Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 14, 1993 TAG: 9310140049
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
A mother of three and an artist for 40 years, her illusions were stripped away long ago.
"The real job of being an artist is being alone and working very hard," said Pienkowski, a longtime Blacksburg resident whose paintings have been shown in galleries around the country.
"It's very plain,`' she says, "but it's just so true. When I meet people who are romantic about it, I just want to take an anti-sweet pill."
Pienkowski, who has been in the area since the early 1960s, is in her mid-50s and holds a master's degree in fine art, graphics and painting from the University of Wisconsin.
She has just ended a month-long show of recent works at the Franz Bader Gallery in Washington, D.C.
"Homage to Paint Saints and Friends" filled the three rooms of the downtown gallery - an uncommon show of faith in one artist.
A review in The Washington Post spoke of Pienkowski's "fresh, often whimsical approach" to the works, which "tends to elevate them above humdrum homages."
"She's not bound by the narrowest conventions of the art world - mentally or spiritually," said Wretha Hanson, proprietor of the gallery at 1500 K St. "So her work is full of vitality and humor. You can't look at it without sensing that there's depth of thought."
A Wisconsin native ("I grew up in Lake Wobegon. I really did"), Pienkowski moved to Blacksburg with her husband, entomology professor Robert Pienkowski, in 1961.
Her reputation has grown steadily since then - with shows not only locally but at museums and galleries in Richmond, New Orleans, Nashville, Milwaukee, Chicago and New York.
Her move to Blacksburg, after leaving the University of Wisconsin, was not an immediate success.
She taught for a while at Virginia Tech, but left teaching, unhappy with the role of female professor at the all-male school. "There really was no place for me" at the Tech of those days, she said.
Pienkowski conceded her marriage has been a cushion in her life as an artist.
"I'm very lucky," she said. "On one level, my heart goes out to anyone who has to pay for the children's shoes or the car before they can even think about the pictures . . .
"Artists," Pienkowski said, "I feel this more and more - they aren't very useful."
She has made time for art anyway, even while raising three children.
"The kids really don't get in the way much at all," Pienkowski said. "They sleep when they're little, and then they go off to school."
Also, "I learned to shift gears very quickly," Pienkowski said. "You can slam a lot of paint on in 20 minutes.
"Now that I have three wonderful adult children, I've really turned on the steam."
You could call that an understatement.
Pienkowski has produced 25 paintings - including all of the 20-plus works in "Homage to Paint Saints and Friends" - since the first of the year, and is currently at work on an enormous painting that will hang at Tech's Wallace Hall.
The show in Washington in September was a risky one, Pienkowski said, because her previous shows had featured abstract work.
"This is my first figurative show," she told a reporter last month. "My first show in a commercial gallery with pictures of people. It's really going out on a limb."
The show was well-received, said Hanson, the gallery proprietor.
Hanson, who has featured Pienkowski in her gallery before, said visitors who came in generally left with smiles on their faces. She said people were cheered by Pienkowski's work - which is always masterfully done, but often has a light-hearted, humorous touch.
"They're impressed," Hanson said. "But mostly they're buoyed when they leave. . . . They walk out of here with more vitality themselves."
They have usually walked out, alas, without opening their wallets.
Only one of the paintings - all of which were priced at several thousand dollars - had sold as of late in September, Pienkowski said.
Included in the show were paintings of painters, poets, art patrons and a girl named Rachel in a thrift-shop dress. A few of the paintings also include portraits of Pienkowski herself.
The works are oil and gesso on birch panels, with lines burned into the wood as well by an industrial-strength soldering iron.
As a child, Pienkowski had tried using wood-burning tools from children's wood-burning sets, she said - but found they were not hot enough to really draw.
With a 175-watt iron, Pienkowski says she can literally "draw with fire."
Pienkowski often mixes mediums in a single work.
"I draw with a whole mess of stuff - chalk, my fingernails, paints, pencils," she once said in a lecture.
"Homage" was originally planned as a show built around the end of the 19th century - a theme of obvious relevance to 1993.
Pienkowski realized quickly that in painting the artists of the earlier period, however, she also was paying homage to artists whose work had influenced her own.
Only later did she realize that she was also paying homage to her father - although he is not pictured in the exhibit.
But he was her first patron. A storekeeper in Wisconsin, he encouraged his young daughter's talent by allowing her to paint on the windows at his store, "Moore's Meats."
Finally, "He bought me a whole ream of drawing paper," Pienkowski said of her father. "That was probably the biggest vote of confidence a child could have."
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by CNB