Each issue, the Art Lantern invites a well-known, or not so well-known, art world personality to write a speakeasy essay on a topic of interest.
Mary Fletcher is a multimedia artist Flaneur: www. axisweb.org/p/maryfletcher She has an MA in contemporary visual art and writes the blog: 4maryfletcher.blogspot.com. She is a humanist, feminist and socialist, influenced by psychotherapy. She lives in St Ives, Cornwall, UK.
Mary Fletcher
This memoir is presented as reflections on her life from a bench in the Bowery where she sat during over more than a year of artistic block, in her fifties when she was a famous photo realist painter.
She had obtained an art education despite her unencouraging background and gambling addicted mother. Remarkably her brother had brought home to his Jewish family from WW2 souvenirs of Hitler’s paintings from the nazi Eagles’ Nest retreat.
Audrey drank in the Cedar bar with Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionist men but kept apart from their alcoholism and sexual invitations.
She left abstraction and studied the Old Masters, chose modern life as her subject, worked with a therapist and sought a stable family life despite marrying in haste with the following repentance and eventual divorce. There are a lot of memories of the famous which bring out their bad sides.
I noticed all the factors that were usefully present in that area of New York then – the artists, the bars, the galleries, the wild lifestyle, new ideas and opportunities and critics writing.
She had humdrum jobs, then worked in graphics, and remarkably turned from abstract expressionism to developing photo realism, but always painting from her images rather than exhibiting them as photography. She explains that the sense of flat compositional surface of abstraction was important in her later paintings. She was criticised for using photos. She had a difficult time as a young mother as her first daughter Melissa had severe autism and never learnt to speak. The condition was not understood and she and others were called ‘refrigerator mothers’ and encouraged to leave their offspring in institutions. Throughout her life art was a therapeutic help and she also performed on a banjo and formed two bands.
There was some good luck- when she was surprisingly given art opportunities and when her first, stable and calm boyfriend, Bob, got in touch and they were eventually happily married with him being very supportive.
She was able to travel in Europe. She joined a feminist consciousness raising group and did some paintings of still life deliberately featuring women’s feminine belongings in contrast to the cars and planes the male photo realists favoured.
She featured Marilyn Monroe and did a picture about the Kennedy assassination. Her ‘WW2’ about holocaust survivors was much criticised but won an award from female survivors even though she had only depicted men in it.
In another remarkable change Flack gave up painting, withdrew from exhibiting for ten years and studied sculpture, looking into creation myths. Her huge commission for a figure of the Portuguese Queen Catherine for Queens district was eventually rejected and destroyed as she had not been aware of that monarch’s involvement in the slave trade.
She ends, ‘Art kept me alive and still helps me cope with the most heartbreaking situations in my life. In the midst of all the darkness that life can bring, art reminds us that with darkness can come stars.’. There are similarities to this in my own life and through reading this memoir and examining the many illustrations of her work I have come to know and respect Audrey Flack’s contribution to art.