Studio Visit with Meghan Dinsmore

Meghan Dinsmore’s studio is located on the 3rd floor of the E.T. Write building in Rockland, MA and is a part of the 4^thFloor Artist Association.  She has been an art teacher at Marshfield High for 9 years while continuing her studio practice and showing her artwork at a number of places, including Laura’s Center for the Arts in August 2013.  Dinsmore received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Boston University in Painting and Art Education and has continued her education through workshops and classes at some of the top arts colleges in New England such as Massachusetts College of Art and Design and New Hampshire Institute of Art.  

The first thing you’ll notice when you walk into Meghan Dinsmore’s studio is the huge variety of artwork.  This is in part because she shares her large space with her husband Dan Talbot and friend Shannon McDonald.  That is not the whole story on the variety though; Dinsmore’s work alone could easily be mistaken for the work of multiple artists.  She is not bound by style, which is a liberating idea, although it of course is not quite as simple as that.  I think that there is a certain stigma in the art world about not zeroing in on one style and there is evidence of this in the repeated questions Dinsmore must field relating to this topic.  “Why do you bounce around so much?”, “what is your true style?”, and “you made that too?” are familiar conversation starters for this exploratory artist.  Dinsmore is interested in form and in shattering form, a process which must be fundamentally fluid and diverse.

pen and ink drawing in a 7x12" sketchbook

Dinsmore tells me, “it is important to me that I know the rules before I break the rules.” Look at these beautiful peeks through her sketchbook.  Each done in about 45 minutes, they serve as a daily warm up.  Working as a high school art teacher, Dinsmore says “these daily drawings are great motivators for my students.  When they say they don’t have time to finish something, I can point to these drawings and tell them I only needed 45 minutes, so do they.  At the same time though, these drawings keep my on my toes with their expanding skill level.  Being their teacher, I feel like I need to stay one step ahead of them which isn't always easy with some of the talent in my school. Keeping current with my practice helps me do that.”

Some bird explorations with pen and acrylic wash on wood panel
Approximately 6x6"

Portraits in acrylic
Each approximately 3x4'

These large painted portraits are another example of Dinsmore flexing her art muscles and pushing herself to see what she could do.  After taking about 10 years off of doing “college style paintings,” mainly large scale realistic works, she was questioning whether or not she could still pull it off.  She decided to grab a few of the people closest to her and test it out.  Turns out she could still do it, and do it really well at that.  She was now assured that she “knew the rules,” and was ready to take a jump.

Brayer drawings in acrylic on paper
Each is 22x30"

This next series of pieces was done based off of memories and photos.  Here, Dinsmore is interested in capturing what a faded memory looks like. After a workshop at New Hampshire Institute of Art on passing over brushes and instead painting with brayers, she had the perfect tool for this series.  A tool that could glide paint across a surface while maintaining a hardness to prevent too much detail from creeping in.  This is, in a way, how we experience memories- fluid, changing, and the further away they are, the less clear.  This series was based off of some photos dug up in an old family treasure trove and each have charming stories to go along with them.  The painting of the shirtless man is based off of a photo of Dinsmore’s grandfather, taken while he was stationed overseas in the military during World War II.  He took the photo himself and sent it home to her grandmother with a note reading, “For my honey, to look at and sigh.” We only have this one endearing piece of the story and Dinsmore does not fill in any gaps for us visually.  She likes that, “you can put your own interpretation into these paintings, and they could be anyone’s grandfather in any place.” 

This series of brayer drawings is where I think Dinsmore’s work really pulls together.  And by “together,” I don’t mean that the brayer drawings are her “true style."  What I mean is that I can see the full circle of her process from an important and new angle: time.  You’ll notice, in the daily sketches the viewer gets a quick and clear look at what is directly in front of this artist no matter how mundane it may be.  The drawings are completed in a short amount of time and their closeness to us in time means that they are recent memories and so their depiction is vibrant.  The large scale portraits take us slightly further back in time, as Dinsmore is working from instances that are not quite as immediate as what is sitting directly in front of her.  These paintings are vivid and easily read, but pay attention to the background.  Things get blurred and distorted in the back with a more playful feeling in color and texture.  There is even a bit of work with brayers.  Then we come to the brayer drawings and are pushed further away in both time and in realistic representation.  These pieces give us a peak at what they are about while allowing us to fill in the rest of the information for ourselves.  This is how Dinsmore works intuitively. By looking at her vast body of work we are able to find these connecting threads.

I think a better question to ask this artist is not anything to do with the disconnectedness of her work.  Perhaps a more insightful questions is, "how are you going to explore these ideas next?"