By NAWA member Susan Rostan

Sitting at my kitchen table in my layered cozies, I carefully arranged my warm cup of green tea on the right of my propped-up iPad, and the questions and notes on the left. Using Zoom technology, I was able to meet and chat with Denise Cormier Mahoney, the new President of the Florida Chapter of NAWA. Denise was at home in Saint Petersburg, Florida, and I was at home in Woodbury, Long Island, New York. On my screen, Denise appeared with her long hair gleaming in the Florida sunshine and a warm smile. We both eagerly looked forward to her interview, and I had emailed her three topics to consider – what motivates her to make art, her process, and her favorite works. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity. (SR)

SR: How long have you been in Florida?

DCM: We are just at the beginning of living in Florida. My husband was in the Navy, so we moved every three years. When we moved to the Seattle area, I really didn’t want to go, but we ended up staying there for 20 years. My family’s home is in Canada and his family is down here, in Florida. So, when it was time to decide about retirement, I told him I didn’t want to stay in the Seattle area anymore — I just didn’t like it. I suggested that we spend some time in Florida, and some time in Canada. So, we have a place in both areas but spend most of our time down here in Florida. As you know, it’s hot down here in the summer, so we head north as soon as it starts getting unbearable.

SR: Which part of Canada do you call home?

DCM: I’m from the province of New Brunswick, and I have dual citizenship. It’s lovely there.

SR: It’s in the eastern part of Canada.

DCM: Yes, It’s right above Maine. There’s a ferry you can take from Maine to Nova Scotia. I’m right on the border between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

SR: It’s a different culture there.

DCM: Yes, it is very different but it’s great. There’s a big celebration of our Acadian cultural history every August, and I’ll never miss it. My roots are from the same people that ended up down in Louisiana, the Cajuns. It’s a rich culture, with an interesting history.

SR: I’d like to touch on not only your identity as an artist, but how that evolved: When and how you came to know that you were an artist?

DCM: You know, it’s kind of funny, everybody has a different story with that. I remember in, maybe Middle School, I got together with some people that were having a camp and they taught us how to do batik and other things besides painting and drawing. I knew right there, that’s what I wanted to do. I came from a family of seven girls, so the message was clear: find a husband who will support you. And so, when I decided to go to college, my mother was very worried for me. I think she felt that I was wasting my money, that I probably wouldn’t amount to anything as an artist. When I met my husband, he promised a lot of adventure with his life in the Navy. So, we moved all around the United States and even lived in Italy for a short period of time. And that was all when my art really started coming back, because I had graduated from college, and didn’t have a chance to jump into anything.

The next thing I knew, I was married, traveling, and having kids. I did a lot of crafts and art projects with my kids, and as soon as they were old enough, I started getting back into creating. I had majored in printmaking at university, and after graduating, I no longer had access to printing facilities. I hadn’t thought about that “small” expense, so I became a painter. I still dabble in printmaking, but I consider myself a mixed media painter. I dabble with all kinds of things, from batik to texture paints, to goldleaf and collaging.

And so, I break a lot of rules and add it all to my paintings.

Opus, Guardian Angel, 2022, acrylic, 24 x 18

SR: So, that accounts for the gap between getting your undergraduate degree and going back for a Master’s. You did get a master’s degree in education. Was it for practical reasons?

DCM: Yes, well… I was saying that I didn’t love the idea that we were in Seattle, but there was a lot of growth that happened there. One of the areas of growth was in teaching art. I had never considered teaching as an option until my kids were in a school that didn’t have an art program. So, I started subbing, teaching art. And then, in high school, when they finally did have an art program, I decided to sub for the art teacher. When the art teacher decided to quit, the principal came to me and said, “You know, the kids love it when you sub. And I think you should be the next art teacher.” I said, “I didn’t train to be an art teacher. But I could try it.” He offered to pay for my master’s degree. Although I could have gone back for an MFA, I chose to get a Master’s in Fine Art Education instead because I really had no idea what I was doing. I found out that I loved it, loved teaching, and bloomed in that role.

