Artists Among Us

Essay by Jane Gordon & Gabriel Davis | Photos by Bradley E. Clift & Julie Bidwell

Connecticut may not be seen by most as a magnet for artists, yet internationally known musicians, painters and sculptors whose names are household words in cities such as New York and Los Angeles are living and flourishing here.

The reasons these artists live in Connecticut may vary, but all share a passionate commitment to craft.

Tim Prentice of Cornwall was educated at Yale, started his career as an architect, and evolved, somehow, into a kinetic sculptor working in the wilds of Litchfield County.

Ellen Griesedieck began her career as a sports photographer, shifted into painting, and watched as a concept for a large-scale mural morphed into the world’s largest collaborative mural, growing larger each day at her home in Sharon.

Connecticut farm boy turned freelance world music percussionist John Marshall has performed and recorded with artists Paul Winter, Michael Brecker, Rhonda Larson, George Benson and Marc Anthony. Later this year, he begins work on a project with Cirque de Soleil.

... Each of these individuals has allowed art to dictate their varying directions, but all roads lead to Northwest Connecticut.

Tim Prentice
Cornwall - Kinetic sculptor

I went to Yale for architecture, and I did an apprenticeship with Edward Durell Stone, three years, mostly design. I had been trained in the modern movement, studying the work of Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. Everybody in the classes was a stalwart champion of one or the other, and I sat in the class scratching my head.

After college, my wife and I got a grant to go around the world singing folk
songs; it was a hobby that got out of hand. I returned to New York to seek my fortune as an architect, started a firm, worked with a friend, that split up, then I had my own firm with 30 draftsmen, and at age 43, I switched my major to kinetic sculpture. Now I say I’m a recovering architect.

Sculpture had been a hobby all along. I was fascinated by the work of Alexander Calder, the patron saint, and George Rickey, the next in apostolic succession. I was just intrigued with the mechanics of kinetic sculpture. It has a balance, a mechanism and an art. You could say that architecture has the same thing, but architecture is very slow. It takes a year to build a house. It’s like taking a photo to be developed and the guy says, “We’ll have it for you in three years.” With sculpture, it is fast and fluid. In a sense it’s for people who are impatient. I didn’t feel I was finding my voice with architecture.

There are two kinds of kinetic sculpture: the air-activated and motor-activated. I’m from the wind-driven branch, which was Alexander Calder’s. My mantra is to try to make the air visible. We make a mechanism that is a toy for the wind to play with, and we hope the wind is interested. So when you are looking at a surface, you’re seeing the shape of the air, just as if you’re looking at the surface of a pond with the light reflecting off it.

This thing got the better of me, that’s all. There’s no rational explanation. I had a feeling that I had turf out there that hadn’t been claimed. I’m still in love with working in architecture and I still love to do houses, but now I’m an artist who does houses.

I was born in Manhattan, but I could never look for nature in the city. That came from looking over the terrace of my parent’s place in Cornwall — I was a summer resident — with the wind blowing over the fields of grass. The flocks of birds, schools of fish, clouds in the sky, smoke from choo-choo trains; all those things shaped by the air. When I was in the Navy flying off aircraft carriers, and when I was sailing off the coast of Maine, that was when I was with the wind. Now I work on an old 1790’s farm. We’ve got all these old buildings that look exactly like they used to, but with very different things going on inside. The icehouse is the shop, where I work on sculpture with my guys. The barn is where we hang, photograph and show the pieces.

My favorite story about the satisfaction of what I do was when we once did an installation in the Hartford Hospital cancer ward waiting room. It’s a long, two-story space where people sit just to wait, and we did an installation with differently shaped kinetic pieces made out of brightly dyed feathers. After we finished, I got a letter from a woman thanking me for the piece. She explained how daunting it was to continually park her car in front of the sign saying ‘cancer patients,’ but that my piece meant so much to her. She said that it reminded her of the beauty of the world and she quoted Emily Dickinson, ‘hope is the thing with feathers,’ and I knew I had made the right decision.

— Jane Gordon

Ellen Griesedieck
Sharon - Large project artist, Wall of America mural

I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and I always knew that art was something I wanted to do, but what form it would take, I didn’t know. I was a nerdy sort of kid, I had an art room upstairs and that was my favorite place to be. In the summertime, I would listen to the baseball Cardinals on the radio and work away in that room.

My first show in New York was based on family photographs. I have three sisters and a brother, and we had the traditional Midwest childhood, and it’s a fond memory for me and a substantial, strong core. I definitely had the combination of family and school and anything is possible, and a lot of what now guides me in this crazy idea started very early.

I was avidly into sports, mainly because my father was involved in moving the football Cardinals to St. Louis. On days when nobody went to the games, all of us went to the game. I was so avid that working for Sports Illustrated was my No. 1 ambition. I went to work for a publishing company in Los Angeles to get experience and learn in the hopes I would be somewhat experienced to take on an assignment at Sports Illustrated. That’s where I met my husband [racecar driver] Sam Posey, and where I got my first assignment for Sports Illustrated.

