Transcription of Abbie Williams for the show The Art of Living, #76
Dr. Lisa: With us today on our art show is Abbie Williams who is a long-time artist and an individual who has lived in Maine, lived away Maine and is living Maine again. We’re so fortunate to have you living in Maine and being part of our show. Thank you for coming in.
Abbie: Thank you Dr. Lisa for inviting me.
Dr. Lisa: Abbie, one of the first questions you asked was, “So tell me about the show and why you would want have an artist on your show?” and you weren’t questioning our motives or anything, but you were kind of interested because I guess it’s true that health and art, you don’t necessarily think that they might go together, but then as we talked, it became pretty clear. You’ve had some experiences of your own with regard to your art and how it has contributed to your health.
Abbie: That’s very true. When I was young, one of the things I promised myself in my life was, well two things. One was that I wouldn’t have to wake up to an alarm clock and the other one was that I hopefully would like in a house or a place where everywhere I looked out the windows there was beauty. That was the gift that I would give to myself in my life.
As I grew, it became apparent to me that what my life was about was freedom and that I chose freedom over the pursuit of money or the pursuit of status or the pursuit of whatever. To me, living authentically and working from my heart, doing my work, and making a difference in the world in terms of bringing beauty forward, was very important to me and that’s pretty much what’s guided me through my life.
Dr. Lisa: It’s an interesting choice to make because it’s one that doesn’t always make sense within society. We’re very oriented towards value being related to money and the ability to buy things and acquire. So your idea that you really just … you want to exist and you want to have freedom, you want to live in a beautiful place that doesn’t necessarily always line up with the way that a lot of people think about things.
Abbie: No it doesn’t and I did, the mainstay of my work for many years was portrait work and, of course, I did a lot of portrait work for very wealthy people. I remember I would go on trips to photograph these children. I’d go into their homes and there were these beautiful, very large, elaborate well decorated homes and what I discovered is that these families were no happier than people who didn’t have money and I begin to ask the question of how much is enough?
That’s kind of what got me started on living my life a little more authentically and staying in touch with what is really, truly important in my life because having enough … if you, anywhere you stand in your life, you can say I have enough, “I have everything I need right now and I’m happy” or you can decide, “I don’t have enough and I’m not happy.”
It’s our own decision and my decision became that I do have enough that I’m living with freedom, I’m doing what I want to do, I’m basically living my dream. The dream I had as a child that I wanted to be an artist. Actually, my mother gave me a paper idea, I think in first grade and I illustrated the front and I illustrated it with myself in the big smock with a burette and my little pallet on my hand and some brushes.
On the inside, it basically said that when I grew up I wanted to get married and have two dogs and two children and be an artist and that’s exactly where I headed.
Dr. Lisa: So it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Abbie: Exactly. Exactly. I was very clear from a very young age what I wanted to do with my life and I feel very luck for that.
Dr. Lisa: You also told me that you spent a lot of time getting feedback from teachers about your daydreaming habits and your not necessarily focusing on what the teachers would want you to focus, but somehow you kept saying to yourself, “Life’s okay, I’m okay. I’m going to keep doing this.” How were you able to do that?
Abbie: You know, that’s a tough question to answer because I think is … I was always sort of this little loner, wild child, and my poor mother, who was an academic, didn’t have a clue how to raise an artistic child, so I was pretty much left on my own resources a lot of the time. I did spend a lot of time in the woods. I was in love with horses and I still am.
I was always down, dirty, grubby in the dirt and doing things and playing in the water and stopping up the streams and playing with turtles and … I was just always doing very earthy kind of things and I think there was a guiding light within me that just kept me on course for what I was headed to do, which was to be an artist.
Dr. Lisa: Somehow your mother provided the space.
Abbie: She did …
Dr. Lisa: To make that happen.
Abbie: And the encouragement. My great uncle was a professional artist and he used to come visit us, but he of course was an old man when I knew him, but I always was very intrigued with the fact that he would show up. We had a summer house in East Boothbay and he would show up to visit and he had a van and on one of the windows in the back of the van, he had painted a grid and apparently as he got old and was unable to manage these chores and so forth in Maine.
