JAMIE CHIARELLO

Sincere Artist/reasonable Human

Some Artist wrote about Jamie in New Orleans when Katrina was there.

Earlier this week, maybe Tuesday, I was riding my bike down Cary Avenue and saw that an artist had set up along the fence in front of that parking lot near Can Can. The artist, Jamie Chiarello, is a displaced New Orleans artist who is originally from Richmond. She was travelling at the time of the hurricane and has yet to return to her home and studio, where she said she had twenty or so paintings. Now she is staying in Richmond with her family and trying to save and prepare for a move to NYC.

Most of the work she is showing on the sidewalk in Carytown is small stuff she has completed since the hurricane and flood, and the best stuff is the smaller works-on-paper. Reminds me a little of the wonderful Ben Shahn. I love the little piece pictured above.

I'm not sure how she is deciding her pricing, because here on her website the prices start at $300.00 but on the last pages they are down to $30.00; I've seen most of this work and it is of comparable size and quality - I think she is pricing based on how much an individual piece means to her personally.

I'm so glad I stopped, her work is good and she's very funny. She's only twenty(!) and hasn't attended any art school but has had some interesting art experiences. She told me of a previous visit to NYC where she approached some galleries with her work and the two guys took her out to lunch and made passes at her. One of them didn't like her frames and I guess she talked back or something - he ended up confessing that he hates his job and hates doing this and wants to weave baskets. She said "that sounds great, go for it" but then he told her she didn't know what she was saying, it is so hard to be a basket weaver, you need to grow special reeds and he can't do it in NYC.

She was also invited by a woman to have an exhibition at the woman's orgy. Jamie made all new work for the orgy show and went to the orgy and although she didn't sell any work made for the show she did sketch people having sex and when they were finished she would sell the sketches to them for twenty-five dollars.

I have no idea if these stories are true or not but it was great meeting Jamie and seeing her work. I asked how long she would be here (selling on Cary Street) and she said she had to be in NYC by August 7th. I told her it was the middle of September and she looked a little confused for a second and then said October 7th, so good luck in trying to find her.

October 2005

"I listen to the muffled sounds of television speaking and applauding through the wall. Perhaps the moderns times always appear crude as we live through them. To ask only for purity and poetry...ah! But then I should have no work!

I've found new companionship in Blake, sometimes I think posperity only keeps such people around because unknowingly, they distribute vastly detailed scraps telling how far we've come, retreated, and with the clarities come furthur darkness, there we must go.

I do not know how I respond to these 'times', hardly interested. And now I see in my future unaccountable and unreaserved wandering. To disavow my current collection of possesions and the desire for fairly consistent solitary living space and prepare to create only to readily abandon my works to any generous or curious or swollen hands desireing...without keeping any accounts of these works for myself...to live like this...I cannot say it is appealing.

Exciting, yes, but frightening and mostly, so very unnecessary, so very uncalled for. Yet- this is the only vision that calls for me! I keep resisting, I reprimand it, pointing out practical comforts and reachable ideals- why! You do not go hungry! The rest of the people let you paint and write in peace (or the little of it I can scrounge) My lord! They will even pay me for it! I've a list of patrons, a website, it has proved consistent...it would not be terribly hard to approach galleries, begin building a name for myself...

but I do not want a name! A name is static- it must stay still for admirers and scoffers to smile and scowl, and critics to do their appointed work, and it cannot move lest one in a moment of relation is josteled too quickly and turns their back in attendance to bad nerves!

I need to become more of what is in me. What we are has no name! This is why we must paint and dance and shake and shiver and change...to redefine ourselves not as a statement, but as AN ACTION. To struggle in our forms without any hope of breaking free, but to refine and stretch these forms so as to let us breath. Yes...I must go...or else I might suffocate...I must go out into the world to catch a breath of air".

JAMIE CHIARELLO