By Lydia Kacala
Eileen Dorsey, an Old Brooklyn resident, has spent over the past 15 years painting nature scenes in her studio at 78th Street Studios at 1300 W. 78th St. in Cleveland.
However, in her early years as an artist, painting wasn’t even on her radar.
Before discovering her love of paint in college, she made art with colored pencils and markers – “the basic materials,” she says. A graduate of Kent State University, Dorsey began attending art classes at the university in her second year, where she took her first painting class.
“I didn’t really paint a lot when I was in high school just because I didn’t have the materials,” she says. “But, there was something about that class that changed things for me.”
As the class progressed, she found that she was falling in love with the medium, she says. While she was naturally gifted in the arts, she also found confidence through the class.
“When you’re working in a setting with other students and you can see how everyone else is painting the same thing differently, you kind of get a sense of your place – if you have skills or not – and it gave me a confidence that way,” Dorsey says. “I’m like, ‘Oh, I actually can do this.’”
Dorsey says she uses vibrant purples and blues in the works she creates today, which were colors she also used in artworks in college. She recalls one instance where, while creating a
still life painting, she was the only student using more vibrant colors and some students were confused as to where she found the inspiration to use them, saying the colors “are there,” but others couldn’t see them.
“I remember students asking me, ‘Where did you get those colors?” she says. “They’re there, I’m just saturating them.”
After her art classes ended, Dorsey wanted to continue working in the arts and pursuing an art degree – she has a bachelor of fine arts, she says. In order to begin sharing her work with larger communities, she slowly started to break out of her more introverted shell and meet new people at shows.
She says while there isn’t a “manual to being successful or getting your work out there,” it’s more difficult to do it on your own.
“You need to meet other artists so you can get information about shows (and the) possibility to (do) collaborations,” she says. “It’s harder to succeed, I think, if you’re doing it all on your own.”
When she was first looking for an art studio, 78th Street Studios, owned by Daniel Bush, didn’t exist, she says. The space – a warehouse – only had about five businesses and Bush told her if he got two artists to sign on, then he would start building studio spaces.
Dorsey was one of the first two to sign on, choosing her studio based on blueprints, she says. The studio, located on the first floor of the space, shares a wall with one other studio, something she was attracted to because she enjoys listening to music and didn’t want to disturb her neighbors.
At the beginning, 78th Street Studios would hold quarterly art walks, and Dorsey wanted to have her studio space open for her first one, so she got her key the morning of her first art walk on Jan. 15, 2010. When she got her keys, she went to open the door and realized she didn’t have a doorknob – a problem that was quickly fixed. She was able to get into her studio as people began filing in for the art walk.
“No one walked in the studio,” Dorsey says. “There was maybe three people that came through my space. It was a different experience. No one came down to this floor for years. It was dark and dank and kind of creepy looking, but now it’s probably one of the most lively levels.”
Now, 78th Street Studios hosts its Third Friday Art Walk every month, where the galleries and artist studios are open for community members to walk through exhibitions and events which aided in Dorsey breaking through her shell and getting more involved with the arts community, she says.
“Every month, I was open and I was forced to talk to people, and I was forced to talk to people about my work, which is personal,” Dorsey says. “… Every year for 15 years, so that’s a lot of experience talking to people about my work.”
She says no matter her personal connection to the piece, there is a layer of vulnerability when it comes to showing someone else your work. However, as time went on, she grew to be less worried about the reactions people may have to her work.
“Whether it is with an actual personal story that has to do with something dramatic in your life or it is just your interpretation of nature, you’re putting yourself out there and you risk yourself getting negativity or positivity,” she says. “I was worried about that more when I was younger.”
The Third Friday Art Walks also factored into her confidence as she was able to put pieces she felt less sure about in the back of her studios and gauge how people might react to them, Dorsey says.
“I’m much older now, so I feel more confident than I did,” she says.
The growth in confidence in her abilities and her work have led her to not let others’ opinions of her works or their feedback affect her work, she says. However, she finds she can be influenced by something and not realize exactly where the inspiration came from until later.
“I really try hard not to let the ideas of others influence me too much, but it’s impossible not to be influenced,” she says. “I mean you could go to a museum, look at a bunch of artwork this year and then four years later you’re making something, and then four years after that you realize, ‘Oh, I chose those colors and that pattern based off of seeing that and it was deep in my brain and just coming out in a different way.’”
Murals by Dorsey can be found scattered around Old Brooklyn and on state Route 43 heading into Kent.
She is planning for an art tour, where she will travel around the U.S. and go to different art fairs – the first of which is the Ann Arbor Art Fair from July 17 to July 19 in Michigan.