I also realized I wanted to be independent of a company and make my own decisions. I did a lot of freelance, a lot of sports photos for Virginia Slims tennis, then for Sports Illustrated I followed Muhammed Ali through several fights. Spending time covering all these sports allowed me to see what makes somebody really great: It’s always the focus, the incredible blinders on.

But I’m not technically the person who wants to set up a lot of strobes at the basketball game. I decided I didn’t want to put a whole lot of energy into doing that, and meeting Sam, his effect was to say, ‘You can’t sit around forever, you have to start painting.’

I started working on paintings of people working. From there I did several large canvases, and I was out at Boeing working on the fabrication of the 747 and that is when the mural project began.

I was thinking that it was amazing to have a sense of what it’s like to have the West Side Highway 200 feet up, or to be standing in the operating room – that ambition – and I wanted to put all that into a giant painting. I thought, let’s make it three-dimensional and let’s involve kids, to ask them, ‘What is your role in the future?’

So we got going on the largest collaborative mural in the world, the Wall of America. It will have an educational curriculum, mentorships in all areas of learning. We’re trying to give kids ideas and incentives to reach for these possibilities, to not see limits.

We talked to Steven Squires at Cornell, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Project, and he said, ‘You’re crazy, and here’s the list of people who were involved,’ and we called them, and we kept asking Jimmy Carter if he’d do a tribute for Habitat for Humanity, and now we’re doing a project that involves all the Habitat projects combined. It spiraled.

The opportunity is great and the symbolism is magnificent, if we can just keep it going. In a time when so many people are guilt-ridden over things our country has done, in the environment, in other countries, it would be amazing to say to the kids, ‘Here are all these frontiers and you guys are going to be in charge, don’t feel guilty, let’s get excited.’

The mural is enormous. It has marble from quarries across the country, 47 feet of blown glass from West Virginia, copper, aluminum honeycomb panels you can saw and cut and bend. Anything goes.

My two kids, Judy, 21, and John, 25, are, at the moment, delightfully both here, though not for long. John has been invaluable to me in writing grants to fund the project. We still have to raise several million to build the Parthenon to put this in.

— Jane Gordon

John Marshall
Litchfield - World music percussionist, recording artist and teacher

I was very young when I discovered my interest in drumming – about 8 or 9 years old. I was watching a parade, and I remember feeling rather than hearing the percussion go by. It was such an incredible experience to feel the music right in the cavity of my chest. That was my first, ‘Oh! What is that sound?’ moment. It really pulled me in. Later, when I found a drum set and sat down to play, it was an immediate fit.

As a boy, I studied with a great Korean percussionist. He showed me that there was drumming outside of the traditional. All of a sudden I’d hear exotic sounds, like tabla drums from North India. So while I was having this sort of classical, rudimental, western percussive approach, I was also getting turned on to music from around the world. It was a great cultural experience.

The [typical work week] thing is a balancing act between teaching, recording, and touring. I have about 58 students a week. Weekends are saved for either recording or performing. I’ve done work in England, Hawaii, the Dominican Republic. All over the place, really. In a couple weeks I’m going out to New Mexico. And in the early fall, I’ll be touring the U.S. So it’s crazy. Long days and a lot of traveling. But it’s fun stuff.

I love seeing students relax into creativity. When you’re drumming, you really communicate in a different way. Words stop and you look at people, and you can just tell that they’re happy and feel really connected to what they’re doing. And we’re doing it together. Everything’s based on getting in rhythm with each other.

I teach traditional rhythms. I teach where they overlap, where they start. I teach arrangements. I’m not a drum circle guy. I mean, I love the experience of being free like that, but I come from a more disciplined approach. I teach people of all ages, from young children to senior citizens. My oldest student is an octogenarian, and she’s a beautiful soul. Her husband died when she first started drumming, and she was sort of casting around, and it helped her find her way. It’s become this thing in her life. Now she has people come to her house and she goes into schools. It really opened up something for her.

When you perform, you make these instant relationships with people. When someone comes up after a concert and takes my hand and says, “Thank you so much,” I can’t tell you how beautiful that is. And there’s no feeling that describes a good performance. Afterwards, I just float. That’s what makes traveling and schlepping all that stuff around worth it.

The most surprising part is that I’ve been able to live in Litchfield County and support a family and put my kids through college. I’m really proud of that. It wasn’t the impossible dream that I was fearful of as a boy. I’m also proud that in a way I don’t have a day gig; in other words I really do what I want to do. I’m proud that I pulled that off.

John Marshall will be playing some gigs this summer in New York and Massachusetts. Check his website at: www.marshalldrum.com.

— Gabriel Davis

Jane Gordon is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to Seasons.

Gabriel Davis is a freelance writer based in Litchfield.