Transcription of The Art of Living, #76
Speaker 1: You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland, Maine. Summaries of all our past shows can be found at doctorlisa.org. Become a subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin at ReMax Heritage, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialist in Falmouth, Maine, Booth Maine, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, Apothecary by Design and The Body Architect.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show #76, the Art of Living, airing for the first time on February 24, 2013. Does life truly imitate art? When we acknowledge the creativity of our spirits and seek to find beauty in the world around us, our lives are immeasurably enriched. Artist Abbie Williams and Attorney Photographer Jack Montgomery, help us explore the connection between wellness and living artfully.
I became interested in the connection between art and wellness as part of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour, although the process began long before that. As a runner, I’ve enjoyed getting up early and looking at the sunrise and seeing what beauty Maine has to offer. I’ve been on iPhone aficionado for quite a long time, as long as I can remember and before that even just a point and shot camera carrier as I went out on my runs. I’ve been posting pictures to Facebook and Tumbler and Twitter of my morning runs for several years now.
I know that this enriches my life and just gives me the chance to look around me and understand that I live in a beautiful place and this beauty is contributing to my own health and wellbeing. Artist Abbie Williams and Photography Jack Montgomery feel the same way. We hope that you’ll enjoy our interviews with them today.
As I’ve mentioned before on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour, I believe that wellness is something that comes from within and comes from the energy that each of us has in our own bodies. One way to bring this energy into our lives and into our bodies is through Qigong. Beginning in March 6, I’ll actually be offering a Qi Gong based wellness program that incorporates instruction on healing foods and health from a traditional Chinese medicine perspective called, “The Dragon’s Way.”
This six week program is particularly helpful for people who would like to address life balance, excess weight, anxiety, digestive problems, stress, backaches, high blood pressure, migraines and much more. For more information on our Qi Gong for healing class, which begins on March 6 at the Body Architect, please call 207-774-2196.
When we think of wellness, we go beyond the idea of maintaining one’s health and really speaks to … be one with the world and life and resonate with the things around us and the people that serve as a beautiful example of this are the artists. The people that really are resonating with the world around them. They bring joy and inspiration into our lives and they inspire us by really wanting to live their lives in an authentic way.
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.
Female: Here on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we’ve long recognized the link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the topic is Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Tom: A picture is worth a thousand words or so I’m told. If you’ve ever only heard what we have to say on the radio show then you’re missing how our view of money is shaped and communicated by art. There’s so much wisdom locked up in the icons and symbols of the past and we believe that many of them need to be recast to uncover their meanings. For over a year, we’ve been the beneficiary of the artistic talents of Belinda Thomas at the Brand Company in Portland.
Our website and Facebook images help us tell a story that is often too difficult or too emotional to get across in words. Please, take a moment to browse our website at www.shepardfinancialmaine.com or find us and like us on Facebook, and most importantly be on the lookout for our traveling show, the Art of Money.
Male: Securities offered through LPL Financial Member, [inaudible 00:14:39] investment advice offered through Flagship Harbor Advisors, a registered investment advisor. Flagship Harbor Advisors and Shepard Financial are separate entities from LPL Financial.
Male: There was a time when the Apothecary the place where you could get safe reliable medicines carefully prepared by experienced professionals coupled with care and attention focused on you and your unique health concerns. Apothecary by Design is built around the forgotten notion that you don’t just need your prescriptions filled, you need attention, advice and individualized care. Visit their website, apothecarybydesign.com or drop by the store at 84 Marginal Way in Portland and experience pharmacy care the way it was meant to be.
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.
Male: We will return to our program after acknowledging the following generous sponsors. The Body Architect was founded on the belief that mindful exercise improved the health of the mind, body and spirit, housed in a opened, light filled space in Portland, Maine, the Body Architect offers a cutting edge fitness center, expert personal trainers, nutrition counseling and a full class scheduled. Visit thebodyarchitect.com or call 207-774-2196 and get started with the Body Architect today.
By John Herzog or Orthopedic Specialist in Falmouth, Maine. At Orthopedics Specialists, ultrasound technology is taken to the highest degree with state of the art ultrasound equipment, small areas of tendonitis, muscle and ligament tears, instability and arthritic conditions can be easily found during examination. For more information, visit orthocareme.com, or call 207-781-9077.
