Long post! TL:dr… I’m going to France for an art residency next year. At this place, Chateau d’ Orquevaux.
Yep. I’m doing this. I applied on a semi-whim in December 2023, knowing that odds of being accepted were somewhere between 20% and never. I make a habit of applying every couple of years to *big* arts grants, because you never know.
And then in mid-March of 2024, I got an email from the Orquevaux organization. I’d been accepted.
I have a grant: the Denis Diderot Grant, which helps offset the cost of room and board. (Residency fees go toward restoring the historic chateau, which traces its artistic roots back to Denis Diderot, an art critic and philosopher in the 1700s. Restoring the chateau is ongoing work, and my kudos go out to owner Ziggy Attias for turning it into an artists’ haven!)
I was in! For the three-week residency of my first choice, in the cool and probably rainy depths of March 2025.
Many summer and autumn residencies at Orquevaux celebrate the green, lush countryside and sunny skies. I’m from Arizona: I know sun. Plus, the early spring landscape seems like something more people should at least acknowledge and celebrate. March in New Mexico is rainy, cool, icy pink dawns, red-ochre sunsets on bare branches and dead gold grass, faint touches of color from crocus flowers and early green…
Besides, I’ll be taking fiber and bead art to Orquevaux, and embroidery outdoors can be an adventure at the best of times. I need a flat table out of the wind, a magnifier visor, a lamp, a chair, and a place to sleep…and I’m good.
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There’s a series of tasks and costs I must navigate first:
Even though there’s a grant, the actual cost of this residency is going to hover just south of NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS when I include airfare, sim card and data plan, electronics, train, passport, incidental meals, shipping art supplies and equipment there, car rental if I’m brave enough, and maybe a few extra days in Paris (museums and fiber and bead stores!)
Clothing is easy: I’ll thrift or make the dark pants and light linen shirts I want to wear, have a dress-up outfit, and shuffling-around clothes. I’ll need a sweater, a windbreaker, and a light coat. I have the coat, more on that later.
I’ve been putting money aside for some other art-related expenses, so this is not quite as horrific a cost as it would have been for me in 2018 (when my win-the-lottery fantasy daydreams included a regular full grocery list!)
I’m fortunate. I’ve already paid the first deposit on my residency fee. But over the next few months I need to get a full health work-up because hey, I’m a senior citizen, and also, things happen. So I’ll be buying travel insurance, updating my will and powers of attorney, and making sure my absence doesn’t cause disasters at home and work.
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Why Orquevaux? The simple answer is why not? It’s lovely, and it’s hitting at a good time in my creative life.
Unlike a lot of artists, I know who I am. Too much so, at times.
I don’t need ‘to give myself permission to create’, that’s got to happen regularly or I get slightly psychotic. My backlog of designed or started projects numbers in the 300s now, more than I may complete in my lifetime. I also have an embarrassing array of art media I could bring.
Acrylic on canvas is fun and fast for me, but comes with its own challenges. Storage, shipping even rolled canvas, and selling the end product is tricky. I could revisit my ‘Jeweled Vista’ series with an eye toward the French landscape.
I will certainly bring sketchbooks and my beloved markers and Micron pens: those will be invaluable to translate into book art later, like this piece ‘Tour’, inspired by a 1984 trip to Italy.
There is certainly studio space to do *big* pieces, especially if I commit to donating them to the Chateau’s art collection. I have all these crazy huge clear glass beads, and some ideas about a steel cable armature wrapped in bright-colored fibers and smaller beads.
Or even a tent-shape of strips of applique linen radiating out from a center hoop, then dropping to a wider hoop at knee or waist level. The outside of the linen would be plain, but beaded with large clear glass beads (6-8mm beads). The inside would be a patchwork applique of many colors, only visible from inside the tent. That would take a lot of work to complete beforehand, but it could be magnificent when done.
Beadwork and bead embroidery, and the fiber art books I love so much, are on a different scale than even this 3-week residency. ‘Sun Bird’ was to date the fastest detailed piece I’ve made, and it took me 30+ days.
Usually, my work takes months. Or years. So I’ll need to bring partially-finished pieces and noodle on them there. I have a few that might work: ‘Artist’s Invocation’ might be an appropriate piece to finish and donate to the collection.
