There is a new artist-in-residence at Studio 2880.
On Wednesday, Cliff Mann handed in his keys after a successful year painting at all hours, free of charge, at the studio space owned by the Community Arts Council. The next hand to receive those keys belongs to Crystalynn Tarr who begins her residency immediately.
"This is our third year, but the first two were a pilot program. Our first two were Cliff and Corey Hardeman, they were our guinea pigs, it worked, so Crystalynn is the first to have to go through the whole process of applying and being voted into the position by a panel of jurists," said Community Arts Council executive director Wendy Young.
"Aside from the painting - she is very good at that - she won the position based on the lengths she goes to to create the paint she uses. That really was unheard of - a unique point for the jury to consider," Young added.
"I make the pigment out of dirt and rocks," said Tarr. "On the back of each of my works is a little note that explains where all the colours come from, all the locations of the dirt I used."
Did you know dirt was loaded in colour? Each kind of soil, sand and stone has it. It isn't always the colour it appears to be on first viewing, but once you grind it down to fine particulate then strain it through water and let it settle for days or even weeks, it turns into a liquid useful for painting.
"I was involved in an online class in prehistoric civilizations, and I got addicted to this idea once I learned about it," Tarr said. "Now I owe my husband a few sets of shocks for the vehicle."
Her family and friends often catch her staring off into the distance, distracted by the colours of a hillside or staring at rock configurations. They've stopped counting the number of times she stops the car and they've considered travelling with a book always in tow to kill the unscheduled time she spends wandering around in woods kicking over rocks and rummaging in the soil.
She's even considering a geology degree, so fond and interested she has become in the features of the earth.
She is well accustomed to academia.
"I always really loved art as a child, but also really loved science," she said. "I wore myself out taking so many math and science classes in school but eventually I couldn't graduate unless I took one little quarter-semester fine art class with Keith Carlson. Well wow, I ended up ditching everything else. It just clicked for me. I fell in love with the creative process."
Life intervened. She still pursued sciences, and started a family as well. She was homeschooling her son when she got the chance to participate in the Toni Onley Project at Island Mountain Arts in Wells. Again, the sparks in her brain surged. She devoured a book by star arts/science personality Philip Ball called Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color. That's when she knew she had to do more than make art, she had to make the tools that make the art. It was a dirty job, but she had to do it.
You can't get blood from a stone, so they say, but you can certainly get paint and it has the sturdiest colourfast known to humans. Colourfast is the aging property of pigment when it is exposed to light. The pigments derived from plants weaken and fade over time, and that has its place, but the pigments derived from dirt and stone lasts beyond comprehendible time.
"The recipe I use is actually the same one the ancient Egyptians used," Tarr said. "It deepens my enjoyment of the artwork that comes out of it all, but it also gives me more memories and a sense of history about the art work, because I have experiences obtaining the dirt, experiences processing the dirt, and experiences making it into a painting."
All of this was done in her basement, at her mother's house, and on the family kitchen table. Now, thanks to the artist-in-residence program, she has a year to focus hard on her career, because she now has ample space to work in.
"Being able to work here this year will be quite sacred to me," she said.
