Art Collectors - Why They Do or Don't Collect Plein Air

For the last few months, in preparation for the Plein Air Painters Chicago fifth I Heart Plein Air Conference, I have interviewed seven individuals who represent, collect or acquire art. The inteviews have taught me that every person and organization that collects art, has a different reason and aesthetic, and that I, as an artist, can't paint for them. As artists we can paint for ourselves and find kindred spirits. I am honored to say that some of these collectors are my kindred spirits.

Here are links to those video interviews.  

Mary Longe overview of the interviews: https://youtu.be/17eHy45HZBQ

Michelle Strassburger https://youtu.be/TcLSTf9BD3E

Chicago designer Michelle Strassburger has been collecting since the mid-eighties and has amassed collections-of-collections of outsider art, musical instruments, dolls, furniture, crosses and figurative, still life and plein air paintings – 3000 pieces, at least. She sees the Palette & Chisel as the place to find emerging artists and has several pieces by PAPC artists represented. She describes what inspires her, her process for going through exhibits and choosing paintings, and what she plans for the future of her collection. Mary Longe interviews Michelle Strassburger in her Chicago home.

Samantha Michalski https://youtu.be/hHo9cHQ1-h4

A prize for winning best in show at the Cedarburg Plein Air Festival is to have your painting purchased by the Cedarburg Art Museum. The organization’s mission reflects its connection to the community and surrounding areas. Museum Director, Samantha Michalski reflects on the role of museums, and their connection to the community and to artists. She explains why the CAM and other regional museums are partial to plein air paintings. Mary Longe talks with Samantha Michalski via Zoom.

Rick Reinert https://youtu.be/1ScPAq3zpzw

Rick and Ann Reinert founded Reinert Fine Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Charleston, SC, and they understand artists, and after years as a gallery owner they understand the people who purchase art. In this conversation, Rick helps us understand the role and the opportunity of a gallery for an artist. He explains what artists should do if they’d like to be represented, the opportunity for them, and the responsibilities in the relationship between artist and gallery. Reinert Fine Art Gallery represents locals, Errol Jacobson, Mary Qian, and William Schneider. Mary Longe talks with Rick Reinert via Zoom.

Barbara Van Driel https://youtu.be/cR_KO97w3i8

Barbara Van Driel’s three residences have different genres of art. What they share is her love for hanging multiple pieces from masters in the genres. In Chicago, her home has more than twenty paintings by PAPC Master Artist, Nancy King Mertz. Barbara tells us why she collects in that fashion, her relationship to the artists, and to the art. Mary Longe interviews Barbara Van Driel in her Chicago home.

Canice Prendergast https://youtu.be/JaYLZV3YWEw

Canice Prendergast manages acquisitions of art work for the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business along with a team of students, faculty and alums. Here he brings his experience with the global art market and his expertise as an economics professor to explain how and why the UC acquires items for its collection. You;ll be surprised by some responses. Mary Longe talks with Canice Prendergast via Zoom.

Jose Santillan https://youtu.be/0Ul0xgpi_lE

Jose Santillan has favorite types of art and favorite artists but likes to find new ones. He establishes an annual budget and sometimes buys a painting from a recognized artist or decides it’s the year for serendipitous buying. He tells us what moves him to make purchases. Mary Longe talks with Jose Santillan via Zoom.

Elizabeth Murphy https://youtu.be/3Iv1oaLymCk

Collecting Art: Buying Plein Air Online, A Conversation with Elizabeth Murphy, Chicago, IL Beth Murphy combs the internet for art and buys from all over the world. She wanders through craft and fine art fairs, and even renaissance festivals searching out emerging artists. She rarely pays more than $100 and has more paintings than she can frame or hang. She knows what she likes, what’s worth the money, and tells us why. Mary Longe talks with Beth Murphy via Zoom.

The Gangster, the Guest Artist and the Couple Who Cleaned Up

This is Jazzy. She used my sketchbook to draw a statue across the street in Humbolt Park. My deal with my "Guest Artists" is that I get to keep the picture and they may draw in my book while I paint. Parents are invited to take a photo of the Guest Artist with their art. None have refused. As the daughter and mother walked away, Jazzy decided she didn’t like the deal, turned back to me and wanted the book. I told her I needed it. She surprisingly didn’t negotiate and they went on their way.. 

