSON TIME

If artists don't draw the outline of their subject onto the canvas, how do they start a painting?

"Loosely. Yeah, loosely," Anderson said, laughing as she stood by her easel at the center of her studio, a spacious, uncluttered room at the center of her home where natural light floods in from two directions.

"When I first read an article on (event boundaries)," she said in the interview, "I immediately made the connection to painting because a lot of people, when they're painting even, they start out with outlines. Once you've started out with a solid outline - not just a 'you are here' map, but a solid outline - now you've created walls all over your painting and you won't see beyond them to make connections that you might otherwise make if you didn't have solid lines."

At this point, she replaced her work-in-progress, which had been sitting at her easel, with a blank canvas. She took out a photo of one of her previous works, grabbed a brush and started the lesson in earnest.

"Instead of outlines, because outlines suggest things, right - that's the big thing about lines is delineating a thing," she said while loading the brush with thinned-out paint.

"So here you've got a pattern; the basic thing is going to be light and dark pattern. You need marks to start, so you can kind of figure out where you're at," Anderson said, as the man from the photo took shape through almost scrubbed-in brush strokes. "Now I can get a suggestion of where information is, obviously, but it's more about getting just enough information so you know where you are on the canvas."

"You know what your spaces are. You see, it's the value pattern," she added, gesturing to the pattern of light and shadow she had painted. "You have to get enough of it in so you can see where you're going. It's the value pattern that starts setting up the painting. You leave open all types of possibilities instead of just locking yourself in on an outline."

The problem with defining forms with lines, she added, is the artist describes solid shapes, when in actuality the exact light, shadow or a color might blend between two areas, but that fact and that artistic opportunity literally go unseen because the eye and brain see a hard separation there.

"You have to describe it in a different way, so instead of getting caught up on (forms). Especially when you're starting, I tell people 'You know, at some point you need to look at it and say, OK, does that really look like a nose?' But ultimately it's the light and the shadow pattern that starts defining the form.

"That's the big thing, if you can get people away from outlines now they can see transitions. But with outlines you don't see the transitions.

"Fun, huh?" she said, as she wiped her brush clean.

PERSONAL TRANSITION

After decades of pursuing her passion in a field where few people make a living, let alone excel, Anderson has reached a point where whe can be choosy.

She said she has started slowing down on workshops, only conducting up to six a year, and even then none in winter because of the unpredictability of the weather, and none in summer because that would interfere with walleye fishing, which she has done avidly for many years.

She has almost cut out all the art shows, as well, she said, after earning awards that include C.M. Russell Artists' Choice, several NWR Award of Excellence, two C. M. Russell Best of Show Awards and the Master Award of Excellence for American Impressionist Society.

She said she doesn't do shows because she got tired of deadlines: "You can't do your best work on a deadline."

The future in the business of art is online, she said, but she refuses to get on Facebook and Instagram.

Her website, carolynanderson.com, and blog are the limit to her participation online, but these and her galleries' websites have done quite a bit to attract online interest.

Art students have contacted her about art in general, and her workshops have gained students from around the world, she said.

A friend with a business that connects artists online for a fee, asked her to be one of his featured artists, and she said she agreed. The only hangup, she said, is that he wants a resume and she hasn't tracked all of her shows or accomplishments.

She pointed to a walk-in closet full of show catalogs, awards and magazines with articles in which she's featured and shrugged, but, she added, she is interested in pursuing that opportunity.

That would give a client an hour of one-on-one time on the phone with her.

Teaching and expressing her thoughts on art is second nature.

"Basically a lot of what I teach is visual psychology and visual language, so it's not just a how-to thing on painting. It's a little bit more of understanding the process," she said, and this is valuable knowledge.

The day after the interview, she sent an email to elaborate on her preference for impressionism-expressionism over realism because she had been pondering the question and her original answer overnight.

"Interesting writing weaves a story," she said, "and allows the reader to follow a thread of explanation. Painting does the same, but on a visual level, using color, shapes, movement, etc. Description can be mundane and predictable, or interesting and enlightening. I still remember how absolutely boring early elementary school reading was. (It's) interesting how something like that can leave a lasting dislike for predictability. 'Run, Jane, run!' Or maybe it wasn't Jane who got to run, probably just Dick and Spot. No matter, either way someone was always running or jumping.

"Obvious description and rendition defeats possibility and creativity," she added. "(It's) mystifying that one could create something by following a rule book of how-tos and how-not-tos."