He would drive his van in and position it so that this grid was over what he wanted to paint and then he would sit in his van and he would paint what he saw through the window and then of course bring it back to the house when he was done, but that was inspiring to me and I still have some of his drawings.
Dr. Lisa: You had somebody as a role model.
Abbie: I did.
Dr. Lisa: To an extent anyway.
Abbie: Yes I did and my dad was very talented, but when he became a young adult, his ability was drawing aircrafts and cars and very technical kind of drawings and so he was unable to find work in that industry that would be enough to support a family. He ended up in sales, but he always said to me that children live out the dreams of their parents and I feel like, this always brings tears to me. I always feel like I lived out my dad’s dream of being an artist, which made me feel really good.
Dr. Lisa: What about your own children?
Abbie: Well, my own children are grown and one of them is a mechanical engineer living in Vermont off the grid and he designs wind turbines and he builds very fancy chicken coops and does gardening, makes slip covers. He does everything. He is very multi-talented. My other son has always been my teacher because he lives outside of any box that I can recognize and he is living in Lexington, Kentucky now with his wife.
Just lives a completely different lifestyle from anything I could ever imagine and he is happy. That of course, every mother knows, that’s all you want for your children, is for them to be happy and do what their life work is that they want to do and he’s doing it. In terms of producing another artist, no I never did, but what was interesting, I should back up a little bit.
When I first started working as a professional artist, just prior to that, I was very fortunate to have a mentor who was a professional artist and she took me under her wing. I went over probably one day a week and she would setup something for me to paint and I would paint and she would work with me. It was such a gift to have her in my corner. She was an illustrator as well and she used to use my children as models for some of her work.
That’s basically how I got to know her because she had a grandson that lived with her and her grandson and my son were about the same age and they played together and through that I got to know this women. She was a real guiding light. She’s still is in a lot of ways. I have a picture of her in my bookcase and when I’m feeling down about a piece I’m doing, I look at her and if she looks like she’s smiling then I figure, “I’m on the right track” if she looks like she’s not smiling, then I regroup a little bit, but she’s still there to kind of guide me and it’s been wonderful to have had her in my life.
Dr. Lisa: So far you’ve talked about the good times and the support that you’ve had and the inspiration, but I know you’ve had other things going on in your life. I know that you’ve experienced difficulty. I know that you’ve had to support yourself and you’ve had to make your way financially, single mother of two kids.
Abbie: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa: I think you were telling me a story about a turning point that happened when you were kind of thinking about where you were going to go next in your life.
Abbie: Yeah, it was … I got divorced in 1979 and my children’s father basically walked out of our life and left me having to deal with two kids that were seven and 11 at the time and I didn’t have a clue how I was going to support myself, but I know, I knew profoundly that at that point in my life, I would take some path and if I didn’t take my path towards art, I’d take it some place else.
If I was going to become an artist, a professional artist, that was the time I’d have to do it. So I did and I started doing, I did illustration, I did portraits, I did drawings, I did ad lay-ups, I did anything I could artistically and I think the thing that you’re referring to was that I was in a place in my life where I was feeling kind of sorry for myself because I was left holding the bag and I had two children to support and so on and so forth.
Anyway, Dr. Bernie Seigel, I had read his book, Love, Medicine and Miracles, and then found out that he was coming to Portland to speak, so I was very intrigued and decided to go to this lecture. There was, oh, I’d say 1500 people at this lecture and he strode into the room, shaves his head so that he can relate to his cancer patients, his energy is just tremendous and he walks in and he just starts talking and the place just went silent and he talked for a while and then he put it to the audience, he said, “Who in this room is doing with your life exactly what you want to do?” and I did not raise my hand.
About a third of people did and he stood there and he kind looked around and then he said, I want you to know you people who didn’t raise your hands that you’re potential cancer patients. I sat there and I went gulp and realized that I needed to do a little rethinking about what was going on in my life. Instead of sitting there and feeling sorry for myself about being left, holding the bag and having two children to support and trying to get my art work off the ground and no money and so on and so forth.
I started to rethink the way I was doing my life and realized that this was my choice that I was given a gift to raise my boys the way I wanted to raise them and that I was able to pursue my art work and I had this wonderful mentor in my life that was helping me and how lucky could I get? It was the real turning of events for me and it wasn’t long after that that my mentor was working for a company in Chicago that was producing product for the collectables industry and they’re kind of like Hummel and art place that kind of thing.