SR: Did your teaching experience influence your own artmaking?

DCM: I think as far as growth goes, absolutely, because when you’re teaching, you must go back to the basics. And as you’re teaching other people, you’re also relearning. I was in a small private school of college prep students, some of whom started with me in grade eight, and I didn’t want them to end up with the same projects. So, I created a brand-new curriculum every single semester. Doing that exposed me to so many other mediums. And I think, as I was teaching my students to break the rules and to find their freedom, that’s exactly what was happening to me.

Becoming What Was Discovered in the Frog Pond, 2022, acrylic, 44 x 24

SR: In the process, did you encounter specific influences on your own artistic development?

DCM: I would say so. I think as a young woman out of college, in my undergraduate work, Gustav Klimt was one of my influences, and the Impressionists. But as soon as I started going back, in my graduate work, I realized that people like Hollis Sigler were my influences, because she was a storyteller, especially her breast cancer journal. She was concerned with stories about her life and a story that isn’t just you; it’s a story that a lot of people can relate to and can see themselves in. And that’s where I developed probably some more honest, and more narrow influences, working in my graduate program.

SR: What about direct mentorship from any of your instructors?

DCM: There was less of that. It was an online program in which I did all the pedagogy, the learning how to teach online, during the year. Texas Tech had a way of designing their programs with the mindset that improving the artists automatically improves the art teacher. So, in the summer, I would go to Texas for six weeks and work with their professors in the MFA program, creating paintings. I had a lot of different instructors, and cumulatively they were an influence on me. I was just gobbling it all up; I was eating at a banquet when they presented that opportunity. I didn’t latch on to any one person, but I would say there was big growth for me there.

SR: Talking about growth, can you take me through the development of your artistic vision?

DCM: When I was in my undergraduate program, I went to the Nova Scotia College of Art Design in Halifax. They did have a little bit of a prejudice for the designers and for the craft people. There wasn’t an appreciation for artistic beauty, and I struggled with that because I wanted to create things that were beautiful. I also wanted the work to reflect who I was, and what I was trying to say, but I guess I didn’t really know that yet. When I went to Texas Tech for graduate work, there was this awareness that art is art –even your grandmother’s quilt can tell a story much as someone’s art. It was that, plus the idea that art can be beautiful — beauty for beauty’s sake.

So, I started with beauty, and as I walked through my graduate work, I started realizing that I’m a storyteller. I take my art and talk about my life, the parts of my life that so many other people find commonality with. An example of that is happening right now. For the last year and a half, I have been working on a series that basically celebrates the child that was free to explore.

Throughout Brian’s Navy career, we traveled, and I missed being home. I missed my family, even though they visited me and I visited them as often as I could. When I decided to move home, suddenly all these thoughts of childhood, all my appreciation for texture, and noticing the bark on trees and ant hills, all those little things started flooding back in my memory. And I thought, “You know what, I’m going to celebrate that, I’m going to tell stories that remind people of their childhood, that remind people that we didn’t always appreciate these things, and maybe we don’t have time anymore to do that, but maybe we should. So, the series I’m working on right now is exactly that. It’s very narrative.

Seen and Known, 2022, acrylic, 23 x 32 in.

I began the series in 2021, at the Kingsbrae International Artist in Residence Program. And it’s about things like my guardian angel and climbing trees and being in the barn with the cow, and singing, and a walk by the cemetery — different things like that. It was a shift from the work I had done before.

I have always created textures and patterns because I appreciate that in nature. It just makes sense that it would also attract my eye in artwork. Intricate details – like the bark of a tree, the pebbles on a pavement, and leaves in a tree, are very captivating and they catch my eye even in movement. In my earlier work, I represented patterns in fabric. For instance, I would lay out a piece of fabric and paint it as part of a still life. That evolved into my actually using the fabric — cutting it out and using it as collage on my piece. Now I’ve become a bit of a surface designer – creating the fabric itself, creating surfaces.

