By Anne W. Semmes
From her lifetime of experience as a child in the woods of Indiana, as a graphic designer for decades in New York, and as a realist painter for a spell, it is plain to see how Greenwich artist Penny Putnam’s creative vision has evolved in her new “Tapestry” exhibit at the Downing Yudain Gallery in North Stamford.
“I think any human being,” Putnam relates, “if you just sit down and relax and look and feel, there’s something coming in the atmosphere from a landscape.” Pointing to her painting of “Falling Forward” she tells, “This was painted not as a landscape in the beginning. I was just playing with color and texture and shapes in an abstract way. And then I stood back and thought, maybe there’s a hint of the wild, like a stream, but if you look closely those shapes are floating. So, it’s a mysterious thing. It’s something to do with nature. It’s the spirit of the place.”
Putnam’s artistic efforts she describes as “more undefined than just landscapes, although I can’t deny that these [paintings] are landscaping.” Thus, she was pleased when gallery co-owner Lily Downing came up with the exhibit title of “Tapestry.” “And yes, one of the paintings is titled, ‘Woodland Tapestry.’ And I think that’s perfect because it’s a weaving together.”
On Putnam’s website there’s a photograph of a table in her studio covered with the bits and pieces she has collected from her outdoor wanderings. They are inspirations for her art. She stays away from oil paint. For her mixed media on paper artwork, she uses watercolor, acrylic ink, an “oil stick” for highlights, and colored pencils for “scribbles.”
Putnam’s backstory begins with childhood solitary walks in the woods in the city of Greencastle, Indiana, then a family move to Florida that would have her in college there majoring in graphic design as a route to making a living. That she did successfully with the industrial designer Raymond Loewy in New York. “They had a department in the firm that was package design,” she tells and “I had won a national contest to design a package in college… So, I became a package designer…You’re given an assignment to dress a product so that it sells… So, I did well because I’m practical and I’m also creative…So, eventually I had my own company.”
Then came a late marriage to a Bostonian descendant of Greenwich’s heroic General Israel Putnam’s brother, a move to Greenwich where she had clients, and then having a son at age 45! She enrolled in the Silvermine School of Art for some classes, “to knock out the graphics mindset – and it worked.” Now fully plugged into the art world, with a number of awards including from Silvermine Gallery, Flinn Gallery, and the Greenwich Art Society, her paintings have found homes in residential collections, in corporations, and at the Smilow Cancer Center at Yale New Haven Hospital.
Putnam’s paintings were recommended by a friend to an art buyer “buying art for the new Women’s Oncology Waiting Room at the Smilow Cancer Center… If you’re about to be wheeled down to the operating room, what should the paintings be at the end of the hall?” The buyer wanted, “Something that is peaceful, serene, hopeful, quiet, lovely, uplifting, upbeat,” and did that friend, know anybody? Yes, “Penny Putnam.” “And she bought nine paintings,” tells Putnam, each about the size of these in the exhibit.”
“And that was a long time ago” adds Putnam, who is still proud of their being there. And then, “The most wonderful thing happened in the grocery store maybe five years ago,” she adds, “My son’s fourth grade teacher at Greenwich Country Day School came up to me and said, ‘Penny, before I tell you this, first of all, I’m fine.” “But she said she had had ‘something’ and was waiting in the Women’s Oncology Waiting Room and ‘It was scary. But I found myself surrounded by your paintings. And I knew I would be all right.” “It gives me chills to think of that,” Putnam notes.
So, how long does it take Putnam to create one of her artworks? “People always ask that,” she says, “and it’s not an easy answer because some get to a certain point, and I don’t know what’s next… I might put it aside and work on something else and come back a month later with a fresh eye and say, oh yeah, I know what to do. I know what it’s calling for. It’s calling for something new or an addition.
“Or you think, oh my God, I love this. This is it. It’s done. And my studio is off of our kitchen. I can see the easel from our kitchen. And I wake up the next morning. I go in there with my coffee, and I go, no, something’s not there. I don’t know what it is. And you wait and maybe a few more mornings with your coffee, you sit in a chair and stare at it and finally, I just figure out what it is that I need to make it feel complete… And then one of them would look too landscaping and that would really annoy me.” She would need then she says to “make it more of a mystery.”
Penny Putnam’s “Tapestry” Exhibit will be on view until October 19 at the Downing Yudain Gallery in Stamford.
