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Victoria Ford
American University
Professor Cochran
Beat Story #2 November 1, 2001
WASHINGTON, Nov. 1
Rebecca Volkmann, a local painter, has created a pocket of creativity in her small apartment on MacArthur Boulevard. The creative energy there contrasts an art scene she doesn’t find particularly approachable. Volkmann, moved to the district in 1996, attracted by classes at The Corcoran art gallery and the cultural promises of government agencies and nonprofit galleries. Since her move, she has found the district’s art community lukewarm. “As the years went by, I started to realize quite honestly that D.C. tends to put itself as the center of the world,” Volkmann said. “The way that effects the art community is negative sometimes. It’s sort of insular. People tend to put themselves in this little niche and not look outside.”
Volkmann’s roommate and fiancé Dajando Smith, a local musician, has also had experience with the creative forces in the district, and agreed that it leaves something to be desired. “For most people here, it is all dependant on who you know and if you are in the scene,” Smith said. “I find it very pretentious and posturing.”
Volkmann and Smith are not alone in their perception of the district’s artistic environment. Conrad Hamather, one of Volkmann’s friends from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, recognizes the district’s potential for artistic inspiration but does not recommend the city as a venue for rising artists. “I think one needs to utilize the energy of the City within his/her own studio, work in a bubble, and push the end result out of the District,” Hamather said. “In other words use the place and show elsewhere.”
That atmosphere isn’t apparent in Volkmann’s apartment, which is golden with sunlight and cluttered with tubes of oil paint, paintbrushes, and magazine clippings. One of Rebecca’s paintings, an abstract piece of bold blues and oranges in circular patterns, adorns a wall above a collection of knick-knacks.
Volkmann’s work does not suffer for lack of a social community, she said, partly because she has an artistic companion in Smith. Volkmann is inspired by Smith’s work and vice versa, she said. Smith said he enjoys the artistic inertia he can develop with Rebecca. “There are times when she is painting, I am making music, and the two mediums are feeding off each other and influencing each other,” Smith said. “Being the creative people that we are, we share a similar perspective very few non-artistic people can understand, and we find a mutual comfort in that.”
Additionally, Volkmann said she has a strong network of familial support, especially in her parents, Frederic and Barbara Volkmann. Such support may be a consequence of a creatively rich lineage. Her grandfather and brother are writers. Her father enjoys photography and woodworking, and her mother and sister dabble in gardening, art, music, and cooking.
Parental support has been financial - especially during her studies at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and classes at the Corcoran - but Volkmann said their support is largely emotional. Her mother is continually sending her magazine clippings of artistic interest, and her father designed and built the easel that still stands in the corner of her apartment. “When I was a kid, my parents set up a mini studio in our basement,” Volkmann said. “There was a little room down there, and I had my tempera paints and my paper and colored pencils and crayons set up.”
Her connections to family have not only kept her immersed in her artwork but have also permeated her work. Recent paintings have experimented in new themes of family, Volkmann said. She motions to a photograph of her mother, reclining in a floppy hat and sunglasses, balancing on the edge of her easel - a possible reference for a painting. “I’ve related my work to family and memories,” Volkmann said. “Somehow it always relates back to that, even if it wasn’t the inspiration for doing it and it doesn’t come out in the work.”
Volkmann’s painting “Sleeping in Prairie Grass” has strong connections to family and memory and is one of Barbara Volkmann’s favorites. It depicts an old photo of Volkmann’s great-aunts and a young neighbor in their childhood. “The rest is a pink and rosy funnel-shaped field, with a piece of old lace applied to it,” Barbara Volkmann said. “The little girls look as if they are resting underground, in gray and black soil. They mean so much to me.”
While Volkmann is experimenting with styles and themes, she said, some of her older, more abstract works are still favorites. Both Volkmann and Smith said they feel particularly strongly about “Organic Transformation,” a piece that hangs over their bed. “To me it gives the an impression of some sort of nebular cloud in an alternate universe where the void of space is a white, milky backdrop and God has dropped multicolored streaks of gas and stellar dust into this void, and these streaks are in the process of forming stars and planets,” Smith said. “At other times, it reminds me of a tree in a winter storm where glints of an aurora filling sky break through the particles of snow.” Volkmann said she modeled the painting after a sketch she had done of a plant, modeling the curves and flow of the lines after the direction of the stems and leaves. “When I started actually doing the painting, I realized that there was a certain kind of transparency of all the colors that had started happening,” Volkmann said. “It almost became a movement to it…. There’s almost a life in it.”
Volkmann most recently displayed her work at Art-O-Matic, a fall arts festival held in Tenleytown. Art-O-Matic is a festival of D.C. artists, including painters, sculptors, filmmakers, writers, dancers, poets, and musicians. Over 700 artists participated in the festival last fall. On the most part, however, Volkmann is not actively promoting her paintings. She will most likely take a more active approach to her artwork in January, she said.
Despite this brief hiatus, her friends and family emphasized her commitment to painting. “I can tell that her desire and passion to create is entrenched in the obsessive,” Hamather said, “and her ability to continue on her path is unobstructed.”
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