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Photography by Carmen Troesser
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Photography by Carmen Troesser
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Photography by Carmen Troesser
Take the roof off a little cottage in Rock Hill. Drop in four kids, ages 8 to 14; a Great Pyrenees puppy; an antique and cranky Saint Bernard mix; an ever-encouraging husband named Sam; a rainbow of color; quirky and beloved objects; and an exuberant artist named Greta.
That artist’s “studio” is a corner of the living room where sun streams through the long front window. Her desk is a metal tool chest, her “fancy paint” (Golden Acrylics) in the top drawer. She still uses the easel her parents gave her in high school: Painted turquoise, it’s as spattered with droplets and brush wipes as a dropcloth in the Sistine Chapel.
Here, from the time the kids leave for school until they need help with their homework, Greta Coalier paints.
When she was growing up, all creativity was encouraged. “Every summer, my brother and sister and I tried to dig a swimming pool in the backyard,” she says, grinning. “My mom let us be kids.” In high school, a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago sealed her fate. She went there for college, but while she soaked up the knowledge of craft—weaving and silkscreening and printmaking—she was a bit intimidated by the ponderous emphasis on conceptual art. “When you’re 18, you don’t even know who you are.”
So, after graduation, Coalier went into hibernation, knitting and crocheting as always but no longer painting.
“And then the kids came along,” she says, her voice softening, “and when my youngest, Charlie, was old enough to not eat paint, I started painting again.”
The relief of it, the sheer joy, carried her from one project to the next, but for the first two years, she stayed in hiding, “so scared” to show her work. Steadily, Sam encouraged her. And finally…
“Old Orchard had a gallery, and you could submit three pieces of work. At the opening, I was so nervous, I couldn’t talk. For the next one, I decided: Probably good if you talk. But it’s like saying, ‘Here I am. Do you like it?’ And asking for money almost killed me.”
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Photography by Carmen Troesser
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Photography by Carmen Troesser
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Photography by Carmen Troesser
Two years later, her work speaks for itself. At her last show, she sold 10 paintings in a matter of minutes. She’s even learning to “ramp it up,” as a young friend urged, on Instagram.
But she’s still happiest when she’s at her easel, her long dark hair braided out of her way, washing blue across a gessoed board, painting in flowers (she keeps reference books handy, including a 1940 guide to local flora), then scraping away a few layers of color to add magenta leaves and a satiny varnish.
“I have this theory that all of us are artists, every single person,” she says. “It’s just that some people haven’t found their medium yet.” When she taught her daughter’s Girl Scout troop, “one little girl literally couldn’t move the paintbrush, she was so stuck that it had to be perfect. That first line can be so hard. I always remember the advice of one of my mom’s friends: ‘There’s always going to be someone better than you, and there’s always going to be someone worse.’
“There’s room for all of us.”
