Tour Stop & Excerpt: The Artist Colony by Joanna Fitzpatrick

Excerpt from THE ARTIST COLONY
By Joanna FitzPatrick

The sun’s rays were hot and Sarah took off her jacket and let her blouse hang outside her skirt. What was the point of raking over the past, she thought. I can’t change what happened.

Directly below and to her right, a dozen or so young women stood in front of sketch boxes unfolded into easels propped up on tripods stuck in the sand. They dipped their paintbrushes into large hand- held palette boards and brushed dabs of paint across their canvases.

She and Ada had often spent summers on the New England coast painting together like this. And now you’re gone and I’ve come to bury you.  

Why did you do it, Ada? When you had so much to live for? And why, when I so desperately need you to talk to me, are you silent?

Sarah frowned at her shiny black patent pumps, unbuckled the straps, stuffed the stockings in the jacket pocket, and dug her cramped toes into the warm sand while watching a slightly stooped gentleman in a Panama hat stop behind each painter, point at the canvas on her easel with a teacher’s pointing stick, speak briefly, and move on to the next student. All the women nodded deferentially when he spoke.

She recognized Henry Champlin, the renowned pleinairist and art teacher. Sixteen years ago, Ada was a student at his summer art school in Rhode Island.

When her sister came home, brown from the sun and feeling sassy, she hung the portrait she’d painted of him over her bed and pointed out to Sarah his handlebar moustache and rusty orange beard that ended in a sharp point on his chest. “His upper whiskers tickled when he kissed me. He’d get so angry when I giggled.”

Fourteen-year-old Sarah, still too young to have been kissed, was put off by the thought of Ada kissing a man twice her age. She wouldn’t have wanted his scratchy whiskers anywhere near her face, or Ada’s face for that matter. But his portrait had been painted by her talented sister and she made a study of it as she did with all of Ada’s paintings.

It was Champlin who had introduced Ada to Carmel. He had closed his Rhode Island school and taught here in the summers. When he offered Ada a teaching position, she jumped at the opportunity.

By then, Sarah and Ada were both living in New York with Aunt Helen, their mother’s sister. She’d offered to share her Manhattan apartment with them after Ada had graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and gotten her first teaching job at the Art Students League on 57th Street.

Sarah had been jealous of Ada’s first summer spent in Carmel while she stayed behind in the stifling hot apartment to take care of Aunt Helen, who had become an invalid. After their aunt died, Ada continued to teach summer classes in Carmel and Sarah, never invited to join her, found work in Manhattan on her school vacations.

Albert tilted his head and gazed curiously up at her as if to say, “Why are we stopping here? I want to run on the beach.”

Sarah freed him from his leash and he scampered down the sand dune. She contemplated the steep drop and decided to take the rope handrail that led down through the sunbathers to the water’s edge.

As she dipped her feet in the water, a hefty wave took her by sur- prise and splashed water on her skirt. She laughed, pulled the skirt above her knees, and pedaled backward like the children dancing and laughing around her.

As children, she and Ada had often played like this on Lake Michigan. Ada had taught her to swim, if throwing her into the water and letting her fend for herself was teaching. If not a swimming lesson, it was certainly a lesson on survival.

But now Sarah shrank back from the waves, afraid of the strong current that had dragged Ada underwater.

She walked southward along the shore, throwing a stick to Albert who happily retrieved it over and over again. Eventually a granite promontory, half buried under the incoming tide, blocked their progress. Another Ada painting, she thought. Being in Carmel was like walking through an exhibition of Ada’s work.

They turned back.

When Sarah saw the student painters again, the mid-afternoon sun had cast their shadows across the sand. Several were sitting and others were standing, posed like Georges Seurat’s painting Un Dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte—Parisians wearing sunhats and straw boaters or berets, staring out at the sailboats on the Seine river.

Women’s fashion had noticeably changed since Seurat’s pastel painting of corseted silhouettes. These women on Carmel Beach had lived through the Great War, had earned their right to vote, and thrown away their corsets, bustles, layered underclothes, padding, and somber fabrics. Their blazing red, yellow, and orange blouses were like freedom banners waving in the sea breeze.

Copyright (c) 2021 by Joanna FitzPatrick