Residency at Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts June 13 - July 10, 2021

 

I arrived at the Golden Residency in New Berlin on Sunday, June 13 along with my two fellow residents, Rabia Ajaz from Lahore Pakistan, and Lauren Whearty from Philadelphia, PA.

                                                                                      

The residency is located in a renovated barn. We each got a huge studio and a separate "apartment" with a shared kitchen and living space.  

                                                                                     

The Golden Paint Factory is located right down the road and we would walk there some mornings to get technical training on various Golden products. The factory also produces Williamsburg Oil Paints and Qor Watercolors.

The surrounding environs were particularly lush during this time. Each night began with an epic sunset. I liked to walk around the grounds and I began taking my paints outside in the evenings to paint the sky as it transitioned into darkness.

A tent was set up outside the barn because the Goldens assumed we'd need to work and eat out there due to pandemic restrictions. Gratefully, we all had our vaccines so the tent was mostly unoccupied. Sometimes I'd sit under it during a phone call. 

I had a view of the tent out my studio window and I started to love painting it.

For me, the tent embodied a lot of the complicated feelings I was going through at the time. 

It seemed both funny and sad, full of potential but also forlorn – steadfast but somewhat vulnerable.

Some weekends we'd drive to the town of Hamilton to shop at the Farmer's Market in the town's plaza. I bought some amazing bread and there was a wonderful bagel shop. 

There were beautiful buildings on every street and a parade on July 4th. 

In the last week of my residency, I started this painting of people waiting in line at the Hamilton Farmer's Market on July 4th.

Portrait of Lauren Whearty

Portrait of Rabia Ajaz

Foliage 

Experiments with papier-mâché and Golden Paint

I tried out a lot of different aesthetics, paints, and processes. I stumbled onto several ideas that I'd like to hash out further in the upcoming year. 

Golden also makes Williamsburg paints which are so lovely to work with. Some have a grit to them which is a tactile pleasure when painting.

Staining a raw canvas using fluid acrylic paints.

In normal times the Golden Foundation hosts an open studio night for the community to gather and talk to us about our work. But we were all practicing caution, so the open studio was limited.

Instead, a videographer named Lukas Korver came in and interviewed each of us. He created the gorgeous video which you can find at the end of this post.

Almost every day we had the opportunity to learn about various Golden products and try them out. Here we are playing around with the different viscosities of acrylic paint and the new line of So Flat Matte paints which I loved especially.

A sample board of acrylic gels and mediums. They eventually all dried clear. In the first week, I learned the term rheology which essentially means the rate at which something drips. Eg: The rheology of water is faster than the rheology of honey.

On the last night of the residency, we celebrated with a delicious dinner party!

This is the Golden Family. From left to right: Barbara, Mark, and Emma. Mark Golden is the son of Sam and Adele Golden who established Golden Paints in 1980. Newly retired, Sam needed something to occupy his time, so he began making paint for his artist friends. As the business picked up Adele would hand-paint the color charts and labels so customers would know what each paint looked like. The hand-painted charts and labels are now a tradition that Golden continues today. 

I mention the color charts in the video that Lukas made. I also mention the artist Édouard Vuillard who was a driving force behind a lot of the work I was making during the residency. The lab technicians at Golden developed a formula for a ground that resembled cardboard that I also talk about in the video below. 

Thank you for your kindness and generosity, Golden Family!

Visit www.goldenfoundation.org for more information.