A Portrait of the Artist: Joanne Bleichner

Joanne Bleichner, currently showing her work at the Arts Barn in Gaithersburg, climbs up hauntingly beautiful and gnarly tree branches through her large-scale paintings. Stark compositions composed of millions of tiny brushstrokes in muted tones ranging from sky light blue to deep siennas blend into the background skies against which she sets her sometimes peaceful and sometimes foreboding true-to-life branches.

"Trees are full of strength and dignity," says Bleichner who scouts out compositions for her paintings while walking her dogs in the woods. "I paint local trees."

Her favorite tree, pictured in her painting "Hanging On," was torn down recently in Montgomery Village. Bleichner often paints the same tree multiple times under different light conditions.

"The woods are my happy place. 'Hanging On' is my secret self-portrait painting because it evokes emotions that played themselves out in its presence. When you paint the same tree again and again, you can capture different sets of emotions," she said.

Joanne Bleichner is a native of Montgomery County. She attended Damascus High School and currently lives in Germantown. Her mother inspired her to become a painter.

"My mother is a fantastic artist. She studied art in college and is my best critic. She is 85 and still sharp and usually right in her commentary about my work. I sometimes take her advice, and sometimes I don't," said Bleichner who got her start by painting and drawing in her mother's studio as a child.

Bleichner graduated from The University of Maryland with an undergraduate degree in Studio Art and Art History in 1979.

"I really learned to draw at Maryland," she said. "The school had a great art department in the '70s. William Willis, an abstract painter, really encouraged my interest in a focused subject," said Bleichner who took five art classes with Willis as a student.

"In college I used to paint crushed beer cans and wrinkled gloves. Willis was a teacher I could respond to so I stuck with him, and his influence has stuck with me to this day. I even took my Independent Study course with him because he was so supportive and understood what my work was about."

Despite Willis's influence, Joanne Bleichner describes herself as a realist painter. She admires Pisarro's later work because it shows the artist's experimentation with visible brushstrokes.

"It's enlivening to be a painter. The simplicity of it is astounding. When you are painting, it's just you and the canvas and the rhythm of the brushstrokes, and you get to create with your own brushstrokes. There is nothing I enjoy more, other than hiking and being with my grandkids."

Bleichner's other artistic influences include Georgia O'Keefe, "who teaches you to look even though her paintings are smooth and without brushstrokes ostensibly." Degas's work has taught her to manipulate compositions although they might not reflect precisely what exists in nature.

"Sometimes I manipulate the branches of trees to convey the essence of the trees and to favor the composition. Degas did the same with his dancers. Instead of painting them as he saw them in real life, he would rearrange them in the painting to capture the reality he wanted to portray."

In her youth, Bleichner attended a Cezanne exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City. The exhibit was composed of over 200 Cezanne paintings of Mont sainte Victoire, which the artist painted repeatedly throughout his lifetime.

"I told myself that there must have been a reason he painted it so many times. Searching for the answer through my own work, I realized that he did it in order to evolve the way he painted. The changing rhythm of the brushstrokes showed the way he was working at any given time," said Bleichner who emphasizes the importance of brushstroke rhythm any time you ask her about her method.

"Every time I go to an art exhibit, I bring back something with me to my own work," said Bleichner who works from photographs for her paintings.

Her current show at the Arts Barn is the first recent show in which it is possible to see a group of her paintings together. Usually the artist enters juried competitions, which allow for only one of her pieces to appear for the public to see.

Bleichner has an upcoming show in Silver Spring at the Fran Abramson Gallery. The show is called "Lines and Edges" and will feature at least five pieces by the artist. She will be creating one new painting for the show.

"Exhibits allow artists to set aside time for painting," said Bleichner. "Each of my paintings takes approximately 100 hours, which translates to two months in my busy schedule."

A paraeducator at Brown Station Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Bleichner also teaches private art classes in her home studio.

"I love the work!" she says.

The students who take private art classes with her begin at age 8 and progress for 10 years on average with Bleichner as their teacher.

"My students usually end up studying art or something art-related in college. I have a student who is currently studying architecture at Cornell University and plans on moving to Berlin to join an artist colony after graduation. I am really impressed by what he is doing. My classes are small and allow for individualized lesson plans. I don't allow for more than seven students per class. This allows me to spend more time with each of them. Students are the ones who really drive the class. They learn without knowing that they are learning," said Bleichner who understands the value of education in a child's life.

A continuing student herself, she took classes at the Corcoran in Washington, DC. One of the classes was human anatomy.

"I didn't always paint trees, but they have been the subject for a while," she said. "Trees are like human bones and remind me of painting the figure. I worked abstractly for a while but realized that I was still including imagery in my work and that exploration of a focused subject was what really suited me." 

Bleichner's scintillating work, alongside Merle Davidson, David Terrar and Susan LaMont's, is on view at the Arts Barn through May 22, 2011.