Dr. Lisa: One of the things that I’ve had a chance to do as a physician, is to spend time with a broad variety of people out and about in the world and in the last couple of years, my world and my ability to spend time with people has broaden that much more. I’ve encountered people such as Jack Montgomery, who is sitting in the studio with me today.
Jack is a practicing attorney and also a fine art photographer and these are the type of people that I just love to spend time with because it goes to show that you don’t have to just be one thing or follow one path. You can kind of find your own way in the world and really find happiness, so thank you for coming in and spending time with us today, Jack.
Jack: It’s my pleasure, entirely.
Dr. Lisa: Jack, you and I were speaking last week, I believe, and we were talking about what led you to become an attorney and this was because of, you said imprinting.
Jack: That’s right, my dad was a lawyer, had practiced for many years, I grew up in a shadow of a lawyer and he was somebody who enjoyed a great deal and I think that led me down that path, even though I kept telling myself, I wasn’t doing it, as I look I realize, I was very definitely following his path for many years. He got tremendous amount of satisfaction out of the practice of law and even though he enjoyed photography, he was a lawyer and a complete person as a lawyer, so that I think is what got me started in that direction.
Dr. Lisa: You also have a photography background in your family as well.
Jack: That’s right, my grandfather and my father were both photographers. I actually have negatives my grandfather took at Versailles during the First World War with all the statues protected by these giant tempers. So I can see that the roots of that interest go back at least two generations.
Dr. Lisa: What was your turning point? When did you go from being a full time practicing attorney to deciding, you know what, I’m really caught by what I can see with my eye and what I can do with that with the camera.
Jack: Well I had had an interest in photography since I was a teenager, but I had never really gotten serious about it until, about 1993 and I had gone with my family to a vacation place in Massachusetts on the shore and I’ve never been a beach person, so I had brought my father’s old camera with me just to clean it up and I went to buy film for it and I couldn’t get film.
So I wound up buying a $25 medium format camera, which is a large negative and just playing with that one afternoon, I took a few portraits of my daughter, Molly, developed those and that was the moment lightning struck. I look at that and I said, “This is what I want to do” using the camera to create portrait. From that moment forward has been preoccupation for me.
Dr. Lisa: Did you have to change the way that you actually saw things with your brain, to go from being an attorney, which is very thought oriented to being a photographer, which is very visual.
Jack: Yes and no. Certainly, the visual realm is very different than the intellectual, rational word oriented world of the lawyer. So in that sense, yes, it’s a different vernacular that I had to learn. On the other hand being a lawyer is not just analyzing contrast, more and more, as I get older and older, I realize it’s more and more assessing people and recognizing what their motives are and what’s driving them and what there passions are.
There is some cross over in terms of the, what you might say, is the emotional intelligence, which I think is a big part of portraiture, but then again there is this other whole realm of the visual, which is in and of itself very exciting to me.
Dr. Lisa: How did you make that transition?
Jack: Well, it was abrupt. I went from zero to 60 in about seconds in terms of the photography. From that moment forward, I was initially buying equipment, learning, taking courses, constantly looking for new people to photograph. It was a very abrupt process and I then had to learn how to integrate that time that that was taking into my other demands, which were family and my professional life.
I have three daughters and when I got started with this, they were all, I think they were eight, 10 and 12, around in that sequence. There were still a lot of family demands. I say demands, I mean it was passionate, I loved being with the family. My work has always been demanding. It was not easy to find the time to accommodate this new passion.
I did that. I gave up a lot of sleep. I’m not complaining. I was glad to do it. I started out during the age of film. So every time I shot a picture, I calculated this, every time I pushed the shutter, I was committed to five minutes just to get to a proof sheet. So if I shot 10 rolls of film, that was hours and hours of work. I used to get up at four in the morning to process my film.
The subtext for all of this is that I’ve had a very tolerant wife and more than tolerant, she has been very supportive, but I’m sure there have been challenging moments for her. It never was a question of choice for me. It was never something I sat down and thought, well I’m going to do this. It was something I had to do. That made it a little easier I suppose.
Dr. Lisa: You also had children who kind of bought into their father being simultaneously a photographer and attorney.
