Cover: Art & Healing Issue
Eileen Corse, artist and owner of Corse Gallery & Atelier, unveiled a collection of her new paintings in September. The show, titled Unfettered, comes just months after Corse celebrated her business’s second anniversary in March, 2010. Corse says that for the past two and a half years she has put her painting career on hold in order to promote other artists and her gallery, because she thought it was a great thing for Jacksonville.
But now she is ready to promote her own work. She is calling her show Unfettered, she says, “because I feel free to paint again.”
Corse learned the artist’s craft while living on the First Coast. A former court reporter, she began studying drawing in 1999 with artist Jenny Chi, then an adjunct professor at the University of North Florida who now teaches at Eastern Illinois University in Chicago.
Unlike being a court reporter, art came easily to Corse. After studying with Chi for just nine months, Corse won an award of merit at Black and White, a juried show run by the St. Augustine Art Association. Syndicated political cartoonist Ed Hall judged the show.
With a solid foundation in drawing, Corse mainly taught herself to paint. She gathered together all the art books she could find and learned the principles of color, value, and composition from them.
In painting, Corse says she discovered her creative release; expressing her gratitude to God who, she believes, gave her the gift and helped her find it. “I found my niche, my love,” she avers, “I don’t know how I survived without it.”
By April of 2004, Corse was selected to participate in Art After Dark, Jacksonville’s showcase for emerging artists.
Meanwhile, local fine art galleries including Bungalow Artworks, Fairfax Gallery, and Fogle Fine Art, noticed Corse’s work and began exhibiting and selling her paintings. The artist has also been featured in juried and local group shows and in local newspaper and magazine articles.
In addition to being recognized for her skills as an artist, Corse is a sought-after painting teacher. She began teaching in 2004 and says the activity gives her tremendous satisfaction. “Teaching is an artist's way of giving back,” says Corse. She especially enjoys seeing students learn a new concept for the first time.
She believes her background as a self-taught artist has helped her become a good teacher: Having overcome many of the mistakes and problems most students encounter, she can help others avoid them.
Corse encourages those interested in becoming an artist to just start. Beginners in her classes are often surprised by how well they can paint after taking one of her workshops: “Anybody can do it,” she encourages.
Three years ago Corse outgrew her small studio on Lakeside Drive, where she had been painting and teaching. “I had so many students I had to look for a bigger place,” she explains.
The artist’s husband, Robert Corse, found the Herschel Street space, but the building was too big for just a studio. The artist says she asked herself, “What am I ever going to do with this space?”
The answer became Corse Gallery & Atelier.
In a little over two years, Corse’s business has established itself in the art world by bringing nationally and internationally recognized artists to exhibit and teach workshops at its location between Avondale and Ortega.
Many of these artists run three to five-day workshops that have been so popular some sell out a year in advance.
In 2009, Oil Painters of America (OPA) asked the gallery owner to host their annual Eastern Regional Juried Exhibition and Sale. Corse says the event "put us on the map." Since the OPA exhibition, the gallery has sold paintings to customers as far away as Hawaii, Canada, and Finland.
Along with her gallery’s success abroad, however, Corse continues to support Jacksonville’s local arts community. Promoting and educating artists in North Florida has been an important part of Corse’s vision since the beginning. She offers local artists the opportunity to exhibit their work at her gallery and on her website where they receive national exposure.
Meanwhile, the workshops at her gallery benefit local artists by offering them a chance to work with well-known painters from across the country. Corse herself studies painting with many of the artists she invites to teach. Working with them is one of the benefits of being a gallery owner, she comments.
Over the past ten years Corse has studied with Robert Johnson, author of On Becoming an Artist; Cheri Christiansen, the Russian impressionist; and Romel de la Torre, the award-winning figurative artist.
Perhaps her most important teacher has been Atlanta-based impressionist Alice Williams: “Alice is the best teacher,” Corse enthuses. “She is very direct and if it isn’t right she’ll tell you, which is what I like.”
It was during her last workshop with Williams, in fact, that she began the work that will appear in her new show, Unfettered. While working with Williams this time, she found great improvements in her figurative painting, Corse says.
She also honed her skills with the palette knife while taking a class with artist and painting instructor Barbara Flowers.
The look she achieves with the palette knife is another important aspect of her new work. The artist uses the tool to spread thick patches of paint onto her canvases. These small fields of color create bumps and ridges that—when seen from a distance—convey the appearance of depth and movement, Corse points out.
Indeed the surfaces of the artist’s new paintings of figures swimming in pool water seem to dance and shimmer in the light.
Paintings of swimming figures as well as landscapes and figures at the beach will be featured in the show. “This is an all new body of work for me,” Corse says. “I’ll be painting all summer in preparation for this show.”
Unfettered will be on view from thru November.
for more images…http://bluetoad.com/publication/?i=49531&p=65http://bluetoad.com/publication/?i=49531&p=65
Corse Gallery & Atelier, 4144 Herschel Street, Jacksonville.
388-8205, www.CorseGallery Atelier.com.