She invited me to meet her boss and to bring my work and I did and he like what I was doing and invited me to participate with their company making art work for product and he handed me a check and he said, “Think about it.” He said, “If you want to work with us, sign the check and book yourself a trip to Chicago.” So me being no fool, (laughs) with two boys to support, took this on.
I went to Chicago and I felt like Cinderella at the ball. They wined and dined me. I started working with them. We did all kinds of projects and it meant a regular income so that I didn’t have to worry with my kids and it unfortunately did take me away from them periodically. My brother lived just a hop and a skip up the road, so he was able to help me out with the kids when I was gone.
It was quite an adventure and I did, I traveled quite a lot. I went to Italy one time and toured the ceramic factories in Northern Italy to see about importing product and then he sent me to Japan one time. We were doing figurines and I went to Japan to work the sculptures there because they would work from drawings and I worked with them.
It was very interesting because I couldn’t speak Japanese and they didn’t speak English, but there were certain words that they were sort of universal like, “skoshi” which means a little bit, they use the same word. I had to be careful with words if you talked about a tummy or a fanny or something like that. They had no idea of what you were talking about.
That went on for almost 20 years, I worked with them. It was a pretty good deal and then it just slowly wound down. It was obviously time to do something else. Almost simultaneously to that, I started thinking about wanting to really paint for myself and I had also been single for 12 years, I guess, and decided that I was ready to have a partner in life and I started speaking with friends and saying, “If you know somebody that you like and feel free to give them my phone number.”
In the meantime, I decided my kids were grown and leaving the nest that it was time for me to bug out of Maine and see what I was made of and of course Taos-Santa Fe area is a big art MECA, so I decided that’s where I would go. I would go there and find a place to rent and spend the winter and paint and see what it was all about. I booked a trip in April to go out in July and in June I met this man who turned out to be my husband and so instead of looking for a place to rent while I was in Taos, I was looking for public phones, (laughs) so that I could call this man.
Well, it turned out a year later, we ended up getting married and he was on the tail end of a digital equipment corporation that was going downhill at the time. He took a severance package and we bugged out of Maine. We moved out to Taos, New Mexico. Lock, stock and barrel. It was like the Clampets from Maine with every thing we own packed in a Ryder truck and a car being pulled behind and we drove cross country and we had bought a piece of land and had built a very small home that would end up being his shop.
He wanted to make fine furniture and so we put a little kitchenette and a bathroom in it and we lived in that while we built the rest of the house. The rest of the house was an authentic adobe and he and I shaped all the adobe, the little niches, the little insets and there were little walls and bancos, which are benches and the fireplaces, the Kiva fireplaces, which are very round and he built all of the furniture, all of the cabinetry, all of the doors and a lot of the porches outside.
The place was absolutely a show piece. Everything in the house was handmade. At the end of the day, we would sit out in the courtyard and look at what we were doing and look at this beautiful blue sky and just feel so incredibly contented to be where we were and that was pretty much the way it was in Taos. It was so artistic, so rewarding to be there. So much fun. We were there for 10 years.
When I turned 50, I climbed three mountains, Willard Peak, which is over 13,000, Hickory to peak and Lobo peak and very proud of myself for doing it. Then I also decided at that point I wanted to get a horse again. I ended up buying a horse, who was just wonderful, is still. I still have him. I moved him to Maine, when we moved back, but after 10 years of being in Taos, and having this wonderful experience, I started to miss my family and I started to miss Maine.
I had always told people that I was on assignment in Taos and someday I would have to go back to Maine. Well the time was coming and we decided okay, we would move back to Maine and our house sold in three days. It barely was even on the market and people that bought it wanted all of our furniture, so we didn’t have to move very much back, but we did move back and that was about ten years, well nine years ago.
The move back to Maine was very difficult for me. I mean it is home. It’s always been home, but I had never been involved in the painting art market in Maine. Moving back here it was like starting all over again. It was very hard. It’s a very different market from out west, very different. In the meantime, painting out west with all the light and the color and the sun, everything is just so brilliant out there.
