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Tag: Buffalo

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How does your sense of place influence your artwork?

Grain elevators, Buffalo, NY, 18X24 in a handmade cherry frame. $2318 includes shipping in continental US.

My hometown of Buffalo, NY, is a great place to be from. I often mention it, especially when it’s snowing.

Buffalo is paradoxical: blue-collar and yet elegant, blighted but historic, crime-ridden and yet pastoral. There’s nature everywhere, from the Olmsted-designed parks to the urban prairie that has replaced the immigrant neighborhoods of the 19th and 20th century. (Since my own people came through those streets, I have mixed feelings about this.)

The grain elevator was born in Buffalo. Grain elevators made Buffalo the largest grain-shipping port in the world in just 15 short years. Those elevators also died there, when the opening of the Welland Canal rendered grain cross-docking obsolete. Finding an adaptive reuse for these buildings has been a chronic challenge. It’s like keeping Grandma’s giant harmonium in your living room—historically important, but taking up a lot of space that could have had more practical use.

My home city spent the second half of the twentieth century on its uppers. That’s when I lived there, so that’s the Buffalo that’s shaped me.

Main Street, Owl’s Head, oil on archival canvasboard, $1623 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Direct and indirect

In some ways, that influence was direct, as in the art I saw at the former Albright-Knox Art Museum and the Canadian Group of Seven painters from just over the river. With two Great Lakes in my backyard, I couldn’t help but love all things nautical. In other ways the influences were indirect. My hometown is multicultural, street-smart, feisty and frugal. I am too.

Inevitably, there were also negative influences. After fifty years of economic contraction, there was an expectation of failure; that’s one big reason the Bills have always been so beloved. There were strong cultural, religious, and familial expectations that kept people in place. We left because there were no jobs, but I would probably never have become a professional painter had I stayed.

Coal Seam, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I live on the Maine coast now, where there are many professional artists. As we all know, iron sharpens iron. The color is clearer and brighter, the light is sublime, but, alas, there’s little cultural diversity. Maine is the whitest state in the nation.

What are the cultural expectations of the place you currently live? The place you’re from? How are they expressed in your work?

Interpretation

Of course, everything I wrote above is my interpretation. I have friends and family who would loudly disagree with my characterization, if they read this blog.

A Woodlot of her own, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Personal connection

I’ve never found it difficult to paint grain elevators or urban clutter. They’re part of my cultural heritage. I can paint my own kids and grandkids; they’re unalloyed joy. But I started a painting last year, as yet unfinished, that I thought would be a sentimental look at my childhood. Instead, it dredged up some difficult, long-suppressed memories. That’s probably why it isn’t finished.

Have you ever been ambushed by a painting? Have you been able to work your visceral response into the canvas, or as with me, has it foxed you? To a lesser degree, how do your emotions color the less-fraught things you paint? That’s a question I can’t really answer, so I’m looking for inspiration here.

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Making art inaccessible

Winter lambing, oil on linen, 30X40, $5072 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I’m from Buffalo, New York, and I grew up visiting the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. My family lived nearby and I went to high school just a few blocks away. The Albright-Knox is where I came to understand art. No institution had a greater impact on my early art education.

Like all city residents, I knew there was no admission charge, just a plexiglass box into which you could stuff your donation. In my case, that was often small change or nothing.

In late 2019, the gallery started a massive expansion and renovation. Investor Jeffrey Gundlach gave $42.5 million. NYS ponied up another $20 million and the rest of the $125 million tab was expected to be met by ‘businesses, foundations, government groups, and individuals.’  It’s a beloved Buffalo institution, so I’m not surprised at the community support. The museum was also rebranded as Buffalo AKG Art Museum to reflect Mr. Gundlach’s contribution.

Grain elevators, Buffalo, NY, 18X24 in a handmade cherry frame. $2318 includes shipping in continental US.

My brother-in-law took his grandchild there last week. “It cost me $20 with my senior discount, $10 for Nora, and $12 to park,” he said. He can afford that, but a lot of Buffalonians can’t. The community ponied up all that money to make art inaccessible to any but its wealthier citizens.

The last reported salary for its director, Janne Siren, was $468,609 (2023). This is in a city whose median household income at the 2020 census was $24,536. (And, for the record, employees of the gallery voted to unionize in January, 2024, citing unfair labor practices.)

