A Painter’s Touch

At age
55, staff member Shirley Bland discovered she had
A Painter’s Touch
…………………………………………………………………

BY DANA BENSON
Rice News Staff

Shirley Bland
likes to try things she’s never done before. That’s
how, at age 55, she discovered painting.

Bland, executive
assistant at Rice’s Computer and Information Technology
Institute (CITI), not only tried her hand at painting, but
she also learned she’s quite good at it. So good, in
fact, that she landed a two-month residency at a gallery
in Santa Fe, N.M., over the summer.

She conducted
the residency in August and September at the Mill Atelier
Gallery in Santa Fe with the goal of completing six to eight
canvases and experimenting with oil painting for the first
time.

The residency
was just the next step in Bland’s progression from
fiber artist to an accomplished painter.

“I have
only been painting since 1993. It came as a great surprise
to me that I could paint. I had been a fiber artist —
a weaver and a spinner and a dyer,” Bland said.

She explained
that she wanted to make a tapestry, but became very frustrated
because she “couldn’t get the design from my brain
to my fingertips.” Someone suggested she take a drawing
class. Terrified at first because of what she described
as “a lack of natural talent,” Bland ended up
enrolling in every art class she could get her hands on
at North Harris County Community College: drawing, ceramics,
design, watercolors, art history, art appreciation and,
finally, painting.

In her first
painting class, Bland painted a landscape using a grid system.
The process involved “gridding off” a picture
that she liked into four-inch squares and then painting
that picture grid by grid onto a canvas.

“I was
so happy with the results,” Bland recalled. “To
me it’s kind of fascinating that I went from where
I was then to now, where I can go out and look at a mountain
or a tree and I can paint what I see. I could not have done
that at the beginning.”

Bland described
the teachers and students at the community college as “completely
affirming. I believe it was strictly a matter of wanting
to do something very badly, and the school gave me the tools
to do it. It increased my self-confidence and my interest,
and finally I decided it was what I had wanted to do all
my life. I was 55 years old before I discovered that.”

Acrylic has
been Bland’s main medium of choice, and she’s
always been fascinated by landscapes. “Because I was
a fiber artist,” she explained, “I’m a very
tactile person. I can’t see a rock without wanting
to pick it up or touch it. Rock formations and mountains
have always held a great deal of fascination for me because
I grew up in hilly country in Oklahoma. I’ve always
loved the mountains.” She joked that she’s lived
in Houston for 40 years, and for all that time she’s
missed living near mountains. But Bland and her husband,
John, plan to retire in the Texas Hill Country.

Her love of
landscapes is what attracted Bland to a residency in Santa
Fe. She enjoyed loading up her car in the mornings with
her paints and easel and heading into the mountains to take
photographs and do watercolor sketches. Then she would return
to the studio to paint.

She found the
residency she wanted through the Internet. It paid for an
efficiency apartment in the heart of Santa Fe’s art
gallery district and studio space in which to work. Bland
paid for her own travel expenses, food and supplies.

While one of
her goals was working with oils for the first time, Bland
also found that she had gotten bogged down in her 40-hour
work week and daily chores. It was taking her weeks and
weeks just to complete one painting. “I wanted to see
what I could do if I had time just handed to me. And that’s
what I got: the gift of time.” In Santa Fe, she completed
eight canvases, and she is working on six more that she
started there.

Bland had thought
about retiring prior to her residency. But once she was
chosen for the residency, she decided to just take a leave
of absence, thinking she would come back refreshed. Now,
she plans on working until her full retirement age, about
18 more months.

Her boss, Tony
Elam, associate dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering
and executive director of CITI, is a fan of her work, particularly
her watercolors. He was thrilled she was selected for the
residency and even happier that she returned to Rice.

“I was
very happy and proud when she was awarded the art fellowship
in Santa Fe this year — it was very deserving,”
Elam said. “Knowing how important art was to Shirley,
I was happy to give her a leave of absence, but on the other
hand I was even happier when she returned! You really find
out how much you depend on and miss someone when they are
not around.”

In addition
to the landscapes Bland painted in Santa Fe, she also did
several abstract mood pieces, especially after Sept. 11.

“After
that, I felt very lonely and depressed,” said Bland,
who noted that her two-month residency was the first time
she had been away from her husband during their 45-year
marriage. “Even if I had wanted to come home, it would
have been very difficult. So I gave myself an assignment
that for a couple of days I would paint nothing that was
not painted in red, white and blue. It was very therapeutic.”

Recently, Bland
said her interest in abstracts has increased, and other
people really respond to them as well. “Everybody sees
what they want to see, which is what’s fun about abstracts.”

Her Santa Fe
work in general is looser than her previous work, and that
is something she’s been trying to achieve. “I
went out there to do new things, and I really grew through
the experience.”

Bland’s
favorite painting, “Root of Jesse,” almost looks
like an abstract but in fact is a painting of the root of
a bristlecone pine tree. It was the painting that proved
to Bland that she could “do something beautiful that
I loved. If I never did another painting, I would be happy
with that one.”

But in keeping
with her philosophy to always try something new, Bland next
wants to take classes in life drawing so she can learn to
draw people.

Of her passion
for painting, she said, “It’s kind of like God
opened a door for me, and I never would have dreamed of
it. I wish my parents were alive to see my work. One day
out in Santa Fe, I kind of talked to my folks. I said, ‘Do
you see me? Can you believe this is your kid doing all this?’”

Bland has worked
at Rice for three years. She and her husband owned a lawn-and-garden
equipment business before she joined the staff at the George
R. Brown School of Engineering. She called Rice a perfect
environment in which to work and said her colleagues are
very supportive of her work as an artist. Her husband is
her best fan and critic and builds most of the frames for
her paintings.

Her work can
be found on the Web at <http://seblandscapes.tripod.com/>.