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Old Soul
Though Alison Dearborn is still relatively new to the art world, her creative sensibilities are centuries old.
BY ANDREW BACSKAI
Barely three years into a full-time art career, Alison Dearborn is enjoying the view from on high. A resident of Boulder, Colorado, situated some 5,300 feet north of sea level, Rieder gets daily eyefuls of the Rocky Mountains from the windows of her home-based studio. The thirty-four-year-old painter doubts she'll ever grow tired of that mountainous sight, jutting skyward on the far side of the Boulder Valley.
"It's breathtaking," she says, "to be able to wake up every morning and look out at that majestic scene."
Rieder's elevated physical station is paralleled by her ascension of the artistic ranks. Already, this artistic under classman has sold hundreds of originals and exhibits at four gallery shows a year. She has self-published four serigraphs and maintains a steady stream of commissions.
Indeed, Rieder's textured acrylics have connected with art buyers and sellers as intensely as the artist herself has bonded with cave-painting, the subject that inspires her art. And though success and stability have come quickly, they hardly arrived overnight. Rather, her introduction into professional-art circles was the culmination of a years-long search for her creative center and its link to both her artis tic ancestors and modern-day art audiences.
"I believe we are all connected to one another and to all of nature," Rieder says. "Somehow, the cave paintings represent, or perhaps prove to me, that we've been doing soulful work for more than 30,000 years. That means to me that art has always been an important, if not integral, part of the lives of human beings. It's in our blood and our souls.
"I think, above all," she adds, "we are creative beings-we are mothers and fathers because we created our children. But, like all works of art, they come through us and are not ours to keep. So I think I am just a small piece of a larger scheme, 'doing my part to stay connected to what has come before me."
Situated deadcenter in a five-child southern-Vermont family, Rieder grew up in an environment flush with creativity. Her father, she says, is something of a Renaissance craftsman who has mastered upholstery, carpentry, and home-remodeling. Her mother is a tailor and skilled quilter who Rieder credits with sparking her growing fondness for all things textural.
And though her parents never overtly nurtured her artistic impulses, Rieder recalls spending most of her childhood and young-adult years with paintbrush in hand. "Basically, I drew and painted what I saw," she says. "I copied paintings. I drew people. I did close-up, realistic nature paintings."
Translating literal images to paper or canvas, however, became increasingly unfulfilling as Rieder became a teenager. Meanwhile, she started feeling an intense urge to shake off the conservatism of the East in exchange for the wide-open West. So in 1983, Rieder headed for the University of Colorado in Boulder . "It was more of a soul thing than anything I can really put to words," she says of her western migration. "I just think I was born on the wrong side of the country."
Yet even as Rieder was finding her physical place in the world, she was straying further away from her creative base. After graduating from college with a degree in lin guistics, Rieder got married, started a hairstyling business, and became a mother to two daughters, who today are eight and ten.
And for a stretch of six or seven years, Rieder didn't make a single brush stroke. "I did nothing," she says. "I was what you'd call a blocked artist."
Though Rieder's artistic drive was ready for the green light, she lacked a starting point. It seems she had become the next in a long line of artists to validate the claim made by 19th-century poet and essayist James Russell Lowell: "In creating, the only hard thing is to begin."
Then Rieder accepted a friend's invitation to attend a reading by Julia Cameron, who outlined a; twelve-week program designed to help artists recover their blocked creativity in the book The Artist's Way. Cameron's discussion about the link between creativity and spirituality, and the principle that creative expression is the natural; direction of life, clicked with Rieder, who bought the book and put herself through the program with banner results.
"Basically, I unblocked," Rieder says. "[The book] quite literally changed my life."
While working through Cameron's program, Rieder happened upon pictures of cave paintings in Time magazine. The accompanying article was about the Chauvet Cave rn southeastern France , where a team of paleontologists discovered the world's oldest cave paintings. Some three-hundred images of animals had been thoughtfully sketched and engraved on Chauvet's stony walls more than three-hundred centuries ago.
"Looking at those cave paintings amazes me," Rieder says. "I mean, these people went into a cave with a torch and pigment and created, if for no other reason than to fulfill their irrepressible need to create."
Inspired to build on that centuries-old tradition, Rieder adopted its "economy of line" but injected it with smoldering reds, starry-night purples, back-water blues, and glowing browns and yellows to evoke a sense of day and night and changing seasons. She layers thin swaths of translucent acrylic, enabling background color and textures to permeate her subjects. Though her animals still appear to be etched in stone, their spirits seem to have been captured with them. "I want to communicate the essence of the animal rather than the actual image of the animal," she says.
Before long, Rieder and her hus band were toting a modest portfo lio to galleries in Boulder and Vail. "By the fourth gallery I tried, the young woman who ran it said, 'Let's give it a try,'" Rieder recalls.
That encouragement in 1996 was enough for Rieder to shut down her ten-year-old business, transform her salon into a studio, and pursue painting full-time. "I was scared to death," she says. She adopted as her mantra the quote "... the moment one definitely com mits oneself, then providence moves too."
For Rieder, providence may well be her mile-high existence with her family and her mountain views. She'd prefer not to speculate just yet, though. Like her artistic ancestors, Rieder feels far more compelled to simply create. "I adore painting; I couldn't not do it," she says. "It's just what I have to do." .
Andrew Bacskai is a freelance writer based in St. Paul, Minnesota.
This article was printed in the June 2000 issue of U.S. Art magazine, Vol. 19, No. 6. Copyright U.S. Art.
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