She and her mom arrived just after Jose left. Jose stood and visited with me for more than two hours… that’s long for the usual plein air bystander. He seemed fascinated with the painting process, asked good questions, made comments about the composition and showed me his bullet wounds from a gang fight, that he apparently lost. Painter friends stopped by while he was there and he’d step back while we chatted and stepped closer when they left. Later, I learned that they thought he and I were friends. I suppose we were- for a few minutes. As I finished the painting, I offered it to him. He said, “No, I’m good.” A bit of a blow.

Just as I packed the last bit of equipment in my backpack, a couple stopped and asked to see the painting I'd done. Lucky me. They love art, said that they hadn’t bought anything local since moving to Chicago three years ago, and purchased my painting. 

It was a rich and interesting day to paint.

When A Scene Turns to Love

This is my happy place, Ft. Sheridan, near Highland Park, IL on September 5th, 2021. General Patton lived here for a time, I've heard, it's probably true; a street bears his name. I paint here frequently enough to actually recognize people who also come here regularly. It is a place to appreciate the Lake. You can’t officially swim here because, there might be unexploded ordinants in the water. I always thought that was an urban legend but, only waded a few time, not wanting to tempt fate. Earlier this year, a grenade from a war a long time ago was found a few hundred yards away.

One couple stopped by my easel and commented on my painting. Out of the blue the man said- We are all connected by love. A few hours before, I had found the obit of someone I once loved. With that, this scene, this painting reminds me of that love. (Painting - sold.)

Old Music Heard a New Way

 After a stroke, my dad started using the phrase, “that was the best…  I ever had, or, I’ve never …” While his certaintude made me smile, it also gave me hope that maybe a brain blown, didn’t have to be a complete calamity. Finding new joy in old things sounded okay. While watching Tick Tick Boom last night, I wondered why I didn’t share the love of theater that many friends have. Reading the memories and hearing soundbites of lyrics by Stephen Sondheim after his death and learning he inspired Jonathan Larson who wrote the lyrics and score for Tick Tick and Rent, challenged that thought more.

Lately, I’ve found myself listening to different radio stations when I drive. WXRT for one. I realized I liked it when I was painting a portrait at the Palette & Chisel. It was in the background, but for me background sound is often front and center and I can’t not hear it. The sniffle in a Zoom program, the voice on the other end of a cell call in a hardware store with Silent Night playing, talking about the disappointment in a center piece at Thanksgiving, for instance. Painting usually puts me into a zone where pretty much I have virtual blinders and noise cancelling earmuffs, but that morning up on the third floor with the north light, I found myself making brushstrokes to Peter Gabriel’s Your Eyes and liked the results. Not in the painting but in the feeling that I wasn’t second guessing my strokes, the music nudged a rhythm. I wondered why I didn’t listen to XRT back in the days of a beer after work that accompanied conversations of bands I’d never heard of, that now are oldies.

Once home, I asked Alexa to play XRT. During my visit to Seattle, we listened to KMHD, a Portland jazz station. I’ve never heard so much xylophone or saxophone… and liked it. Alexa has been playing that too. As far as I know, I haven’t had a stroke, but something has happened to nudge me from a rut I didn’t know I was navigating. I feel less hunkered down, like I could tap into courage to do something else new… something bigger than a radio station. Move? Take a long trip alone. Write a novel? Create some other adventure. Now, I wonder if it really was the stroke that caused my dad’s reframing his experience of the world. He may have just heard old music in a new way.

A Child in Isolation and How A Mystery Made it Easier

My ears still hurt from wearing earrings I wear all day on Halloween. The metal finding is cheap and makes my skin black around the piercing, but the black spiderweb and silver tarantula make me smile. It’s worth the suffering. 

During the rest of the year the earrings rest in an antique porcelain box that once sat on the table where my mother stood her magnifying mirror and pull tweezers from the drawer to shape her eyebrows. It was hers, but given that it was likely made before she was born, it may have belonged to someone else, but I never asked. The box holds my treasures now, though most the same monetary value as the plastic earrings, a resin vampire pin, a puzzle-piece Christmas tree my son made with safety pins glued to the back, a coin pressed at Greenfield Village, another in the Caribbean, and a teddy-bear barrette that felt like velvet when I wore it with the Easter dress the first year I rode a two-wheeler; the flocking now worn away but the pink eyes remain as bright as I remember.

