We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Eleanor Blair. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Eleanor below.
Eleanor, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.
During WWII, Mom (along with many young women at the time) wrote letters of support to soldiers serving abroad. My parents corresponded during the war, sharing their mutual love of drawing. I still have a few of those sketches, which they made and sent to one another. They met in person after the war, were married in 1946, and I was born a year later. Dad encouraged my mother’s interest in art, and bought her a set of oil painting supplies while she was pregnant with me. Dad stretched large canvases for my mother, and she created a series of ‘over the couch’ paintings (landscapes copied from calendar photos) to give to her family. So, there was always an unfinished oil painting propped up in the kitchen when I was a little girl. Back then, people didn’t realize how toxic most oil paint is. Mom let me play with her leftover paint, and the strips of fabric trimmed from the canvases Dad built for her. She claimed that I was oil painting when I was three, but of course I don’t remember that. I do, however, vividly remember taking one of my oil paintings to kindergarten show and tell, the canvas rolled and tucked into the front of my winter coat as I walked to school in Palmyra, New Jersey. That early access to materials, and the day-to-day example of art being made in the kitchen as an normal part of a normal life has given me a great advantage as an artist. Oil paints have always felt as natural and easy in my hands as crayons or a no. 2 pencil.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I paint. I use oil, mostly. But also watercolor, soft pastel, gouache and acrylic. And I draw. I’m a skilled artist, along with thousands of other skilled artists, and although I’d like to think I am unique, don’t we all?
Painting has always been my primary source of income. In my early years, I managed to avoid getting a ‘real’ job by being extremely productive, and pricing as low as possible.
I like to dance along the boundaries between the dazzling beauty of the visible world, the wisdom of paint and brushes, and the unending song, composed of memory and imagination, that plays in my heart. Making art brings me peace, distracts me, and gives me purpose.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I’m left-handed, and broke my left arm at the elbow in January of 2007. Unable to paint with my dominant hand, I proceeded to paint with my non-dominant hand for several months. I decided that, after all, it’s not my hand that knows how to paint; it’s my brain. Certainly, my right hand lacked that easy gestural brush stroke that usually informs my style, but I figured out a way to mix and apply the paint in a different way, using smaller brushes and a more intentional application of paint. I’m an efficient painter, a skill that evolved over years of plein air painting and art class demonstrations.
You can see me in action, painting on stage with the Gainesville Orchestra:
I discovered that, in fact, I was still able to paint, using my ‘wrong’ hand; it just took me a lot longer to complete a painting. A few months later, I was contacted by the committee tasked with selecting an image for the 2007 Downtown Festival & Art Show poster. They selected a painting I had done with my non-dominant hand!
Have you ever had to pivot?
I discovered very early in my career, that, as a female artist, my work was taken much more seriously, if I had a studio separate from my home. In the late 1980’s, I was able to buy a small store-front in downtown Gainesville, where I happily worked for thirty years. Over that time, the area was revitalized, with many new businesses opening up around my studio, and what had been a perfect working environment became less than perfect. My patrons had a hard time finding a parking place, and the noise from the bar next door was disruptive, As difficult as it was to make the decision to move out of my beautiful downtown studio, it was the right move at the right time. I live in a house in the historic duckpond neighborhood, a house that had been a home for extended family and friends for many years. It suddenly occurred to me, now that I had the house all to myself, and didn’t need to ‘prove’ myself to potential collectors any more, that I could move my studio home. Got rid of lots of furniture, did a little bit of renovating, and now here I am, full circle. Living in my studio, just as I did when I was first starting out.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.EleanorBlairStudio.come
- Instagram: eleanor.blair.studio
- Facebook: eleanor.blair.9
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3_LuaJ2NUg
Image Credits
Isaac Oster Paula Barett Eleanor Blair Eleanor Blair Eleanor Blair