I could stretch linen on boards and hand paint scenes for later embroidery, in acrylic, and leave the acrylics for future artists.
I’m considering refurbishing and donating my old Elna sewing machine (not shipping the new Janome). I have a couple of wearable arts-pieces that would be a good fit for the timeline…but they might require a mannequin. Not shipping that!
So smaller lap and table projects will probably be for the best.
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My Imposter Syndrome rears up in the oddest ways. Yes, this residency will be amazing, and I will do great work here and learn from other artists and staff.
I’m having the hardest time *advertising it* right now.
I’m told this is good for my CV, I should be utilizing the news right now, long before I actually go.
My book arts agents know, as do the non-profit folks I work with. I’ll put an announcement up on SaatchiArt Online, as they might care. I’m partly funding this with art sales, after all.
But as for announcing it locally here in the Southwest, in Arizona, and to larger US arts communities, I’m in the funk of ‘Why bother?’
I don’t earn the bulk of my living from art, it just feeds my soul. I have the absurd luxury to do art that I want to do. It is such a narrow niche of art that most people don’t know it exists, or care. And that’s fine. I’m not making it for them.
I no longer show regularly in Arizona; all the mainstream galleries I worked with have closed.
I show art at one local science-fiction convention art show. I usually sell there, but it’s not at Biennale prices (none of my stuff goes that high, I’m too unknown after 25 years and in a weird market. My nearest fine-craft comparable artist–and he’s far above me–usually sells pieces at the $5-8K range.)
The four or five Arizona galleries that I’ve pitched in the last five years have all ghosted me. The last fiber exhibition I showed at was in January of 2020, and I was so unimpressed by the show as a whole I struck that gallery off my list. Same with a Tucson gallery that, in 2018, was so incompetent with email submissions that I swore never to enter another show there.
Sure, there are cooperative galleries that might be interested in my work…but I’ve had such terrible experiences with co-ops in the past that I’m over them. You pay a membership fee, then you pay commission on sales, and then you have to work in the gallery (I hate retail so much now), and *then* you are at the mercy of foot traffic and flighty customers. In any economic downturn, the co-op starts taking on artists of lower skill, which brings down the gallery as a whole, and turns off buyers. I’ve seen it happen several times.
Same with some California fine-craft galleries I queried in the recent past, and stopped, because they flat out told me my book art and fiber art work wasn’t for them.
Why advertise my residency to people who didn’t want to give me the time of day, before?
I’m not going to do business with them now, even if they approached me. Why would I trust them?
Online art platforms may have their disadvantages, too, but they at least manage to sell my work!
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Why France?
First, I blame the late writer Mary Stewart, whose gothic romance novels held vividly skilled descriptions of the European cities and landscapes she loved. I read her works when I was a very young teen, and those images stuck with me.
A very long time ago, in the late 90s, I worked for an art manufacturing firm in Phoenix AZ. It was both infamous and one of the best places I’ve ever worked at: I got a crash course in making acrylic paint mimic almost any other art medium, and how to build pieces to fit market trends. Commercial art is no place for the faint of heart!
Part of the place’s lure was the incredible art library the owners had installed onsite: books, magazines, ephemera. All of which we used as inspiration and collage ideas.
One luxury lifestyle magazine had an article about a French former monastery turned into a chateau, then a luxury hotel. It had seen artist’s parties a hundred years ago that are legendary now. I liked the vibe of that article so much it became a short story I’ve never published.
And maybe ten years after leaving that company, I found The Coat.
It’s not quite this beige-gold polyester trench coat, but very close, and even better made. I found it in a thrift store for $10.
A few nights later, I dreamed…
I wear this coat, as part of a tasteful, comfortable outfit.
I’m on a train through a winter-brown landscape, but bits of spring green showing in the grass. Fields and forests rolling by. Then a car (I’m not driving) in a late sunset, up a long sweep of gravel drive to an unmistakably French chateau.
I greet people I know, but don’t, and am greeted. I have a private room, looking out a second story to that landscape. I have a writing desk, an art table, an easel. I am here to create.
That dream has now stuck with me for over a decade.
It was probably the reason I applied for Orquevaux in the first place.
Thanks for reading this far!
I’ll keep my journey posted in future updates.