Why are museums so darned expensive?

The fees my brother-in-law paid are not, sadly, outrageous for American fine art museums. The MFA Boston is now $27 for an adult ticket, MoMA is $30, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which has one of the nation’s largest endowment funds) is $30 and the Art Institute of Chicago is $32. I looked this up because my kids wanted to go to the MFA last weekend, but couldn’t afford it. Instead, they went to a nearby college gallery. “I saw a few cool things and I can still buy a house,” my daughter said.

Thunder Bay, 12X16, $1159 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Arts access is important

School groups will still visit the gallery in their strictly-monitored tours, but gone are the days when we could just wander at will to visit our favorite paintings. For my parents and my siblings, an afternoon at the gallery would now cost $104 plus parking.

This is happening at a time when the broader culture is reducing arts education. That makes unfettered access to art even more important.

For kids, art helps develop imagination and cognitive, communication and problem-solving skills. It helps all of us reduce stress. It should not be only for rich people.

Coal Seam, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Community identity

The old Albright-Knox was a great example of how the public loved and cared for museums, and how museums enhanced our quality of life. It was built for the 1901 Pan-American Exhibition, along with its neighbor, the Buffalo History Museum (which is still pay-as-you-wish). They both face Olmstead-designed Delaware Park with its sparkling artificial lake. This whole complex was a source of great civic pride in my youth.  But, honestly, why would a young Buffalonian care if they can’t afford to go inside?

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A portrait of lost time

Each week until the end of the year I’ll be giving you a behind-the-scenes look at one of my favorite paintings. These are paintings that are available for you to purchase unless otherwise noted.

Grain elevators, Buffalo, New York, 18X24, oil and cold wax on canvas, in a handmade cherry frame, $2318 includes shipping in continental US.

This is a portrait of lost time, both my own and my hometown’s. I was born in North Buffalo in 1959; I lived with my grandmother in South Buffalo for my last year of high school. My bus ride took me down South Park Avenue past the notorious Commodore Perry Projects, right through the First Ward where the rebranded Silo City is located. That’s on the verge of being hip, and a state park has made the grotty old waterfront into something beautiful. The nearby area now called Larkinville is a true success story. Restaurants, offices, shops and condos now fill an area that was once a terrifying post-industrial, apocalyptic wasteland. I don’t miss it a bit.

Bennett Grain Elevator, Buffalo, circa 1870, courtesy Lower Lakes Marine Historical Society. Wooden elevators often burned catastrophically. 

Buffalo was built on the back of the grain elevator. It was invented there by Joseph Dart and Robert Dunbar in 1842-1843. Before that, grain was handled in bags, which were wrestled off lake freighters (schooners and brigantines) and moved to canal boats to head down the Erie Canal. Dart and Dunbar’s elevator scooped loose grain out of the holds of the boats and lifted it to the top of a tower. It could then be dumped directly into canal boat or rail car, oldest product first. Think of it as the earliest example of cross-docking.

At the start of the 20th century, Buffalo was the fifth-largest city in the US and the largest grain port in the world. Much of the grain harvested in the Midwest was shipped through Buffalo. Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence Seaway are separated from the other Great Lakes by Niagara Falls, which meant that lake freighters couldn’t go any farther east than Buffalo.

That problem wasn’t really solved until 1932. The Fourth Welland Canal meant grain could just float right out from Minnesota to the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. That was the death-knell for Buffalo’s grain elevators, although their demise was slow.

The Standard Elevator (the one on the left in my painting) was built in 1928. The elevator is unloading a lake freighter while simultaneously loading a canal barge. Courtesy Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

My uncle Bob had a job as a night watchman in Silo City when he was a college student. Whenever I waxed lyrical about the elevators, he talked about the rustle and squeak of thousands of rats along his beat. Uncle Bob and my husband and I canoed up the Buffalo River once. It was completely industrial, with Pratt & Lambert still dumping pigments into the water.

The siloes still crowd the river on both sides, but they’re mostly empty now, a decaying reminder of the past. Only the General Mills elevator still accepts freighters, because they’re still manufacturing in Buffalo.