When I started at the residency, that whole idea of going back home also inspired me to write a poem about the sound of a childhood train. The train whistle I hear when I’m in my bed this coming summer, is the same train whistle I heard when I was a little girl. It’s a memory keeper, it’s constant. I started using the poem as the underpainting for this series. As I started painting, I realized that I wanted to see that underpainting, I wanted to see the words, and some of the letters shine through. So, I started creating almost a ghostlike image, so that you would see through to this poem underneath. I’m playing with that idea even more, because it’s who we were as children, and this ghostlike image helps to talk about the past.

SR: So, in a sense, your process of layering amplifies the concept of history. This a surface on a surface, creates a history in your painting, amplifying your narrative, enriching the imagery.

Becoming What Was Discovered at the Beach, 2022, acrylic, 44 x 24 in.

DCM: Exactly…, It does. I really enjoyed it. It was a surprise and I ran with it, immediately, as soon as I noticed it. The other surprise was how much people relate to my stories. I have a studio down here in St. Petersburg, and every second Saturday of the month, we have an art walk. We have 100 to 200 people walking through the doors in that evening, in that four-hour period, and I hear again and again, “Oh, look, that’s me,” or “Oh, look, that’s you,” all the time. I love that. I love that they’re identifying with a story I’m sharing.

SR: Do you think that the printmaking brought this about for you in your painting?

DCM: It’s possible. I’m not sure how to explain it because I am doing both. I am printmaking, doing small projects. I have been doing them for the last five years but not as often as my paintings, probably because I’m in the midst of this series right now and I don’t want to interrupt it. It’s flowing beautifully. It is an opposite way of thinking: I have to put the white on first in a printmaking piece and the white on last in a painting piece – so, it’s a reverse way — but I still very much think of both processes as layering. I probably paint like a printmaker thinks.

SR: You mentioned how being in a place, of being home, inspires you. Is there anything in particular that you experience that will bring out that impulse to make art?

DCM: For me, it’s always been that walk in nature. It’s not just inspiring, it’s fixing a problem in a painting. As President of NAWA Florida, this has put me in my left brain, so walking helps me get into my right brain. When I want to come back full circle into my right brain, I go for a walk by myself. I call it my artist’s date. I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and she talks about the idea of replenishing the bucket, and how you do that. You do that with the things you love. If you love collecting shells on the beach, that’s going to fill your bucket. For me, it’s being by myself, in nature, and exploring, looking, touching. I can look everywhere and see patterns in the grass, in the bark on the trees, on the fur of the squirrel. It’s all patterning, and all of a sudden I’m either inspired to get back in the studio, or I think, “That’s what I’m going to do to that piece that I am stuck in.” It just comes; it’s a wonderful resource.

Here, in Florida, I have beautiful trails, and I can go on the beach as well. In Canada, I have the river — I can walk along the river. So, it’s available in both of my places. It’s funny, I discovered one of the things I love is Crackle. I use Crackle Paste or Crackle Medium a lot in my work. I was walking by the river one day, maybe three years ago — in New Brunswick, the Petitcodiac River, and it’s red earth, like Prince Edward Island, red earth water. We call it the chocolate river. It’s constantly moving, so the sediment never settles. I remember walking along the river when the tide was down, and seeing all this beautiful cracked mud. And I thought, “Oh, that’s where that idea comes from.”

SR: Those moments of insight.

DCM: It’s amazing to me how nature is my constant, and I don’t know what I would do if it was something harder to attain or harder to have it at my fingertips.

SR: How do you decide on titles for your work?

