Anyway, sometime early in the summer of 2011 I was sitting at a red light while on my commute home from work and saw one of those signs jammed into a little patch of grass at the corner. "Huh," I thought, "This one actually looks hand-drawn." In a whimsical, colorful script, the sign said "Artists Wanted For Studio & Gallery In Netcong." Of course, I remembered the number and called as soon as I got home.
That was how the first iteration of Main Artery came to be -- artists and art enthusiasts from all over the small towns all over North West New Jersey calling this number and joining the crowd at Main Artery Studio and Gallery on Main Street in Netcong, NJ, for a brief few months art-making and art-showing. Like a lot of art galleries, the 'brick-and-mortar' version of Main Artery didn't last long, unfortunately, but while it was around, it created a sense of an artistic community I would have never thought possible in an area almost entirely lacking a public presence of the visual arts / artists. That sense of community was one of the central ideas the gallery's founder, Michelle Cirotti, recently told me she wanted to see come to fruition with the opening of the gallery:
I wanted to open a place that made art accessible to all, not just for pur-
chasing art but also for customers and artists and members of the comm-
unity to experience the process of it. I wanted a place that gave everyone
the feeling they belonged there -- "knowing art" or not -- because the arts
are a part of everyone's lives.
"Experiencing the process of it" -- that was a big part of what Main Artery helped people do. Many of the artists who became members had little experience showing their work publicly, but all members were part of rotating group shows in one gallery and got to experience the process of hanging a show and holding an opening reception in the main gallery. This created opportunities for some artists to sell work for the first time, as well as the first opportunities for many members of the Netcong community to peruse an art gallery and intermingle with the artists themselves.
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| Two shots from the first show at the gallery.... |
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| ...featuring the work of Jesse Jeramczak & Michelle Cirotti (and Carl the dog). |
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| And shots from preparations for a three-person show.... |
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| ...featuring my painting and photography by Jason and Rachael Yerkes. |
Speaking for myself, the two things I enjoyed the most about my time at Main Artery Studio and Gallery were making new friends who were themselves artists (something I had a severe shortage of at the time), and our semi-regular "Create Nights." Create Night was exactly what the name implies - a designated night every other week or so in which many of us would get together at the gallery and make stuff. The first time or two, I brought an easel and one of my many "works-in-progress," and found a mostly-isolated corner to paint in, as is my wont to do. One night I went into the gallery for a Create Night and found the gallery and studio areas almost empty, but what sounded like a small party coming from the back patio. Outside were a couple dozen artists & friends & family, mostly gathered around a roughly 4' x 8' piece of canvas which had been stretched and fastened to a makeshift easel / stretcher contraption, itself fashioned out of screwed-together 2x4s. Four or five people were painting on the canvas. One of them saw me & invited me to grab a brush and get in on the fun. I did so, though being highly ambivalent towards the prospect of working in or being a member of a group, it was with great skepticism that I started painting. What I recall of the rest of the evening was that once I let go of my skepticism and my need for everything I draw or paint to be a precious masterpiece, I had genuine fun and started forming a bond with a number of people I still consider friends.
After a number of these spontaneous group-painting Create Nights (most of the work at that point looked like pages from a giant, shared sketchbook), Michelle approached a few of us with an idea that was as terrifying as it was intriguing. Someone who was involved with booking at The Stanhope House had been over to the gallery one evening and watched a bunch of us painting and was interested in having us do something similar outside on the patio of their beer garden while a bunch of musicians did acoustic sets. I agreed to take part in the event right away, but inside I had some serious second thoughts about the whole thing. I've always been most comfortable in the "loner-working-in-his-studio" mindset. Working with & among a bunch of fellow artists turned out to be a lot of fun, but painting in front of who the hell knows how many knuckleheads, most of whom, I'm sure, would be there for the live music & cheap draft beer? I could just imagine the "suggestions" from the crowd -- "put some big jugs on it!" "ew, why are you painting it that way, it's gonna give e nightmares!" "that's awesome, dude! I'll give you 10 bucks for it!" I'd have much preferred not to hear any of that stuff. "Oh well," I thought, "maybe I can just ignore all the riff-raff..."
