The Art of the Ephemeral:
Mickey Myers’ Lamoille Project

By Amy Lilly

Driving east on Route 15 toward the Green Mountains reveals a series of increasingly stunning vistas. But most people would miss the spot that took artist Mickey Myers’ breath away: the view of Sterling Ridge behind the Lehouillier farm, between Jeffersonville and Johnson. Standing in her friend Isabeth Hardy’s art gallery across the road a few years ago, Myers found herself mesmerized by the sight.

“Every day that scene would change. It had a way of hugging the mountain, almost like a mystical scene,” Myers recalls at her home in Johnson, a spacious 1915 house airily decorated with her own framed pastels of colorful cloudscapes. Studying the scene’s changing atmospheric conditions, the 66-year-old artist conceived of a plan. She would visit the spot as often as she could for a year – Myers also works full-time as executive director of the Bryan Memorial Gallery in Jeffersonville – and record each momentary incarnation in art.

Myers has just completed the work she came to call The Lamoille Project, after the Vermont county where she and her favorite view both reside. It consists of 140 semi-abstract monoprints made with oil sticks on a Plexiglas plate and augmented, after printing, with pastels. Each bears the date, written in pencil on the back, on which Myers captured the scene – and each is wildly different from the rest. There are diaphanous morning mists, light falling through a stand of trees, deep purple snows. The surfaces are almost tactile, the printed parts looking as if they’ve been scratched with a fingernail. Some prints are entirely softened by colorful, chalky pastels; others show almost nothing but a whitened sky.

As a whole, the 140 works – currently spread around her house on tables – record a year’s worth of fleeting moments. But now that whole is itself destined to become an ephemera: Myers is about to ship most of the monoprints off to their new owners, the 118 members of an art collectors’ society in Wisconsin called the Madison Print Club. After more than two years of exhilarating work, the artist admits bittersweetly, the whole project – except for 20 prints Myers will keep for herself – will disappear.

But that’s a price Myers is more than willing to pay. It was the Print Club, after all, that commissioned Lamoille – and with extraordinarily good timing. Myers was just developing her idea when club president Valerie Kazamias called in March 2007 to offer her the club’s annual commission. Kazamias, previously an art gallery owner, had known of the California-born artist’s work ever since she came across Myers’ 1970s silkscreen prints of Crayola crayons and pencils. “I sold quite a few of them to hospitals and pediatrician’s offices in the area,” she recalls by phone from her office in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, where she works as a full-time volunteer in fundraising.

The terms of the Print Club commission were simple. Myers would make 120 prints: one for each club member, and two for the permanent collections of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Wisconsin Chazen Museum of Art.

There was only one problem. By definition, print club members receive identical prints of the same image. “If you belong to a print club for twenty years, you have twenty prints,” Myers explains – and everyone else in the club has those prints, too. But Myers hasn’t made prints since she moved to Vermont in 1992. The full-time positions she has held here, including directing the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe for six years before moving to the Bryan in 2006, haven’t left her enough studio time for the laborious process.

Besides, Myers’ vision of the project didn’t accord with a single, reproduced print. Her interest lay in the fact that the scene never looked the same.

Fortunately, however, the Print Club was open to the idea of commissioning monoprints instead of prints for the first time in its 38-year history. “‘We want you to follow any creative idea you have,’” Myers remembers Kazamias specifying. It was the sort of commission every artist wishes for: someone calls out of the blue and says, We would like to fund your next project, whatever that is. “‘Well,’” Myers recalls responding, “‘there is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.’”

Commission secured, Myers plunged into her project. She spent a full year experimenting with materials and methods: using brushes and rollers with liquid oils on the Plexiglas plate, trying out different brands of paper and oil sticks, testing various sizes and formats. Eventually she chose a 15-inch-square format – a departure from the horizontal rectangle of traditional landscapes. “I didn’t want to do anything obvious,” Myers explains. “I wanted to be challenged to contain the landscape each time. The question was, could I use this and not be limited by it? The answer was yes.”