DCM: So one I call Seen and Known. It’s a little girl in a tree and her guardian angel. And then I have works called Becoming What Was Discovered In The Frog Pond; Becoming What Was Discovered At The Beach; and Becoming What Was Discovered In Nature. Those are all a bit of a self-portrait, in a way, and maybe all my art is self-portrait; I think these were–they started out to be. My series is expanding a little bit, in that I’m wanting to incorporate other people’s stories, not just share my own. So, I’m trying to use images other than small blonde-haired girls; I’m going to start using little boys, and that type of thing. I don’t know how long this series is going to last but I’m going to use it to exhaustion, and then I’ll start something else, whatever that is. I think the titles came from the desire to emphasize and really remind people of what these pieces were about. All the “Becoming What Was Discovered in” paintings–I think I have four so far — all have a crown. In the one with nature, the crown is a bird’s nest with three little eggs in it; in the one at the beach, the bird nest is all seashells; in the one in the tree, it’s all gold branches, gold branches; and in the one with the frog pond, it’s daisy chains. … These are the pieces that are very close to home, and really telling the story I want to tell. I’m creating other things, but these are the works I’m valuing the most.
SR: Is there any part of the day when you prefer to make art?

DCM: I do have a pattern, and it’s developed because of my need to exercise, and the fact that if I don’t do it first thing in the morning, it doesn’t get done. I’m one of those people who exercises for mental health. I need this. Then, once I’ve done a few errands, and taken a shower and gotten dressed, I go to the studio. So, I usually am there around 11 or 12, till five, sometimes six o’clock. I’m trying to find my balance because Brian and I are both retired now. He’s a golfer, and he is starting to golf more, which kind of gives me permission to be at the studio more.

But at first, I remember he would say, “Oh, I’m kind of a navy wife now – you’re gone, and I’m the one staying at home.” And I thought, “Oh, ouch. I don’t know that’s what I want it to be. I didn’t intend that to be but I guess what he is telling me is that I’m never here.” … I don’t have enough room for a studio in my Florida home, so I must leave the house to go to my studio, to create. So, I started to create a little bit of a balance. I try to be at the studio, typically four days a week, and then I have three that I’m home and in my own environment. In Canada, my studio is actually in my home.

Becoming What Was Discovered in Nature, 2022, acrylic, 23 x 32

SR: Is the schedule different in Canada?

DCM: The schedule would probably be similar in terms of exercising in the morning, and then going to create in the afternoon, but there is a difference: if my husband is home, or if somebody shows up, I’m more easily interrupted. So, it’s a different dynamic, for sure.

SR: Do you think it’s important to have a network of other artists support you in your development? Has that been a factor for you?

DCM: Absolutely. I think it probably started in the Seattle area, where I met a group of printmakers. I had joined the group because I wanted to learn new techniques; I wanted to get a feeling of what they were doing. But this group of printmakers ended up becoming friends. We would create together, and show art together, and brainstorm ideas, and have critique groups. They became a trustworthy circle, and that was important. It’s kind of what I’m trying to create with the NAWA Florida chapter. The idea is, how can we become that trustworthy group where nobody has risen above the others, where we’re all just people who trust each other, and are starting to know each other. That’s obviously a big goal for 80 people. But it is a model that is making me realize that a lot of people don’t have that. And it is so beneficial.

SR: You’re talking about a very practical kind of support network, in terms of critiquing, and sharing work, even collaborating. So, what is your dream project for NAWA? Is there something that you envision, and hope to make real?

DCM: I think I’m taking baby steps toward that. For me, the foundation is what’s important. And the foundation to me is having artists trust their creative voice. And by building up trust in critiques, and trust in professional development, that’s going to help. By having professional-level exhibitions and venues, they’re going to start trusting us as an organization that brings good things for them. Then the trust will also be foundational. So, that’s my first step. My first goal is communicating and communicating often. Reaching out when I need help often and inviting and keeping the communication open; letting people know what’s happening, when it’s happening, and how they can participate. So that’s the beginning for me. I don’t know, maybe next year. It’s early yet.