While sorting through the box for the spiderwebs, I noticed envelopes trapped in the lid of the box, the kind attached to coats or dresses with extra buttons. Two had buttons as marked, and one held a tiny china dog. I don’t remember putting it there, but I do remember the dog, a good replica of beagle brown and long flopped black ears, and how it sat atop a mirror on a bookshelf, with beagles in other poses, and other breeds of dogs and many other tiny bone China animals that eventually filled three shelves.

 

I don’t remember how my collection started. I believe there was a cocker spaniel that was my mother's and, maybe a couple other dogs belonged to my sister until she lost interest in them as a teenager. My memory is hazy on that part, but I remember amassing money I made from extra chores and gifts to ride my bike to the Village, the shopping district, to a gift store where they had a display of what seemed like hundreds of bone China animals. I bought other beagles that made a family for the one in the envelope. I bought a Siamese kitty that lapped milk from a separate pale of spilt milk- a cost of two animals, plus it’s mother with a fragile serpentine tail, that miraculously never broke. I remember buying a frog, a hippo, mother and calf elephants, brown, black and white cows, pigs with a momma and two babies, a skunk that held onto a separate tree-the cost of two animals, a squirrel the very same body as the skunk that reached out to a separate tree trunk, chipmunks, a ewe with two white and one black lamb- a little like me, a deer family, chickens, roosters, and horses of different breeds and coloring.

 

Farm animals were separated from the domestics, neighborhood wildlife from the wild animals. Word got around the family of my collection, and, like Beanie Boos and Beanie Babies now were a pretty much guaranteed hit as a gift. I admit that I was disappointed when they showed up in glass, or carved stone. I liked the smooth shiny bone china, others would be found on the lower shelves.

 

On the fourth to last day of third grade, when my collection of animals easily fit on a single mirrored tray on top of my dresser, I was diagnosed with an illness that meant I had to stay in a darkened room until my blood tests were normal… weeks, the doctor told my mother. And, I was contagious. No Field Day at school or final good byes, no biking, no swimming, no hide and seek on the block, nor visits from friends. Except for weekly trips to the doctor to draw blood to monitor the illness, I wasn’t allowed out. Since light was an issue, I was relegated to the basement where we had a tv and my bed room. 

 

Luckily, I was a reader. Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, the Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, and the buccaneers of Treasure Island kept me company, as well as Annette, Jimmy, Cubby and Bobby of the Mickey Mouse Club, Beaver, Kathy Anderson on Father Knows Best, and Soupy Sales, White Fang and Blacktooth on tv. It’s funny, I don’t remember being frustrated or bored or lonely or scared. I don’t remember getting special attention, but I likely did... someone went to the library to get me the books, and someone brought me Faygo Rock and Rye. 

 

I was five when we moved to that Cape Cod house. My siblings each had a room upstairs, my bedroom was on the first floor along with my parent’s. I remember the heavy book of wallpaper samples, larger than any photo album, that my mother brought home to pick out wallpaper. I chose black and white puppies with a green background, the other choice I had, was a pink background. My mother hung lined curtains to match.

 

One window of my room faced south toward downtown Detroit, and the other, west toward the next-door neighbors. No fence in between, only a few box shrubs and lawn on our property, and the neighbor’s wide driveway. In the mornings that summer, I was allowed to open my curtains to let in the west light but had to close them before noon when the sun peeked in. One morning, when I drew back the curtains a grey wolf sat, ready to howl on the window ledge. No box nor note. He was different from every one that I had. They were shiny and smooth. The wolf’s coat was rough and matte. No one fessed up to giving me the wolf. And Though I was learning great detective skills in the books I was reading, I could Barely leave my room, let alone the house to Interrogate my suspects.

 

Three days later a collie, standing majestic like Lassie, stood on my window ledge,  then a German Shepherd. Every eight or ten days over the course of June, July and August more animals appeared. A couple had little nicks, as though someone else may have owned them.

 

It became so much easier to go to sleep at night in hopes I have a surprise. You want to know who orchestrated this multi week campaign of China animals? So do I, I never found out. That window was always open, though the curtains drawn from noon to dawn, it was summer and we didn’t have air-conditioning, but I never heard a sound. They stopped appearing once I received an all clear from Doctor Kennary. Even once I was able to ask people face-to-face no one confessed. I suspect it was my next-door neighbors who’s kitchen faced my bedroom window but, they never let on.

  

In this time of Covid and thinking about people who are sick, I’m reminded of the kindness that someone bestowed on me to make my life easier, and never let on.