Moving to Maine, which as you know, is very overcast and gray and very subtle colors and so forth. It was hard transition for me and then I finally decided that what my challenge was, was to find the color in Maine. This had been a slow process, but there was a point not too long ago where I realized, I’m in a fog, I don’t know what to paint. I don’t know how to paint Maine. I’m just in a fog and of course the light bulb went on and I said, “I’ll paint fog.” (Laughs).
I did a whole fog series and went around to different places and through painting fog, I realized how much color there really is and fog isn’t always just one color, it’s many, many, many colors, depends on how thick it is, depends on whether it’s a cloudy day or a sunny day or what time of year it is that fog takes on very different colors.
Well about that same time, I was invited to go to Monhegan with a group of gals from the area and we rented a house for two weeks and we stayed in Monhegan and painted and had an absolute wonderful time and I painted out every single day and what I discovered there was that I could paint Maine. It was there. It was right in front of me and I just had to paint it and it was a big discovery for me because prior to that I was just feeling so kind of floundering, sort of lost. How do I paint Maine? It came to me in Monhegan.
I’ve been going to Monhegan with the same group of gals every year for two weeks. We rent a cottage and just go out there and paint. It’s fun. It’s wonderful. We have a great time.
Dr. Lisa: It sounds like to me, perspective, has been really important, whether it’s personal perspective on your own life, whether it’s finding the perspective that enables you to find the color in Maine versus New Mexico, it really sounds to me like you have had to keep shifting back and forth to try to evolve the way that you look at things.
Abbie: I think that that’s one of the wonderful things about being an artist, least for me, is that you’re always, always, always taking a look. You’re taking a look at your life, you’re taking a look at what’s around you, you’re taking a look at where you’re headed, you’re friends, you’re family, you’re home, you’re always looking at things and in a sense it’s introspective way of living. It has been for me.
I’ve always been aware that opportunity is out there everywhere, it’s just whether you’re willing to pick up on it or not and to be open to taking up an opportunity, making choices, being in a place of choice, about where you’re heading, what you’re doing, what you’re going to pain and one of the things that I had to come to grips with was that I couldn’t paint Maine the way most people paint.
I’m not a tourist painter at all. I’ve never been that way. I’ve done, as I said earlier, portrait work was one of the avenues that supported me throughout most of the time that I was bringing up my boys and realizing that portraits related also no necessarily only to people, but it related to a place. A place has a character and that character is what I try to paint.
For a while, I did a lot of narrative kind of paintings and it was fun, but now I’m in a place where I realize that this character of Maine, like I said with the fog, I’m so, I know Maine, I know the character of Maine, it’s just the case of figuring out how to put that character into a painting of mine.
So that I’m portraying the character of Maine from my viewpoint and fairly, probably within the last year that’s really come together for me and I’m on a path now that I’m very happy with. Along with having been asked to join my gallery in Kennebunk, which has been a real boost for me as well. It’s been a wonderful gallery to deal with.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about that? I actually … I know which gallery you belong to and I’m friends with the gallery owner and I’ve always had a very good sense about this individual and his, actually both gallery owners, is the husband and wife, but tell me what your experience has been.
Abbie: Well, it was out of blue I got a … I think it was an email from Amy, who is the manager, would be interested in showing with them and so being a skeptical artist because I’ve dealt with many galleries, of course I looked them up, went online and I asked around because I knew a couple of the artists that they were representing and they all said, “Oh it’s wonderful. They’re wonderful to deal with.”
I emailed Amy back and I said, “I would be very interested, can I come talk.” She said, “You don’t need to come all the way down. We could arrange to have your work come here and so on and so … ” and I said, “No, I’d like to come down” because I know that energy is an incredibly important aspect to any relationship, as well as my relationship with my painting if my energy isn’t in my painting then people aren’t going to feel that energy when they look at my work.
It’s the same thing with a gallery. The energy has to be right. I have to feel comfortable with them as they with myself. I went down and I met Amy and John was down in Florida at the time and I just felt at home. I just felt like this is right, the work that they had in the gallery was appropriate for my work, so it just felt right. I said, “Yes, I would love to work with you.” I did happen to bring some work and she said, “Bring it in.”