Jack: Yeah, my kids have been wonderful. I appreciate that more than you know. Because some of my photography has been challenging. I have not simply done things that are benign and simple and comforting. Some of them are and some of them aren’t, and I’ve always gotten a particular degree of pleasure out of using photography as a way to introduce subjects into the minds of my audience that they might not be comfortable with.
Put that in the context of three kids who were in middle school and you might think that they would be terrified that their father was going to do something that would be horribly embarrassing. There has not been one moment when they have been anything other than supportive. Together with a wonderful wife and three great kids, I’ve felt that I’ve been able to do things that I otherwise would not.
Male: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is brought to you by the following generous sponsors.
Male: Mike LePaige and Beth Franklin of ReMax Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home. With ReMax Heritage, it’s your move. Learn more at rheritage.com and by Booth, accounting and business management services, payroll and bookkeeping. Business is done better with Booth. Go to boothmaine.com for more information.
Dr. Lisa: Talk to me about the work that you did after 911.
Jack: Three weeks before 911, we had taken my oldest daughter, Molly, the subject of my first portrait, down to New York, where she was starting college at the new school about a mile and a half north of the World Trade Center and like every parent, we had all the anxiety of leaving your Maine kid in New York. What’s that all about?
On the morning of 911, I was at my desk and the secretary outside said, “Oh, my gosh, a plane has flown into the World Trade Center” and I thought it was just a Piper Cub or something and then it quickly evolved to something else. I called Molly and I woke her up. I said, “What’s going on?” She said, “I don’t know, I hear a lot of sirens” I said, “Well go out to the street and call me” and five minutes later she called.
She said, “Oh my God dad, you won’t believe what I’m seeing.” Well then when the towers came down, we lost contact with her and we were terrified, the major cell phone towers were on top of the south tower through that whole end of New York. I wound up driving her down to New York and like everybody at that moment we wanted to do something to help and couldn’t figure out what to do.
I tried a few things that didn’t work and it dawned on me that maybe I could use the same process that I had employed for the holocaust pictures for the New York fireman. So I took the portfolio of the holocaust survivors, went to the nearest fire station, near Molly’s dorm, because I’d taken her back to New York. That was the one time in this whole process I’ve been nervous. I thought I was going to get thrown out.
These people were going to say, “We don’t need this.” They were so welcoming and they had lost their engine. Actually the engine for Ladder Company III which is where I photograph is the one that’s in the museum now. So the whole floor was empty and I just spread all the holocaust pictures out on the floor where that engine had been and all the fireman came and looked at it.
They brought down the Captain Ray Trinkle, who’s portrait became the signature picture for the show and I said, “Look, I don’t know where this is going to go, but I just have a feeling if we do these pictures, we’ll all be glad we have them and something good will come of it” and Ray Trinkle said, “Let’s do it.”
I was down there a lot that fall and did pictures for, oh I think three or four days all around the fire house. We then said, “What are we going to do with this?” We formed a committee, Andy Verzosa, among others, was terrific, but there were a lot of other people on that. My secretary at the time, Diane Langdon, jumped in, Nano Chatfield and then we got Henry Kennedy on board and Henry is the director of Camp Up the Coast.
Well the long and the short of it is, we then got the museum involved, we had a show, we raised money. The first money that the families of the latter three family received were from the people of Portland, Maine. There was a big snafu with the Federal Government. The first dollars, and they had it before Thanksgivings, thanks to the people of Portland.
It was quite an experience. I should also say that as a result of the fundraising and then the generosity of Camp Kiev and Henry Kennedy, the fire fighters come back to Maine. The surviving fire fighters come back to Maine every summer for family camp.
Dr. Lisa: How has being a photographer and a father and an attorney, but let’s just talk about being a photographer, how has this changed you?
Jack: Oh, a lot. It’s been wonderful. It’s been one of the greatest things that’s happened to me because it’s given me an opportunity to meet people all over the place from every experience and I love that. On my 30th birthday, my best friend Jody said to me, “You know you’re a wonderful guy, but you’re kind of boring” so I still tease her and we tease each other about that and I think was, she sort of threw down the gauntlet for me.
I’m still a 10-year-old kid at some level. If something happens across the street and I want to run over and see what happened and if there is some new person around, I want to go meet them. I’m just curious. The camera has given me license to go to places and to meet people I’d never, ever, ever would have seen. It’s been one of the great gifts in my life, this passion I have.