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| Things that got created at Create Night |
The day came for the Stanhope House gig -- what would be the first of many live art & music events that we called "The Sound Of Art." I showed up late in the morning. A crowd of a couple dozen people was there, mostly what looked to be band members and artists I knew from the gallery. I had no preparatory sketches for what I intended to paint, my planning only going far enough to pick a few favorite colors and stake-out a large corner of the canvas on which to work. Michelle, along with Jesse Jaremczak and Courtney Fredette (two other Main Artery mainstays) had set the canvas up already. It was a massive thing, six feet high, and maybe twenty-four feet wide. If any of us at the gallery had the usual hang-ups about a blank canvas, well, that person was better off not coming here. After some small talk and getting some detail on the very loose idea of what we were looking to make out of this thing, I grabbed my corner of the canvas and got to work.
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| Stanhope House action shots |
Once I got to work I don't think I turned around for two hours -- once underway, I got into the type of zone that allowed me to forget about anything other than what I was painting. After about two hours of that I needed a drink of water. I turned around and saw a crowd of around 200 people (maybe more). I was taken aback for a second, but realized soon enough that all the people there were really enjoying what we were doing -- thinking about it later, it occurred to me that while it was normal for the other artists and me to see art as it is being made, most people don't see that kind of thing happen very often, if at all. The picture we ended up with was a gigantic, discombobulated, sprawling, messy thing -- which we ended up cutting into four evenly-sized panels that were then raffled off -- but nevertheless we managed to bring a unique experience to most of the people in that crowd that day.
The gallery didn't last much longer after that, but a core group of us wanted to stay together and try to bring the experience of the Stanhope House to other venues in the area. Over the course of the next year and a half or so, we did Sound of Art events at a number of venues throughout Northwest New Jersey. At first many of the pieces we did had the same sketchbook quality the Stanhope House piece had -- although the process was fun and invigorating, the end result was sort of a cluster of vibrant non-sequiters, each of us working organically on a separate image occupying a portion of the canvas, with minimal interaction. As time progressed and we did Sound Of Art events in more places, we narrowed our group down from 8 - 10 (basically, whoever showed up), to four or five of us. At the same time we began meeting up before events, in order to work out the picture we'd paint beforehand, getting theme and composition and color and other elements squared away. The pieces went from a very loosey-goosey quality, sometimes featuring random helpings of glue and glitter and saliva and other liquids splattered haphazardly to and fro (which would be fine if we were an experimental avante guard spastic abstract expressionist performance art group, but we mainly just wanted to paint fun pictures), to being sometimes impressively cohesive, fully-formed large-scale paintings, completed start-to-finish in front of an audience, in around three hours. There were certainly a couple of real duds among the pieces we did together, but there were also a couple of real gems in there that I am still proud of when I think about us making them.
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| A few shots of the Sound Of Art.... |
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| It's always nice when people appreciate your work. |
Alas, as Michelle states in a previous post, after a while life got in our way. New jobs demanded lots of time, a baby was born, a marriage was started, an out-of-state move was made. It's been around a year and a half since we've done any of this work together. In that time I did two or three live-painting events on my own, one of which was a really great experience. The other two, due mostly to my own bad habit of not planning for things ahead of time well enough (I always seem to do better when I have people other than myself to be accountable to), not so much. I've thought many times since our last event that we needed to get back at it, that we had something pretty cool going here that was not only a fun and unique experience for those who attended Sound Of Art events, but was also really good for us as artists. Maybe we just had to progress as a group, move out beyond just our immediate area, mix up what we did at the events a little bit, keep pushing to see if we could move what we were doing to bigger and better stages. What we had going and the progress we had made as a group was, to me, too important to just let it go.
A few weeks ago I received a text message from Michelle -- it appeared there was at least one more of us who felt the same way I did. She mentioned wanting to try to get some variation of Main Artery Productions back off the ground again, and said there were a couple of venues she knew of that would welcome us to hold some kind of art events there. Of course we thought at first of getting right back into live painting, as we had been doing before. But Michelle was also thinking similarly to me in terms of wanting to progress beyond just that aspect of the whole thing. We tossed around ideas such as pop-up shows, live-art competitions, art parties, murals. Get two or three enthusiastic people together thinking about the same thing, and some of the great ideas that come up will surprise you. We decided over the course of a few texts that day that, to hell with it, even if it were just the two of us to start, we were going to get our shit together again.
As I type this, we have about a day and a half until the first event undertaken in the re-resurgence of Main Artery Productions. This, of course, is the Bar 46 Pop-Up Show, a one-night group exhibition of 11 NJ artists working in a wide variety of media and styles. All of them are talented artists, and I am very excited to meet them all and see all their work in one place.
--- Aric Calfee
