From the Advocate Weekly:
Painting with a camera
Local artist’s struggle with cancer has opened a new world of art
By JUDITH FAIRWEATHER
When people are faced with their own mortality, they all react in different ways.
One local artist has chosen to take that life-changing experience and express her reaction to it by “painting with a camera.”
Vaal London Kane has just opened a monthlong hanging of 18 of her photographs, titled “Motion Pictures: Photography,” at the Ferrin Gallery at 437 North St., Pittsfield. The exhibit, which opened Saturday, will be on display through March 8.
The photographs were shot last autumn at peak foliage season from the passenger window of a moving car, Kane said.
“I really feel life is movement and is consistently moving on many levels. Trees are not just standing still, but moving also, just in their own nature and at their own pace,” she said.
Kane had been working on this project for a couple of years, but it had never really progressed past the “idea” stage for her.
“I had no visceral connection or spiritual tie to it,” she said - “until I came out of the hospital.”
‘A wake-up call’
The hospital she referred to was Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Last summer, Kane experienced what she thought were stomach cramps. She went to the doctor, who thought it was just a stomach virus, as did she. Three nights later, the pain was so intense that she drove herself to the hospital. There, she was operated on for colon cancer, and she had part of her large intestine removed, as well as her appendix.
Eight days later, she awoke from a coma to find that she had been sent by helicopter to the intensive care unit at Brigham & Women’s. When she woke up, she found she was surrounded by friends and loved ones from all over the globe, including London.
“They really thought I was going to die, I guess,” she said with a smile.
Her tree photographs, which had been only an idea of what they could be before this, suddenly “became very real and a very promising body of work,” she said.
“Being faced with your own life span forces you to look at everything and consider its life span,” she said.
The pictures were shot between noon and 3 p.m., when the sun was pretty high, out of the passenger window of the car, up into the trees and the light.
“I probably ruined over 100 rolls of film before I figured out the formula,” she said. “The photographs are very colorful and more true to what Berkshirites might consider really great fall foliage.”
After her illness, as many do, she began to consider her own life span.
“What really clicked for me was things that live for a long time - I pondered whether that had something to do with the timing of their growth,” she said.
Trees, for example, grow and change and move, but at a very slow pace.
“This was a wake-up call for me in that I needed to slow down and live. I worked a lot but I forgot to live. I wasn’t doing my art. I had to realize that I was out of my body, just in my head. I admire trees because they have a long time to contemplate. I find it intriguing enough to want to do work about it,” she said.
She described this exhibit as her best work yet. And how does she know if art is good?
“Because I want to own it,” she said with a laugh.
She did admit, however, to loving “good” bad art: “It’s my favorite - the badder, the better,” she quipped.
The reason she feels this is her best work is because “not only do I like it, but it likes me, and that doesn’t happen all the time,” she said with a laugh.
“This work is bloody gorgeous,” she said. “It’s like hard candy - you want to eat it!”
‘A sense of community’
Kane, who makes her home in North Adams, described herself as a formally trained painter, and considers what she is doing now to be painting with her camera. Before moving here, Kane used the camera extensively, but more as a tool to document her paintings.
“I have realized since living in the Berkshires that I was a photographer who happens to paint,” she said.
She has lived in the Berkshires for seven years, moving here after leaving an executive position at an advertising agency in New York City. Born in Illinois, she studied painting in Texas, living in Dallas for five years before moving to New York.
“I ended up in advertising, climbed the corporate ladder, got to the top, and then two years later, left,” she said.
She has stayed in the Berkshires because it meets her three criteria: “I am not deprived of art, it is small, and it is beautiful.”
She also loves the four seasons and the sense of community here.
“The love that came pouring out when I got sick would never happen in New York,” she said. “Even though I knew the whole city, I would have ended up alone in bed surrounded by takeout boxes. There is a sense of community here like I’ve never experienced.”
Even though she’s focusing on photographs, Kane has not set down the paintbrush for good.
She is currently involved in a project of self-portraits done on a wood veneer with oil stains that she said have a very watercolor feel to them. She would like to partner with a realist who could incorporate masks done in aquatic colors over the faces.
“It’s all in here,” she said, pointing to her head.
While she works on her self-portraits, she continues her struggle against the cancer that led to this body of work. The cancer initially found in her colon is now in her liver, so she is undergoing chemotherapy treatments while she mounts this exhibit. Her outlook is positive and her enthusiasm contagious, however.
She was quick to boast that she just celebrated her 47th birthday on Feb. 13 and that although last year her friends gathered for her death, here she was, celebrating another birthday.
“Motion Pictures: Photography” runs through March 8 at the Ferrin Gallery at 437 North St., Pittsfield. Info: ferringallery.com.