Dr. Lisa: Let me broaden up the questions, how do you think that photography and art contribute to the health, wellness and inspiration of a society?
Jack: Absolutely. In so many ways, my answer to that question is focused on a … start off a narrowly and maybe I can address it more broadly, but narrowly, for me, I think art has a tremendous capacity for reaching into people, getting beyond certain filters, into their emotional center to get them to look at things they would not otherwise see.
Dr. Lisa: Have you encountered any challenges along the way?
Jack: Oh, yeah, of many. The first is reconciling my time commitment to this with my profession that’s always been a challenge. I run into people who are resistant from time to time. I have people who, not often, but occasionally who get angry with the photographs, which is always a fascinating moment by the way. I used to get a little uptight and now I’m fascinated because I realize that this photography among it’s many other functions can serve like a Rorschach test for people with …
Particularly an ambiguous image and some people will seize on that image with an interruption that never occurred to me, but they’re sure that’s what that picture means and sometimes they get angry, sometimes they’re defensive or sad or it rekindles some experience in their life, in their early life in a very passionate way. It’s fascinating. I don’t enjoy it when it happens, but that’s the causative of doing what I do.
I can’t be completely benign for me. If it’s too simple, it just doesn’t grab me. It doesn’t wake me up.
Dr. Lisa: What about the people who are a part of your professional life. Have they always just easily accepted the fact that you’re not only an attorney, but also a photographer.
Jack: Yes, everybody been, either been very nice and supportive or just ignored it and I think when the 911 was happening, I think people were aware of that because it crossed a line of their own emotional interests. I mean at that point everybody was engaged. No, I’ve never had one moment when my colleagues have in anyway made me feel reticent, anything but supported, they’ve been great.
Dr. Lisa: Jack, you’ve done work in Maine Magazine, you’ve done profile pictures of Linda Greenlaw, also Angus King, so people who are listening can see your pictures in Maine Magazine with those articles. Where else can they find your work?
Jack: I have a website, jackmontgomeryphotography.com, which is now showing a small portion of what I do. I have not have had show in Maine in a while, in about a year, but I hope to have some up soon. There is a new publication coming out, a new book coming out, the Maine Art Now, which Andy Verzosa and Edgar Beane are working and I have a number of photographs in that. Including some of the gender pictures, which are the core of what I’m doing or a lot of what I’m doing right now.
Your question raises a very interesting point too, which is given the finite amount of time that I have to dedicate to this, if I have an hour, do I spend it making more pictures or getting it out in the world. Promotion of ones artistic work is a hugely time consuming process and I’ve been bad, I should be doing it more, but if I have that extra hour and I have a subject to shoot, I’ll always go and shoot. Stay tuned, I hope that there’ll a lot more that’ll be more easily available very soon.
Dr. Lisa: Jack, you’re a very busy man, and we’re so appreciative that you’ve come in and spoken with us about what it’s like to be a photographer and an attorney and a husband and father living here in the state of Maine, thank you so much for spending time with us. We’ve been speaking with Jack Montgomery.
Jack: Thank you very much. My pleasure entirely.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 76, The Art of Living, featuring artist Abbie Williams and photographer Jack Montgomery. For more information on our guests, visit dsvtorlisa.org. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each weeks shows, sign up for our e-news letter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page.
You can also follow me on Twitter and Pinterest, dsvtorlisa and read my take on health and well-being on Dr. Lisa’s bountiful blog, bountiful-blog.org. We’d love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future shows.
For more information on my medical practices at the Body Architect, visit dsvtorlisa.org or call 207-774-2196. They can tell you about our Qi Gong based healing program coming out beginning on March 6th and they can also tell you about our February 27th rev up your metabolism wellness talk. Please let us sponsors know that you’ve heard about them here.
Apothecary by Design is offering a special event with Dr. Masina Wright and Katy Donohue of Rx Skin Therapy on February 26, 2013. For more information on their event www.apothecarybydesign.com. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, hoping that you’ve enjoyed our art theme show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Male: Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors, Maine Magazine, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin at ReMax Heritage, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, Booth Maine, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, Apothecary by Design and the Body Architect.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street in Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music, by John C. McCain. Our assistant producer is Courtney Tiberge. Summaries of all our past shows can be found at doctorlisa.org. Become a subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.