2 commentsWendy Weldon has been an artist for more than forty years, but she carries herself as though she’s finally arrived in a place of strength and stability with her work.
“It feels different, better, strong,” she said not long ago on a visit to her Chilmark studio overlooking Squibnocket Pond. Smudges of paint covered her hands. Beaded earrings, a gift brought back from Honduras or Guatemala, dangled under her red hair and wampum jewelry covered her wrists. She had just come from a Chilmark Conservation Commission meeting and wanted to get some studio time in before the afternoon was over, she said.
A large wall in her studio is reserved for collected religious iconography from all over the world – Mexican retablos, an altarpiece she found at the dump in Aquinnah. The word “joy” hangs alongside a Buddha figure, crosses, and altar candles. “You can put anything there and it goes,” she said. “I’m attracted by what has attracted people forever.”
Weldon’s work is characterized by a vibrant color palette, and is often abstract, though barns and stone walls are common motifs. Think of the Keith Farm barn set against the rolling walls of Chilmark, its rust-red door standing out in any season.
“It’s a favorite; I must have painted it thousands of times,” she said, in front of one of those thousands of paintings. “And stone walls.”
“Visually, stone walls entice everybody,” she said. “The barn imagery perhaps goes back to my childhood and growing up on a farm and in barns.” Mostly, though, it is the simplicity of the circles and squares that attracts her, and she enjoys taking those images in a new direction, “hovering a little” over the shape “but you’ll never see a horizon.”
She first came to the Island as a child in 1955. “My family – mom, dad, and the cocker spaniel – drove from Indianapolis, Indiana. We drove to the Vineyard because my dad had a friend who said, you’d love vacationing on the Vineyard.”
Initial reviews were mixed. “My mother loved it, my dad thought it was a little weird,” she recalled. “He’s from the Midwest and it was really hot and sunny, and he’s a redhead so he got sunburned. And then he caught a striped bass and the rest is history.”
The family returned summer after summer and eventually built a house in 1958. Her mother was an artist who often drew pastel portraits of her neighbors in Chilmark, and Weldon soon took it up herself. One of those summers she showed her work at the Chilmark gallery of Henry Scott, a colorful Island character known for his mosaic work. “Hank Scott was this really crazy guy, painter, a little older than we were, and we all used to go down and do life drawing near Chilmark Pond,” she said.
She studied art at Bard College, decided “this is my voice,” and returned to the Vineyard for a year before moving to Vermont, where she painted a lot of seascapes. “I really missed the view,” she said, a smile crossing her face. “When I was here I didn’t paint them so much and when I was there I guess I was longing for the view.”
Also in Vermont, she had a realization: she had never learned how to draw properly. Friends would ask her to paint their house, but she found herself struggling. She turned to drawing barns to get back to basics. A decade later, having moved with her former husband to California, she had another realization: her art was selling well, but she was stuck.
“I was painting the same thing over and over; it became formulaic,” Weldon said. “So I turned everything around in my studio and put up large canvases.”
She stared at the white space and nothing came to her, until a friend suggested she was too far away from the blank sheet. “So I put my face right up to the canvas and started painting.”
The Island eventually called her home and she moved back to Chilmark in 1998. Today, she tries to spend four or five hours a day in her Chilmark studio, usually in the afternoon, some days staying until sundown.
“You have to show up,” she said. “People ask me, ‘how do you discipline yourself to be a painter?’ And I say, ‘you have to show up and start it.’ Sometimes I’m not flowing, but I don’t need to meditate on it, and I don’t need to shut off the world.”
As is the case for many artists, art supply stores can be dangerous territory for Weldon. “I can go a little crazy,” she said unapologetically, holding up the latest tube of paint she purchased and squeezing it slightly to reveal a brilliant cotton candy pink.
“I don’t even like pink that much, but look at that! It’s almost edible!”
Once a painting is complete, she uses a varnish to seal the painting and create an extra layer. “The varnish lets you see in and see the layers,” she says. “My work is really about layers and looking through them.”
She’s inspired by the work of Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Gauguin, and Richard Diebenkorn, to name a few, and stacks of their catalogues line her studio. But she keeps them at a respectful distance.
“It’s important to pay attention to what they do,” she said. “But I was always terrified of copying their work. I was afraid I wouldn’t have my own voice. Rather, I take off in my own way and see what else comes up. It’s a huge privilege to do this. Without getting religious, I’m blessed to be able to get up and paint.”
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