photo by Kevin Briles/artwork by Chuck Olson

From Easel to Exhibition

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To put it plainly, you get your artwork shown by living the lifestyle. Mingling, chatting, schmoozing over a few glasses of wine… That’s if you already have the talent and studio space. Fortunately, Chuck Olson had both.

“It’s hard when you leave the support structure of a university setting,” says the Indiana, PA, artist. Incidentally, Indiana is Jimmy Stewart’s hometown and served as the inspiration for Bedford Falls in It’s a Wonderful Life. “You wonder, who’s going to look at your work instead of teachers and classmates? The first thing is a studio.”

Or garden, as Chuck calls it. An artist’s studio needs to be a place you want to go, a space that lends itself to creativity, and that doesn’t mean it can only house your art supplies. For example, Chuck keeps a guitar and stationary bike in his work space, just in case he needs to ride a few miles while staring at blank easel.

“You need something to give you energy,” he laughs. “Most of the time I listen to books on tape, and it’s usually a book about something I’m studying for a piece. When I was working on some landscapes and coming out here, I’d listen to Lonesome Dove for an hour and a half and just paint. Just whatever motivates me.”

Chuck originally had dreams of being a doctor, but upon realizing he couldn’t function in a sterile environment, he turned to art. He was 14 years old when his father passed away, which he recognizes as a catalyst in his career.

“I think about how we deal with loss, and we can’t fill up that vacuum. You can fill it up with grief, or you can do something like this,” he gestures to his collection – Visual Histories: the Paintings of Chuck Olson – currently on display at the Amarillo Museum of Art. “That isn’t the sole reason why I do this, but in the cocktail of reasons why we do the things we do, it’s a very important part.”

Chuck graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, one of the largest state schools with one of the best art departments. He went on to Tyler School of Art, which is part of Temple University in Philadelphia, for his Master in Fine Arts, and went on to teach at Saint Francis University at 23 years old.

“I’ve been teaching for 33 semesters and am currently the Head of Fine Arts. I stayed there because I really wanted to be able to balance teaching and my own art,” he says. “I’ve always had a large studio apart from the house in town where I can keep my routine going.”

Once an artist creates showable pieces, Chuck recommends seeking out juried exhibitions. Take images, send images and budget a certain amount of money to enter 20 shows a year. Consider it a success to make it into half of them.

“You build a resume that way. You also learn how to build a way of life, one that allows for some activity to take place,” he says. “You need a work space, some time in your day and a job that accommodates all of that.”

For Chuck, he made the majority of his connections early on going through the juried process and working with local galleries. He finds that it’s often folks on the local level that can make a big impact on a budding artist’s career.

“I remember I entered an exhibition in a public library about two hours from where I lived and the new curator at the museum of art in Pittsburgh juried it, liked my work and did a show for me at Carnegie Museum. That was my first New York show,” he recalls. “You look at what Ann Crouch is doing with Sunset Gallery. It starts on the local level. You never know who’s going to walk in and it will be a different experience for everyone.”

Chuck met AMoA Executive Director and Curator Graziella Marchicelli at the Southern Alleghenies Museum in Pennsylvania, where she was the curator before moving to Amarillo two years ago. She asked Chuck to jury a show in November 2007, which was his first visit to the Texas Panhandle. Arrangements were made to show Chuck’s collection in the fall of 2009, and he ended up added several pieces after seeing the terrain in Amarillo.

“I’m really interested in the reaction to the flat landscapes,” he says. “There’s a group of four called ‘The Land,’ which really come from that November spent in Amarillo. These pieces haven’t been seen before.”

Chuck encourages artists to chalk everything up to the experience. The process of getting your art shown is relentless, so whether your pieces show in New York City or a small town in Illinois, it’s all good. Interesting things can happen just about anywhere.

“It is difficult because you go from place to place like a salesman – because you are – and you try to get them to give you the time of day,” he says. “Try to establish contacts, arrange things, meet for dinner, talk over a glass of wine. You have to think of it as a lifestyle.”

The bulk of Visual Histories paintings were shown in 2007 and 2008 at the Southern Alleghenies Museum. Whenever a painting is bought, Chuck replaces it or simply adds to the collection, as he did with the group of four landscapes. Part of the collection was shown in Parma, Italy, where Chuck works the director for a music and arts program each May. Some of his paintings will return to Parma in May 2010, where they’ll hang in an old Renaissance church. Overall, the collection represents seven years of work.

The exhibition is broken down into three categories: objects, landscapes and maps. Chuck has always been fascinated with the past as cultural archeology. He takes history and adds a modern spin, playing on the contradiction of the two.

“I have a piece called Art and Science and it’s based on the notion that science always rejects its past, whereas art accumulates everything,” he explains. “For example, medieval literature is still relevant but medieval cardiology isn’t. So I found these old Chemistry books from the late 70s that had been thrown out – which is science rejecting itself, you know? So I took this orphan and photographed the things in it and made a collage. I painted the carbon bonds and that’s what the painted is: imagery that comes out of a rejected chemistry book.”

He and his son, Jeremy, drove the collection from Indiana to Amarillo in two days, whereas some artists send their work via postal service. Chuck likes the peace of mind knowing his seven years of work is safe, and the do-it-yourself method saves the museum a little money as well. While satisfaction comes with a safe delivery, the labor of packing, transporting and unloading the pieces prove to be exhausting.

“It’s a problem, a Chinese puzzle,” he laughs, as he and his son carry a 6x16-foot canvas into the AMoA storage room. “It’s like a Thanksgiving dinner. It’s an eight-hour process.”

When a collection arrives at a museum, the artist typically has the floor plan of the exhibit already designed. Such is the case for Chuck, who’s even labeled each piece on the back “top” so Alex Gregory, the AMoA Collections Manager, knows which end is up.

“I’ve walked in and had things hung upside down before. When you work the way I work, you have that problem,” he says.

Chuck maintains that the initial process of creating is the most important for artists. Life can be distracting, so it’s essential to keep that time of creating sacred.

“I try to look at the creative process as showing up – period. Make time in your day, have a place to go. It’s like exercise or cooking. Just get there. Don’t ask yourself, ‘Do I feel right? Am I inspired? Do I have this great cause?’ Just turn the key and go in the door and something will happen,” he says. “If you turn it into a luxury, it becomes something else. Routine can really solidify things.”

Visual Histories: the Paintings of Chuck Olson will be on display at the AMoA through October 25. The exhibit opens Friday, August 28. For more information on the exhibition, log on to the Amarillo Museum of Art.

by Jennie Treadway-Miller

Jennie was a columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press for eight years prior to moving to Amarillo in 2008. She is an avid reader, runner and writer.