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Eric Robinette keeps you updated on things to do throughout Butler and Warren counties, offers his perspective on the local entertainment scene and welcomes yours. Eric writes about arts entertainment for the the Middletown Journal, the Hamilton JournalNews and The Pulse-Journal newspapers in West Chester and Mason.

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Home > Blogs > Things to do in Butler County > Archives > 2009 > July > 16 > Entry

Expatriate artist brings paintings to Art on Symmes, July 19

By Richard O Jones | Thursday, July 16, 2009, 02:51 PM

how to go… Open house with Angie Reed Garner 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, July 19 Art on Symmes, 1000 Symmes Rd., Fairfield (513) 844-2787.

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Go to the jump for Angie Reed Garner’s letter talking about living overseas and how that inspires her work …

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On Sunday, July 19, Art on Symmes will hold an open house to feature new work by one of its artists, Angie Reed Garner.

The paintings will be from her “Thinking of Home” series, paintings that she has been working on for the past few years while living overseas, currently in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

A native of Lexington, Ky., Garner has been living overseas since going to Berlin with her husband, an anthropologist, who was doing field work for his dissertation.

“It was tough, particularly the first year,” Garner said in an e-mail, “but I got hooked on the perspective on my own country and myself as well as the challenge of learning to live in a new country.”

The expatriate bug later took them to Pakistan for a year, until the war on terror and the economic conditions there led them to Abu Dhabi.

“Abu Dhabi is an ultramodern, wealthy, safe city that has generally been spared the worst impacts of the global recession,” she said. “Other than the summertime heat, which is ferocious, it is a very comfortable place to live and work.”

Garner said that being an outsider not only challenges her to look at her current environment in a fresh light, but it also makes her paint about home and what that means.

“When I think about ‘home,’ what comes to me are images of the Ohio River valley houses, farmland and woods,’ she said, so many of the paintings she is taking to Art on Symmes have river motifs. There will also be some cat paintings, inspired by her encounters with the feral cats of the Middle East.

“Feral cats are seasoned survivors,” she said. “I guess the theme of knowing how to survive in times of scarcity links the two different kinds of work, the river houses and the cats.”

Complete text of the e-mail from Angie Reed Garner:

AI lived overseas for the first time when my husband was doing the fieldwork for his dissertation— he’s an anthropologist— in Berlin. It was tough, particularly the first year, but I got hooked on the perspective on my own country and myself as well as the challenge of learning to live in a new country.

After two years we came back to the States for him to write up his research and get in a few years of teaching, but I started agitating to expatriate again right away. My work (painting) is portable, so he began to look for teaching positions in places that interested us.

We lived for a year in Lahore, Pakistan. We would have stayed on but things got so much harder there for everyone— not just the increasing violence from the War on Terror, but economic conditions. We didn’t want to leave but eventually it became obvious it was the responsible thing to do.

We both still miss it. He had wonderful students there, and I had more support for my painting than I knew what to do with. You can see the Pakistan work here, although right now it is hanging in J.E. Smith Gallery in Evansville IN.

Then we moved to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

It was a soft landing. Abu Dhabi is an ultramodern, wealthy, safe city that has generally been spared the worst impacts of the global recession. Other than the summertime heat which is ferocious, it is a very comfortable place to live and work.

I love painting as an expat because being an outsider makes for a lot of creative freedom. It’s challenging to make sense of a different culture, but it gives me a fresh eye on myself and where I’m from and what I believe. I paint about all of that.

I also end up painting a lot about what home means to me, since I think about it so much when living on the other side of the world.

These paintings about home are at Art on Symmes Gallery.

When I think about “home,” what comes to me are images of the Ohio River valley houses, farmland and woods.

My grandparents lived in a white shotgun house in Covington, KY with a little bit of acreage, huge trees, a fruit orchard and garden. My family moved all over the US for my dad’s work, but I always visited my grandparents in that house every year.

This brought me a big sense of stability. As a little girl I remember hating it when my grandparents changed anything about the place, and I’m not normally like that.

The US changed since I was last home.

The recession bit deep and I’m seeing all the changes all at once since I wasn’t here for a year. My impressions of the US took the form of riverscapes, and those works are at Art on Symmes.

Living on the river, flooding is a fact of life— seems to me like a timely metaphor. When the water starts rising, we don’t know how high it will go. We have historical records of floodwater levels, but they don’t tell us what our future will be, next week or next year.

I’m painting houses on stilts that look delicate but can take the high water.

I’m also painting cats, lounging around or grooming themselves. I think they are funny, they are meant to be a little comic relief for me anyway!

I got started on painting cats, lots of cats, groups of cats, when I lived in Pakistan and then in the UAE. In both places feral cats are a part of daily life. They are a whole world unto themselves even as they live among humans.

In the UAE some of the ferals are pretty fierce, probably because they breed back to the native Arabian wildcats. They are also insanely brave; one skinny little fellow maybe three pounds attacked my husband and my German Shepherd, and no it didn’t have rabies. It was just having a bad day already and then they walked too close to the dumpster where it does most of its scrounging.

Feral cats are seasoned survivors. I guess the theme of knowing how to survive in times of scarcity links the two different kinds of work, the river houses and the cats.

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