I left, I don’t know, eight or 10 paintings with them and it’s worked very well for me. I’ve had a wonderful experience with them. John [inaudible 00:31:23] who owns the gallery is a heck of a guy to deal with. He’s just like a tiger. He’s so full of life and so full of enthusiasm. He’s done a great deal to promote me and it’s the kind of gallery that I’ve only had one other experience like this gallery and it also was that. They did work as a partnership with me to promote my work and get my work into the community and just make it work and it does. It’s been wonderful.
Dr. Lisa: I’d never thought about that fact, that as an artist you are very, it tends to be a very individual, very introspective, some would say solitary kind of pursuit, but in order to actually get your work out, you need to have, I think, the community around you and the people who champion what you do.
Abbie: Oh exactly. One of the decisions I had to make was I do know how to market myself, but do I want to market myself or do I want to paint. It’s very hard to do both. For me, having a gallery, let them do all that work. Let them do the marketing and let them have the show space, just leave me alone, let me paint, let me create, let me grow, experiment and get outside of my box.
My best work is done when I am alone. As my husband says, he can always tell when I’m having a good time because the stereo is blaring and I’m up there painting away. It’s true. It’s very … for me, painting is a very emotional experience, very energetic experience. It’s not something that I can just go up say, “Okay, now I’m going to paint.” I have to set the scene for myself and gear myself up and get into slowly and allow myself the space to be where I need to be to get to where I want to go.
It is a process. Sometimes I don’t … I go up in the studio at 9:00 and I don’t actually get to painting until 2:00 in the afternoon because it’s about just being in the space and being with that energy and doing whatever I need to do to be there. Sometimes I start a new painting right away. Sometimes I don’t paint at all, but I need to allow myself that space to do as I please, rather than as I always used to joke, there was an add for a donor company which showed the man getting up in the morning and he would trudge to work, I gotta go make the doughnuts.
I used to think of myself that way, I’ve got to go make the paintings, but that doesn’t work for me. I’m not a productive painter, I’m an idea painter. I gather an idea and then I start to explore it and I sleep on it and I draw and journal and I just think about it and may take, I’m not a fast painter either because each painting has a life of its own and you make get your idea totally solid down on paper, but when you actually start painting, little things start happening and it starts creating it’s own space and it starts taking over and you have to let it go.
You have to let that happen because that’s that nonverbal part of yourself that’s coming out that’s just, you know, this very deep inner creative being that’s guiding what you do. You just have to let it have its lead. It’s space.
Dr. Lisa: What big life lessons have you learned, are you learning from those, living the life of an artist.
Abbie: I guess, like I said earlier, opportunities everywhere. It depends on whether you want to pick it up. One of the things I learned from being in the collectables industry was that money is easy to earn. It depends on what you’re willing to do for it. I realized at a very early age that there were a lot of things I was not willing to do to make money.
I would rather make just enough and live the way I want to live. That’s that freedom thing for me. It’s not about making big bucks and living in the right place and traveling the world and having all the accouchements, it’s about being free and being authentic and being peaceful. For me those are the biggies. The ones that are worth pursuing and even that, I mean saying pursuing it, it’s not a case of pursuing it. It’s a case of letting go and being with what’s important.
It’s like I said on the phone with you last night. I am living my dream. I’m painting, my paintings are selling, I can pay my bills and I have a wonderful home and a nice partner and my kids are all grown. I don’t have to parent anymore, I’ve got good health, I have a horse and two cats (laughs) and I’m very happy, very happy indeed.
Dr. Lisa: Abbie, how can people find out about your work or the gallery? How can people connect with you?
Abbie: I suppose through, I have a website, abbiewilliamsstudio.com and through the main art gallery in Kennebunk. Not to be confused with the main art gallery in Wiscasset because my work is there, I have various shows throughout the year, which I post on my website, so those are the best ways to see my work.
Dr. Lisa: Well I’ve been sitting here, feeling inspired the entire conversation, so I know that those who are listening are likely feeling just as inspired. I’m personally grateful for having you spend time with me today. We’ve been speaking with Abbie Williams, who is a Maine artist, back to the state, back to Maine, we’re so glad to have you here again and so glad to have you come talk.
Abbie: Well, I feel very honored. Thank you very much.