Page 28 - the NOISE February 2016

When I first walked into Northern View Artist Studio to meet Linda Shearer-Whiting my eye was immediately drawn to the pencil drawings of statues carved into the
facades of buildings prevalent in cities throughout europe. My memories took me back to my aimless wanderings around Florence, Italy in 2011, marveling at the intricate figures carved in stone. “stone People,” were inspired by the artist’s travels in Glasgow, Madrid, Prague, Lisbon and Paris.
“I became fascinated by these stone figures holding up the entrances and gracing the windows of buildings,” Ms. shearer-whiting recalls. “They weren’t listed in the guide books and people seemed to take these silent sentinels on their buildings as just something that was supposed to be there. It made me very sad to return to the beige, square boxes that made up my daily cityscape of Phoenix.”
The “stone People” studies were influenced by the artist’s background in printmaking. “Lithography was one of my favorite mediums in school,” she shares. “Drawing on a fine- grained piece of granite was such a wonderful experience. Unfortunately, my printing skills in lithography weren’t as developed as they were in the other forms of printmaking I was doing. The richness of the drawings I was doing on the stone always lost a bit when the image was printed onto paper.”
A few years ago the artist purchased some Claybord panels intending to use them as a surface for some paintings, but ended up drawing on them instead. “I was immediately transported into the litho studio at school,” Ms. shearer- whiting says. “Drawing on this was very much like drawing on a litho stone. The panels seemed the perfect surface to finally do something with all the sketches and photographs of my ‘stone people’ studies.”
Ms. shearer-whiting grew up in Alberta, Canada. Her father painted, and many of the gifts she received growing up were art supplies. Growing up with four brothers, the artist found art to be a means of finding personal space, and would often lock herself in her room and draw.
she attended Walla Walla College in washington where she met her husband and studied art. The two relocated to Portland, Oregon, and later moved to Phoenix where Ms. shearer-whiting studied printmaking at Arizona State University and taught elementary school.
Ms. shearer-whiting and her late husband had purchased a home in Flagstaff with the idea of retiring, but with a teacher’s schedule, the painter would come visit Flagstaff often on holidays and vacations. she has now been living in Flagstaff since May 2013. “Most of the stuff I was painting was about route 66 anyway so it just made sense for me to move up here,” she tells me. “It’s nice to have a space and give myself permission to just focus on this. This studio makes it easy, I love staring out at the square and seeing what’s going on.”
Many of the artist’s paintings and drawings tell tales of travel. There has been a series painted from photographs taken with the camera on the dashboard as she rode passenger side on a road trip — each scene different, but the road always reappearing in the same place.
A series of small pencil “Daily Drawings” hang around the studio — sketches of her yard illuminated by the full moon light in the wee hours of the morning, a view from the car window at the side of the road, and Buffalo Park on a foggy day are recreated with graphite on paper.
“I really like working on a whole series of something,” she says of the “Daily Drawings.” “They often start out as further studies to sketches and then they become something whole when a large number is completed.”
Having just finished another small series of paintings, also inspired by route 66 signs, Ms. shearer-whiting comments it feels good to be painting on canvas again and to move her arm more. she is currently working on sign-inspired paintings and recently took a trip to Las Vegas where she met someone who had grown up there and knew where all the good signs were.
A current work in progress, inspired by a road trip to Lincoln, nebraska, shows a scene from the brief amount of time Ms. shearer-whiting was passing through Texas. A towering figure of a cowboy stands out in front of a restaurant. Another snapshot in time shows an old grain elevator sitting in disuse along the side of Old route 66, clouds stretch sparsely across
28 • february 2016 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us
a blue sky over a flat Kansas landscape. “when I took my road trip in the spring (visiting family), the only way I could see myself doing this was to stay on old route 66 as much as I could,” she admits. “You hardly see those grain elevators anymore. I was so shocked to see one in Kansas. Most of them are cement now, but this was obviously not in use and out in the middle of nowhere.”
One piece, different from the others, is a collage of clippings, calendar pages, letters, drawings and leaves — Marking Time. “I did a show last year on bare trees, because I wanted to show some of my husband’s photographs of aspen and I did a bunch of drawings,” Ms. shearer-whiting tells me. she realized late one night she hadn’t designed an invitation for the show, and made a small collage. Inspired by the small postcard-sized piece, she decided to make a bigger collage.
The collage became much more personal than the post card. Ms. shearer-whiting had saved the calendars full of doctor appointments and treatments from when her husband was diagnosed with cancer. “It was one of those things that was really weird — you felt bad throwing them away and you don’t know what to do with them, but you don’t want to look at them,” reflects the artist. she decided to incorporate them into the collage, along with pages from her husband’s journal he kept when he would go on weekend photography trips. “so it became an homage to him. It’s more personal than a lot of my stuff is — I don’t usually put that much of myself into a piece.”
Also incorporated into the collage are rhododendron leaves Ms. shearer-whiting gathered while in Vancouver, Canada. The leaves had been on the ground so long they were skeletal. “It’s all about time and the passing of it,” Ms. shearer-whiting explains. “Marking time, and all the ways we do it.”
Another section of the collage has many different layers of peeling wallpaper — representing the walls inside the abandoned homes in Bodie, a ghost town in California. “It is my favorite ghost town ever because it’s one they haven’t cleaned up to make it look like what it may have been like when people lived there,” she describes. “I remember going in this one house and there were all these layers of wallpaper and I thought that was the coolest thing. I thought, these places were built so quick, and then you bring in women to marry the miners or teachers to teach the kids and they try to decorate it to make it look like this lovely Victorian house when it’s just a shack — I think those kinds of buildings have stories to tell.”
One of Ms. shearer-whiting’s most recent series is a deck of cards featuring the artist’s long-time inspiration — the Hotel Monte Vista. A collection of 54 small watercolors is spread out on a table during our interview.
Though the artist has been painting the exterior of the Monte Vista for years, and had originally thought she would use some of those older paintings for card imagery, she ended up creating all new paintings for each of the 54 cards.
when she shared her idea of doing a Monte Vista playing card deck, she was invited to take a look at the interior of the Hotel. she had seen the inside of rendezvous and the cocktail lounge, but had never gone upstairs. when she saw the name plates on the rooms, she was struck with an idea for the face cards.
Instead of Jacks, Queens and Kings, celebrities appear on the face cards — Jon Bon Jovi, Bing Crosby, Linda ronstadt, Humphrey Bogart, and John wayne — to name a few. The jokers picture a raven wearing a jester hat, playing on the myth of the trickster. The number cards show the illuminated Monte Vista sign from a variety of angles, both day and night, and also scenes from rendezvous, the Cocktail Lounge, the halls, lobby and hotel rooms.
The paintings and drawings of Ms. shearer-whiting can be found at Arizona Handmade Gallery, 13 n. san Francisco, and at the artist’s own creative place, northern View Artist studio, 7 e. Aspen studio 5. NorthernViewStudio.com
| Clair anna rose shuffles her cards for gin rummy. clair@thenoise.us KaRen ClaRKSOn
the aRt OF MaRKing tiMe:
linda sHearer-wHitinG’s litHos of leGaCY
storY BY
ClaiR anna ROSe