Greta Van Campen
Transience
June 3 – 25, 2022
White Elephant, the iconic harborside hotel on Nantucket, is celebrating its 100th anniversary with a multi-million dollar makeover just in time for the 2023 summer season.
Original art peppers the property as a result of the hotel’s all-new Artist in Residency Program, which launched last year.
“New York based art consultant and curator Emily Santangelo worked closely with White Elephant’s owners, the Karp family, to create a residency made up of acclaimed artists from around the world,” hotel officials said in a statement. “The artists spent two weeks exploring the island to gather inspiration for their works, venturing to some parts of the island only accessible by boat.”
As a result, the property’s art includes watercolors of Nantucket flora by painter Mary Chandler, beachside photographs by photographer Thomas Jackson, landscape portraits by Maine-based painter Greta van Campen, and more.
Is a child whose parents are successful artists inclined to become an artist, and when this happens, why does it happen? Is it genetic or the result of being raised by artists in a home full of art?
In the case of the Van Campens, it was probably a bit of both—nature plus nurture. Artists Tim and Susan raised two daughters in a Thomaston, Maine, home filled with art, and both parents worked full-time in home studios, thereby immersing their girls in that world. The family tree also includes both artists and art lovers.
When confronted with the beauty of Maine’s coast, most painters, whether working plein-air or in the studio, respond with loaded brushes and an impressionistic style that well captures atmospheric conditions and light reflections. Not so Greta Van Campen. The young midcoast native has developed a style of her own that is all flat, angular planes and smoothly applied paint. At least at first glance.
In the fall of 2010, I left my teaching job in Chicago and moved back to Maine. I wanted to focus more on my art, but wasn’t really sure how to do that. A friend of mine told me about people raising money through Kickstarter. I decided to try it and called my project “Greta Paints America.” I wanted to visit all 50 states and paint along the way.
The work of Maine-based artist Greta Van Campen provides an interesting counterpoint to that of Stinson and Kitchel. Although Van Campen’s work also draws on the great Western tradition of exploration, she approaches the subject as both a young painter and as a non-Westerner. Where Stinson and Kitchel know the region intimately, Van Campen is viewing it with fresh eyes — and usually from behind the wheel of a car. Over the course of two years encompassing six trips to each of the 50 states, Van Campen traveled by plane, train and automobile, logging 50,000 miles on her car, sending sketches to her 86 sponsors, bartering art- work for mechanical repairs and adopting a puppy along the way.
October 10, 2012 – Greta Van Campen was interviewed by The Courier-Gazette and The Camden Herald in conjunction with her show “Painting America,” on view at Dowling Walsh Gallery until November 12.
Greta Van Campen distills the world around her into prismatic, clean-edged images that visually thrum with clear notes of color. Reducing still life and landscape elements to essential forms, she pictures nature and domesticity as ordered arrangements of flat, abstracted shapes. Ocean and sky radiate from the horizon as swathes of fractured color or raking triangles of light. Islands, mountains, and trees appear as silhouettes, anchoring the expanse of land and sea. Growing up in an artistic household, her parents are artists Tim and Susan Van Campen, and now the mother of two small daughters with her partner Mike, Van Campen has recently been "thinking about 'home' and what that means to me." Several new interior scenes—spare, elegant still lifes inspired by her parent's home—are tone poems to treasured objects. "My life and my work are closely connected," she says. "There's no real separation for me, so in a sense, I paint what I live."
Van Campen received her BA with a major in Visual Art from Bowdoin College. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at On Center Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Firecat Projects, Chicago, IL; Garage Gallery, Kimball Art Center, Park City, UT; Hespe Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Octavia Art Gallery, New Orleans, LA; and Gallery BOM, Boston, MA, and included in numerous group shows throughout the United States. She has had residencies at Brush Creek Arts, Saratoga, WY; Wrangell Mountains Center, McCarthy, AK; and Borestone Mountain Audobon Sanctuary, Elliotsville, ME. She lives and works in Thomaston, ME.