Buffalo loves its grain elevators but can’t quite figure out what to do with them. I feel exactly the same, but I’m a landscape painter.  I painted the view from the Ohio Street Bridge. That’s the Standard Elevator on the left, and the Electric Elevator and Perot Malting on the right.

Scoopers in the hold of a freighter move grain towards the marine leg of the elevator. What a miserable job that must have been.

My challenge was to illustrate the worn surfaces of the elevators from a distance. I like cold wax medium. It can be brushed or troweled on, depending on how it’s thinned, and it can be burnished, scraped, sanded, or abused in a million different ways once it’s in place. I used it in the sky, applying it in thin, pigmented layers, and then buffed and burnished it so it had the character of the elevators’ own old brick walls.

That’s the Buffalo of my youth, but it’s not the Buffalo you’ll see today, much of which has had a facelift in the ensuing decades. “The reuse projects are really cool but they’re only cool in light of where the city is coming from,” a Buffalonian told me.

Last week I wrote about how you can’t go back and recapture lost memories. This painting is of something that still exists, but in a city that has changed beyond all measure. It’s 18X24, in a handmade cherry frame, and it’s available for $2318. It’s a bargain compared to what an historic elevator will cost you, and sized to fit in a living room to boot. Click here to purchase online.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Connection and chaos

Christmas Eve, oil on canvasboard, 6X8 private collection.

Last weekend, more than 260 million Americans were under winter weather advisories of some sort. That’s a stunningly high percentage of our population. I understand the powerful impulse that impelled some of them into the teeth of the blizzard despite those warnings. I’ve driven into horrible storms myself just because it was Christmas.

We’re high on a bluff so the storm surge couldn’t touch us. We heat with wood. During our few hours without power, we wrapped gifts by candlelight and ate Scotch eggs.

That doesn’t mean the state of Maine went unscathed. My contractor was called away from my kitchen project to tend a house flooded by the storm surge; thousands of gallons of salt water rolled across the lawn into their basement. He cut the power and they’ll be replacing their systems this week.

Christmas Eve 2, oil on canvasboard, private collection.

Almost a quarter of a million customers were without power in Maine on Friday. Some still haven’t seen it restored. That made for a wicked cold and dark Christmas for many people.

I had no great expectations for Christmas, so when my plans went flapdoodle, it was no big deal. I was headed for Troy, NY, to have pizza with my youngest child. We would then wait patiently for his sisters to be done with their roistering so we could celebrate Christmas later this week.

My daughters didn’t fare as well. M was snowed in at Buffalo. L has influenza, but she wouldn’t have been able to travel to her in-laws’ home anyway; the driving was too awful. One of J’s in-laws had emergency surgery on Christmas Eve and others were down with influenza.

For me this meant no inconvenience, just constant recalibration. That hardly compares with being stuck in an airport for thirty hours, but it’s had its moments.

Lonely cabin, 8X10, oil on canvasboard, $652 framed.

Buffalo has a long history of blizzards. Many Buffalo natives (of which I am one) have, at one time or another, been trapped by sudden, catastrophic snowfalls. There were generally no happy Hallmark endings to our experiences. There was no instant personal connection, no way nor reason to stay in contact with the strangers with whom we were thrown together.

At 18, when the Blizzard of ’77 hit, I was sublimely self-centered. At 63, I’m more inclined to look at the people around me. A thought niggles—what if we looked at this week as an opportunity for new connections, to welcome others into our Christmas spirit?

At Passover, my Jewish friends set an extra cup of wine on the dinner table and open the door for the prophet Elijah. This tradition is intertwined with the idea of welcoming the stranger, since nobody knows in what guise Elijah might appear.

I believe that a winter that starts out with a roar generally continues in the same vein. That means more storms, more dislocation. My resolution for the remainder of this Christmastide and beyond is to focus more on the ones I’m with than the ones I’m missing.

The Late Bus, 8X6, oil on canvasboard, $435 framed.

I’m also going to run to Walmart and replace my husband’s car emergency kit. His has wandered off. For those of you new to sub-zero temperatures, that means:

  • A filled water bottle;
  • Candles and matches in a tightly-sealed glass jar;
  • Chocolate bars or other high-calorie non-perishable snack foods (you can eat them in the spring if you don’t need them now);
  • A car blanket;
  • A collapsible shovel in the trunk;
  • A charged power bank for your phone.