Closer Than Ever

STRANGERCROMBIE WINNER! This article was bought-and-paid-for in The Stranger’s annual charity auction—which this year raised more than $50,000 for the Seattle nonprofit Treehouse, helping foster kids since 1988. Thank you, everybody!

The 619 Western Ave building in Seattle’s Pioneer Square is one of
those storied homes for packs of people who are driven to make art in
drafty rented lofts pretty much regardless of whether other people buy
it. These are not careerists; they’re usually either too young to have
a career yet or too old to believe (or really care whether) they’ll
still have a career. More than 100 artists work on these six
floors—which have been studio spaces since 1979—and the
artist in the back corner of the Sophia Room on the fourth floor is
named Marie Gagnon. Her story and her struggle might be similar to the
story and struggle of many of the artists at 619, or, really, anywhere.
But she’s special in her ability to see it and to tell it.

Gagnon has a degree in art, and she sells her art
sometimes—usually
on the internet—but she doesn’t make
a living by painting. Instead, she works four 10-hour days a week in an
office, managing the database for the Pride Foundation. After work and
on weekends, she’s in her studio. Painting is not a means to an end; it
is just part of how she lives.

On the wall of her studio now are several—maybe 8 or
10—rectangular canvases with a single rectangle, or two
rectangles of the same color (one color inside the rectangle and
another color outlining the rectangle), sitting in what looks from a
distance like a field of one flat color. It’s as if Mark Rothko and
Piet Mondrian hashed out their differences.

Gagnon does not know what these rectangles are doing here, and they
are freaking her out.

“I was always an observational painter,” she says. “I can react. I
just love to react to what I see.”

But what’s on her walls now is abstract. It’s coming from within as
much as from without. This started happening at the end of 2006, during
an ovarian-cancer scare when Gagnon found herself crying for days and
painting black circles.

Gagnon has been a painter most of her life—she’s 49. When she
graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a BFA 13 years ago,
half of her final show of atmospheric but realistic landscapes and
still lifes (in sensible, autumnal, “Yankee” colors, she calls them)
sold, and her grades were good. But her mentor told her something was
missing, and she knew it, too. It turned out that what was missing was
part of her. She used to call herself “the happy painter.”

“Things in my life were grand,” she says. “And I realized then that
I could only paint when things were going well.” When she and her
girlfriend starting having problems as she was finishing up her thesis,
she asked the girlfriend to move out so she could focus on painting.
Thinking about it now, she cringes. But for the longest time, if
something was wrong in her life, she’d find herself paralyzed in front
of a canvas.

Then came the black circles and the cancer scare. Then a
life-rending breakup, which yielded a torrent of black-and-white
rectangles in charcoal on paper. (A friend bought one and called it
The Angry Stove. Funny: A later rectangle painting looks like a
refrigerator stranded in a horizonless desert.) Eventually, color
finally came back—the same burgundies and olives, at first in
blurry shapes that look as though they’re being seen at night through
inclement weather. Last summer, after working with a pregnant friend as
a model for five weeks, observation started to come back into her work,
to show up in new abstracts. The final painting of 2008 was of two
rectangles with glowing outlines—not as fiercely glowing as the
outlines of the earlier rectangles, which made them look like doors
closed on hell—standing next to one another, one with a splintery
hole in it. It’s the only blatantly illusionistic moment in all of the
abstract rectangles, but it reflects on all of them. Now, in addition
to being doors, they are mirrors and windows, too, prone to cracking as
well as to shutting away. It helps to see them in the studio, which is
open every month during Art Walk, where they hang next to big,
beautiful, rectangular windows framing sections of old brick buildings
and shining neon signs on Seattle’s original thoroughfare, Yesler
Way.

Very recently, Gagnon has begun work on a larger abstract painting.
It has three rectangles, interlocking and suspended inside the
rectangle of the horizontal stretched canvas. She doesn’t have
painter’s block anymore—now she’s painting the block itself, over
and over. She turned it into something like its own cure, or its own
counterweight, so that she can live with whatever comes and still
paint. On her blog not too long ago, she wrote, “I need to stay close
to honesty.” She and her art are closer to it than they’ve ever been
before.