Marie Cameron: More Rainbows!
Marie Cameron is an imaginative realist oil painter and mixed media assemblage artist working in Los Gatos, California. Her found photo compositions use silk thread to tie the present to the past, exploring how humans relate to their environment and each other.
How did your creative journey begin?
I grew up with a super creative mom - she did it all! While she was renovating our century old house, she ran a ceramic shop, refinished and upholstered furniture, made linoleum cut prints, painted, sewed clothes and embroidered. Later on she made reproduction folk art and quilts for sale. She made me fee like I could do anything with a power tool, a needle or a brush and I did! As a kid I built my own doll house and tree house, sewed clothes for both my dolls and myself (even my prom dress and wedding dress - think sweetheart neckline, off the shoulder puffy short sleeves, purple princess ’80s extravaganza and a red sand-washed silk, bias cut '20’s influenced midi dress). We didn’t have any art classes at my school in rural Nova Scotia but I did take a few independent community classes, a still life painting class in oil, a casein class and a watercolor workshop with Leonard Paul. I was also awarded a summer intensive workshop for gifted high school students instructed by artists David MacNeil and Jean Hancock held at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. I was selling commissioned oil paintings in my teens and hand painted and embroidered angel ornaments made from vintage fabric and lace at craft fairs, which along with my job at the local slaughter house, helped to put me through art school, earning a BFA with honors from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick in Canada, majoring in painting and minoring in sculpture.
Where do you find inspiration for your work?
I find the most awe inspiring moments in nature. Encountering a wild albino deer in the dark woods. Seeing a leucistic hummingbird flit about like a wild fairy in a magical garden. Watching a glorious rainbow cut through a gloomy, sodden sky. Discovering themystery of an old shell midden. Finding strange creatures at low tide. Smelling the flowers that bloom in the ashes of a forest fire. Stumbling across a stunted albino redwood in a forest of green giants. I draw much hope from the metaphors these moments reveal.
How has your work evolved over the last few years?
My work really changed once the pandemic hit. Along with the fear and isolation from that time there was so much social, political and environmental turmoil that I found myself really struggling to connect with a sense of hope and wonder. As I was confronting this in my personal life and wondering how I might convey this through my art, I was struck by a huge rainbow and knew in an instant that I needed more rainbows in my life. I began to obsessively embroider silk rainbows onto found, vintage photographs, choosing luminous, hand-dyed silk threads to contrast against the somber grays and sepias of time worn images. I scoured the internet for orphaned photographs of everything that resonated with me: forests, oceans, landscapes, firefighters, nurses, children lovers and lots of women, hot air balloons and even more rainbows. I needed to see the rainbow in myself, in others and in our word again.
What does a typical day in the studio look like for you, and how has your art practice grown or changed?
I am an early riser, the morning light is really great and I love the potential of a new day and the huge expanse of uninterrupted time unfolding before me. I can see my studio in the back yard as I have my breakfast and coffee and mull over my plans are for the day. I want my brain to be fresh and fluid. Same goes for the paint, I want it to be fresh and fluid too. I squeeze out a veritable rainbow of oil paint onto my palette and mix it with my mediums as I ago along. I typically work from physical objects like a shells that I can hold in my hand as I paint or from my own reference photographs that I reassemble through photoshop to create the vignette I’m interested in. I have my radio on for company which I can tune in or out of and get in my zone. Then I paint (or some other creative endeavor) with only a quick break for lunch, until the sun shifts in late afternoon. I need to give my eyes, body and brain a break, keeping the work fresh, not forced. I try to relegate other work like e-mails, social media, website maintenance, exhibition or residency applications, framing, shipping or cleaning for this “after-hours” time, though it doesn’t always work out that way. And then there’s the time I make for attending exhibitions, openings and talks (which is usually in the evenings or on the weekends).
Which experiences have impacted your work as an artist?
So many things have impacted my work as an artist. Family and community support has always been very important. Never underestimate the importance of a thriving arts community filled with artists, mentors, curators, gallerists and collectors - we all need to get pout there and show up for each other! Going to art school and winning a Canada Council Grant gave me great confidence early on. Building my dream studio to work in and and having a professional website have both been key to my operational success. I’m grateful for every show I have been juried into or been invited to participate in, especially "The de Young Open 2020 & 2023 "at the De Young Museum, San Francisco, my solo exhibition "Critical Masses, A Very Low Tide" at New Museum Los Gatos and “Fable” an inaugural group exhibition at Jen Tough Gallery in Santa Fe where my piece hung next to the work of one of my art heroes, Danielle Krysa (AKA The Jealous Curator).
How has social media impacted your work?
Social Media became an integral part of my #morerainbows! project. I would create a new piece almost every day, The work was calming and meditative. I would delicately pierce the fragile, brittle photographs with the finest of beading needles and gently pull the silk through the tiny holes, stitch after careful stitch, working with the rhythms of the day. It was so restorative, so healing. I would photograph the finished piece it in the late afternoon light and then post it to social media that evening in an attempt to share hope, wonder and joy with others. People told me they would wait for their daily dose of rainbow wondering what I might do next! I made a series of postcards based on this work with my author friend, Christy Ann Conlin (my rainbows on the front and her inspired lines of prose on the back) and we would send them out to anyone in the world who needed a rainbow for free. We mailed them all over the US and Canada and as far as Iceland, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand and Australia! Somehow it didn’t seem right to offer these pieces for sale in those dark days and as my collection grew I began to imagine what it would like to have an entire wall covered in these little rainbows when we opened up again. When people were interested in a piece I would reserve it for them - no money required and they could claim them at the “Wall of Rainbows” exhibition that I held in my studio June 11- 15, 2021 when we officially opened up in California. It was like a festive reunion and the rainbows looked like a collective photo album mounted to the wall with photo corners, almost a diary of the pandemic. The #morerainbows! project taught me how the sharing of joy can actually be the art itself.
Website: mariecameronstudio.com
Instagram: @mariecameronstudio