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Date: 3/1/2023
WEST SPRINGFIELD — For Christine Hartman, there’s nothing better than squeezing out a blob of intense, lovely oil paint or picking up a vibrant stick of pastel. The materials she uses to create her art are the least intellectual and the most sensual part of the work for her.
“It’s like something really amazing to eat,” said Hartman, a West Springfield resident whose work is on exhibit now through March 25 at the Westfield Athenaeum.
Athenaeum Executive Director Guy McLain will host a gallery talk 2-3 p.m. on March 8 about Hartman’s works.
She works primarily from a still life setup using only natural light. She does use digital media and drawing to do most of the design work for a painting, but the actual paintings are done directly from nature.
Hartman added that her paintings are about the dialogue between the two-dimensional world of painting and the three-dimensional world humans experience. She designs her work so that a viewer can recreate the space and texture of the world when looking at the picture.
“I’ve always wanted to have my work represent that tactile experienced reality that happens when we are really awake to a place,” she said. “Technically speaking, paintings are flat, so any creation of space is made in the viewer’s mind. I’m telling the viewer how to look at the pictures as I make them.”
McLain said Hartman’s paintings of still life arrangement are not simple recreations of objects she chooses to depict, but are reconstructions of a complex visual world.
“She maps the underlying geometry of the world around us, something most of us are only vaguely aware of, and through this process constructs an interplay of space and form that makes the viewer acutely aware of the peculiar characteristics of objects that surround us,” he explained.
Hartman said the show at the Athenaeum has oil paintings and pastel work, a couple of figure paintings and many still life paintings.
“I included some of my study drawings for a few of the paintings and some copy drawings that are so important to my education,” she said.
Although she works in both oils and pastel, pastels are newer for her.
“I started experimenting with them about seven years ago. My grounds are very traditional, primed canvas for oil and prepared papers for the pastel work,” she said.
As a student of art, she began studying and copying artwork that impressed her with its beauty, skill and feeling.
“I continue that process now and I’m still learning new things and ideas,” she said. “A great painting, for me, has an intense beauty — I only find that sometimes in nature, so an activity that involves both is ideal,” she said.
Originally from the Midwest, she now lives in West Springfield. Hartman recalls being “awestruck” by a work of art while at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.
“I was around 12 or 13 and Michelangelo’s Pieta just knocked me out,” she said.
She also was inspired by her maternal grandfather, a professional artist and sculptor, who worked on the St. Louis Cathedral.
“He died when I was very young, but I think that genetics influence one’s way of perceiving the world,” she said. “I have always been a very visual person.”
Hartmann added she is more analytical in how she approaches her work as a painter. She enjoys reading about science, so the connection between art and science is important to her.
She said her main interest is in the visual experience, paired with a love and appreciation for the language of the visual arts, particularly painting and drawing. “Looking, really learning to see, is what has driven my work, my teaching, and just about everything else I do,” she explained.
Hartman studied art in Paris in 1975, and then moved to New York, studying first at the Parsons School of Design, and eventually obtaining a master of fine art degree in painting from Brooklyn College in 1982.
She’s been active as a teacher in both New York and Connecticut, and has exhibited widely. Through the course of her career, she has been represented by the Ann Leonard Gallery, the Piermont Flywheel Gallery, the Sound Shore Gallery, the Bowery Gallery, and the Oxbow Gallery in Easthampton.
Hartman came to teaching late. She met her husband while they were students at the Kansas City Art Institute. They ran a business together for 25 years as piano restorers in the Hudson Valley of New York.
“I painted during most of those years and when we decided to wind down the business in 2005, I was offered a teaching job at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury,” she said.
Hartman was in her mid-50s and — to her surprise — found she loved teaching. She taught drawing and painting to undergraduate and graduate students at Western Connecticut until 2018. That’s when she and her husband decided to make a change and move to Massachusetts.
“One of my oldest artist friends lives in the area and we had visited from time to time, and came to like the area. We have come to love Massachusetts,” said Hartman who recalled spending a year looking around the Pioneer Valley before find a house in West Springfield.
She said her studio is located in her home, but it’s still a work in progress.
“I was at my former studio for 30 years, and it’s interesting how a new space can change your work,” she said.
Her other interests include gardening, furniture design — her husband is a woodworker — and most aspects of cooking.
McLain’s talk on March 8 will guide attendees through the world that Hartman has created, providing insight and telling the stories behind the brushstrokes. Attendees will leave with a new way to look at art and a deeper understanding of these works in particular.
Advance registration for the gallery talk is required at westath.libcal.com/event/10399147.
Hartman’s exhibit can be viewed whenever the Athenaeum is open, Mondays through Saturdays, at 6 Elm St., Westfield. For more information, visit westath.org.