Myers made her first onsite rendering in late December 2008. She painted en plein air, following the tradition of setting up one’s easel outside in all weather – but with one modification: she sat in her car on the side of the road with the window rolled down. Setting the square Plexiglas plate inside a shallow cardboard box lid, she balanced her homemade easel against the steering wheel. From a plastic tub on the passenger’s seat she chose oil sticks, rubbing in their thick lines with her fingers. Occasionally she would shift the position of her car slightly, depending on which angle of the view appealed to her.

Next, Myers would run the Plexiglas plate through Hardy’s Whelan press – a table-like affair with a hand-cranked wheel the size of a ship’s helm. Soon she was spending every other weekend printing at her friend’s place. Eventually Hardy told her to take the press home for the duration of the project; it now sits in her basement, a dusty, cavernous space Myers likes to call “Hades.”

After a week of drying near Hades’ mammoth furnace, each monoprint would migrate upstairs to Myers’ light-filled studio to be modified with pastels. Her vast pastel collection is organized by color in plastic containers; the tray of greens has easily 50 different shades. “They’re from absolutely all over,” Myers notes. “French, Italian, a lot of British, some American. Russian pastels were too hard, I found.” She knows the different effects each brand produces, and reaches for them instinctively – a useful talent when rendering atmospheric conditions.

Myers’ use of color is, in many of the prints, unexpected. “It’s interesting how clichéd we are about color,” she muses. “Often the colors I was encountering were not the ones people would associate with that time of year. A winter’s afternoon shadows can be such a study in violets and purples. Fall is hard: you put those oranges and reds down on a piece of paper and they look like Life Savers. But if you wait, the colors become a little duller and the sky becomes really milky.

“It’s endless what you can do with pastels,” she adds. “The greatest trick is knowing when to stop.”

Allowing the soft pastels to counter what Myers sees as the “hardness” of the monoprint was the heart of her enterprise. “I just love the interaction, the tension that exists between them,” she explains. “It’s what the landscape is all about: the sunlight versus the shadow, the mountaintop versus the clouds. In winter, it’s the hardness of the evergreen trees versus the softness of the snow; in summer, the intensity of the colors of the foliage versus the light that is bouncing off the surface of a tree or rock.”

To say that the style of the Lamoille monoprints is Impressionist is not far off the mark. For one thing, Myers notes, her life is so busy that her experience of the landscape – mostly driving to and from work – is one of movement and impression, not detail. But her choice of style also reaches far into her past. Her parents began teaching her art appreciation by taking her to see the Impressionist paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum.

“When I was six or seven,” she recalls, “I was taken to see three of Monet’s haystacks. I stood in front of them with my father and I said, ‘Which one is the right one?’ Well, what can I say? I was a Catholic schoolgirl, and there was a right way and a wrong way!” she quips, laughing heartily. “My father had to explain that they were done at different times.”

In her own work, Myers says, “I’ve had my hard-edged period – the silkscreening – but this is what I’ve come back to.”

Myers heads to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on April 25 to give a talk and show slides of all 140 monoprints to the club and any interested members of the public. (Print Club members’ dues fund not just the artists’ work but events that educate the public about prints and print-making, Kazamias explains.) Then each member will be handed his or her unique print from a pile; no one gets to choose. Myers returns home a few days later, bringing an end to the project she calls “the most exciting of my career.”

“If there’s a sadness I harbor, it’s that this whole collection cannot be shown in Vermont,” Myers admits. (On principle, she wouldn’t show it in the Bryan – “I won’t give myself the privilege,” she explains – and in any case, there isn’t time. She completed the project only two weeks before the delivery date.)

Does Myers at least have a photograph of the view she visited and painted so often? She shakes her head. “I never took a photograph. I decided not to. I wanted to be recording exactly what I was seeing. I wanted to pay tribute to the fact that it’s never the same.”

Associate Editor Amy Lilly lives in Burlington.