The 'Feet Girl'
This is the first in a series of three interviews to be offered over the next three months exploring the challenges of three Cincinnati artists in various transitions in their careers
Northside artist Jessica Grace Bechtel was so serious about putting her principles before profit she stopped her career cold.
Bechtel's talented brush ranges over a myriad of subjects including botanicals, small still lifes and mundane scenes like an abandoned golf cart filled with ferns in which one finds mystery and meaning.
Preeminent, though, is her portraiture that intrigues with faces often partially or totally obscured. One's gaze does not easily leave them.
The artist's career started out with a burst of speed in 2002 immediately before her graduation from the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
“We had a senior thesis show,” Bechtel said. “I was able to sell half of my work. We had been given a pretty good background in how to promote yourself and do press releases.”
She does qualify her first success. Some of the buyers were “family and friends — people who had supported me up through the years. I don't know if that one counts,” Bechtel laughs.
Despite some possible nepotism for the academy exhibit, opportunities to show started arriving for Bechtel. She said she is especially indebted to curator Steven Vincent Clark for early exposure in a 2004 show. She worked as a gallery preparator for Clark, now of the Salveo Gallery in the Rookwood Pavilion, Norwood, OH.
“I was also fortunate to be connected with Jason Franz,” said Bechtel. “He was a professor at the Academy.”
Franz is director and a founder of the forward-looking Manifest Gallery in East Walnut Hills.
“He asked myself and some other people he knew to be a part of the opening exhibit at Manifest (in January 2005), which was really flattering.”
But the rosy light on Bechtel's career soon started to dim.
“About two and half years ago, I was at place where I had some negative experiences with galleries both locally and one that was out of the state,” Bechtel said.
These quarrels with commercial galleries had enough negative impact to cause Bechtel to put down her brushes.
“Mostly, it was exclusivity issues,” she said. “Commercial galleries tend not to want you to have lots of shows and want to take a substantial commission.”
She said some of the galleries raked 50 percent off of her selling price. The monetary conflicts with galleries went against her populist ideas of keeping her art accessible to most budgets.
“A lot of what I have based my career on is local people (both as subjects and buyers) and making sure that my work is priced in a way that people can afford it,” Bechtel said.
Bechtel's price range can go as high as $2000 for one of her large-scale pieces like the diptychs. They are elaborately prepared on wood panel. The multi-step process includes rice paper layering, painting with oils and coating with a polymer resin that gives the work a highly finished gloss.
Yet, a small still life can be had for as little as $75.
However, after a series of run-ins with galleries, Bechtel said, “I started to question and to think, do I really want to keep doing this? ”
The independent-spirited artist decided to take a year off but her artistic impulse had no intention of retiring.
“I was very frustrated because I wasn't painting” she says with an ironic laugh.
Now, back at the easel, Bechtel has extricated herself from depending on painting alone to make a living. She took a day job at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens where she helps prepare exhibitions and murals. She also carries home to the studio lots of ideas for her plant paintings.
Bechtel explains that the art world is not immune from “the recent economic ups and downs. It can be very challenging to maintain a steady income.”
The advantage of having an alternative income has given Bechtel more latitude in regard to making decisions about her art.
“Even though I'm really bad about saying 'no' to shows, I don't have to take exhibits if I don't want to...if I'm not comfortable with the gallery or the curator,” she said.
“If I had to do art full time, I think I would have to probably make some other compromises.”
At present, Bechtel has said “yes” to a solo at the Carnegie Arts Center in Covington show now up through Nov. 25 .
Bechtel's solo show reflects the diversity of subjects and moods that is engendered in her art.
“When I was a senior, I was trying to do new ways of portraiture,” she said. “I did a whole series of portraits but it was all feet.”
She obsessively did so many portraits of feet that she said Bill Seitz, director of the Carnegie Arts Center galleries, “called me 'the feet girl' the first time I met him.”
That was enough to get the artist to start to address other subjects higher up than the ankles. In her burst of diversity, it is the portraiture that fixes the attention.
Disentangle (2009), a diptych, is a dramatic example of Bechtel moving to different subject matter, style and even more emotional density than what she was capturing in feet.
The surreal diptych (not hinged but sprawling over an eight-foot stretch of wood panel) is based on a dream Bechtel had. The left panel shows just a portion of a woman's face. Her jaw is set. The expression is stressful as she clutches at a sweater that is unraveling.
A strand of yarn from the sweater continues across the lower left panel into the right one. There, a great deal of unraveled yarn has formed itself into a mound. A pair of aged hands hovers protectively.
Bechtel believes the genesis of her dream lay in fear or danger. Yet, the tense woman is counter-balanced with a softly formed background of trees and sky, reminiscent of a serene Corot mid-19th century landscape.
Additional calm is served up in the picture through Bechtel's use of a cool palette of green, blue, and chartreuse that bathe the woman and the protective hands in the adjoining panel.
Even when the face in these paintings is partially obscured or not shown at all, the effect Bechtel achieves is consistently engaging.
For example, Bechtel's self-portrait, titled not looking, 2007 (she tends not to use capital letters), is done in flat passages of single colors. The anatomical detail is minimized in the style of Paul Gauguin.
In this self-portrait, Bechtel painted herself with her hands covering her face. She dramatically conveys the aesthetic point that the face need not be present at all in portraits to express intense emotion.
Is she crying? Is she amazed or is she, as one viewer of Bechtel's self-portrait suggested, “just playing peek-a-boo?”
The painting is complex enough that we will never nail down the answer and Jessica Grace Bechtel is not telling.
