Plein Air painter Fassbinder unveils result of years-long project
“Hi! I’m Mary and I’m here to make a painting of you!’”
Petaluma painter Mary Fassbinder repeats these words with a bright smile, as she describes her reactions and her feelings while visiting 60 national parks over a three-year period, paint equipment in tow, on her years-long effort to make paintings of every national park in America.
“That’s more-or-less what it was like when I’d arrive at a new park,” she reveals. “I’d look around and think, ‘Hello. I don’t know you, and I don’t have time to really get to know you, because I only have a day with you. But I’m going to do the best I can. And then I’m leaving and we’ll probably never see each other again. I hope that’s okay.’”
Fassbinder sits in her Petaluma Studio, a nicely crammed space on Western Avenue sharing a wall with Ray’s Delicatessen. An experienced plein air painter - “plein air” being French for out-of-doors, used to describe an artistic aesthetic and the practice of painting landscapes in natural light - Fassbinder gestures to the dozens and dozens of paintings tucked here and there around the room.
“I work mostly in the great outdoors, so most of my work is small,” she allows, but then points to a large landscape on an easel toward the back of the studio. “Well, large pieces like that one, I’ll do in here. I just can’t be hauling a massive canvas like that out into the woods, right? I’d have to go out to the same place, at the exact same time of day, over and over and over, in order to finish it. But I really would sometimes only have one day in a park, so I needed to keep the canvasses small enough to finish my paintings in one sitting.”
As of last summer, when she visited St. Louis to paint the recently named Gateway Arch National Park - the 60th park in the system - Fassbinder’s ambitious project has officially been completed. Next weekend, she’ll attend the opening of her first exhibition of all 60 paintings, at the Petaluma Arts Center. Also exhibiting paintings in the show is local landscape painter Davis Perkins.
The project has been more than just a lark, Fassbinder says. From the beginning, it’s been something of a spiritual and deeply personal quest.
“I woke up one morning saying, ‘I need to make a difference with my art. How am I going to do that?’” she recalls. “I decided that I needed the project to take no less than three years, but no more than four. I needed it to be something that lots of other people weren’t already doing. And I needed it to be something that drew attention to nature. So I suddenly thought, ‘Okay, how about if I go and paint all the national park in the country?’ Three weeks, later, I was doing it.”
In many ways, it’s been Fassbinder’s own unique version of a birder’s “big year,” when adventurous bird-lovers go out to see as many birds as possible all over the world.
“Every park has a crazy story attached to it, and those stories bring me closer to the painting,” she says. “The crazier the adventure, the fonder the memory. In some ways, my favorite park was Isle Royale, a park in Michigan, on Lake Superior. Because it was my first park.”
Choosing Isle Royale coincided with the sudden availability, in Ohio, of a 1984 Westfalia Volkswagen Vanagon, at a good price. Fassbinder had decided that such a vehicle would be crucial were she to go travelling the country with a stock of painting supplies, as it would provide a place to sleep and cook, and get her from park to park. After visiting family in Chicago, she traveled to Ohio to pick up the van, and from that geographic point, the nearest park was Isle Royale.
“I was at Isle Royale for just one day, not even overnight,” she says, a bit wistfully, clearly wishing she could have stayed longer. “But that’s where I began to develop my system of arriving at a park, and checking in with the first ranger or docent or concessions worker I encountered, telling them what I was doing, and asking them what their favorite place in the park was. They would send me off to little obscure places, mostly, and I would nestle in, make my painting, and leave.”
On that first leg of the project, Fassbinder painted seven parks between Isle Royale and home. She now admits that if she has any regrets, it’s that she didn’t record more information as she went.
“I didn’t get the rangers’ names or email contacts,” she says. “So for a lot of the people I connected with, I never had the chance to re-connect and show them the painting I made from their suggestion. I was too focused on just getting in and getting the painting.”
Asked what the upcoming Arts Center show represents for her personally, Fassbinder replies that she sees the exhibition as the kick-off for the next phase of the project.
“The first phase is over,” she says. “And now I’m starting all over again, hoping this will just be the first of many exhibits in national parks, airports, museums. My big dream is that eventually these paintings will all be on display at the Smithsonian Institution.”
As for why the first-ever unveiling is taking place in a tiny museum in Petaluma, Fassbinder says, “It’s simple. I wanted to start the exhibitions in my own town. I want this show to generate interest from environmental groups, conservationists, local land trusts. I felt that I needed the next phase to start here at home. Petaluma has been very supportive of me on this journey, so I want to let my community have the first glance at all sixty paintings.”
It so happens that it’s not just Fassbinder’s neighbors and community who will be seeing all 60 paintings in one place for the first time.
“That includes me,” she says with a smile. “As I would finish each painting, I’d photograph them, frame them, then put them away. I’ve never had them all out and up in one setting.”
Echoing her earlier regret that she didn’t capture more facts and figures along the way, Fassbinder says she now believes it’s for the best, allowing the focus of the epic adventure to stay on the paintings themselves.
“I’m not Ken Burns,” Fassbinder notes with a laugh. “I’m not a documentarian, and I’d never profess to be. I’m just recording with my eyes what I see as an artist so that I can share that with the world. I might not know the logistics and history of the places I visited, but I have my own little story of visiting that place. And of course, I have my painting of it. That’s what I have to share, and I’m very happy with it.”
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