What defines a “professional” artist, especially here in East Hampton, the East End’s original artist colony? The answers are endless, and it’s a question that Shari Goddard Shambaugh struggles with each time she talks about her art.
Those conversations are infrequent to begin with, she says, because she tends not to engage in a lot of self-promotion. But when she’s got her paintbrush in hand, working in oils on a serene woodland landscape or a lively floral scene, Ms. Goddard Shambaugh isn’t dreaming of gallery exhibitions or fretting over her website. Instead, she’s slipping back in time, recreating her feelings and physical sensations when she’s out on long hikes with her husband, the Rev. Ben Shambaugh of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, observing her source material.
So perhaps it doesn’t matter if one is a true “professional,” as long as the work is authentic to the artist. As the spiritual teacher and self-help author Eckhart Tolle has said, “Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.”
Painting has called to Ms. Goddard Shambaugh since she was a child, but it took her about three decades to finally act upon it. “I always wanted to paint, but I had a brother and a sister who at a young age were brilliant at it, so they were the artists and I took a different niche,” she recalled over cups of coffee and a plate of Girl Scout Thin Mints and homemade pepparkakor (Swedish ginger cookies).
“There were six of us, so you tend to have what you’re good at — there were the singers, the artists, the students. I had done a couple of pieces that didn’t garner any astonishment from anyone, so I thought that I wasn’t the artist. But it didn’t go away.”
The first painting she completed to her own liking hangs in the dining room of the house provided to the Shambaughs by St. Luke’s. It’s an autumn scene filled with rich color, of evergreens on a rocky cliff overlooking a body of water. A woman watches two others in a rowboat a short distance out. The light suggests the sun will be setting soon. Time to come in and clean up for dinner.
On adjacent walls hang two paintings that inspired her. One, a summery scene, is by her grandmother, Erma Goddard, also a self-taught artist. “She was incredibly poor, so she would take paints — wherever she got them — and take cotton and put it around a toothpick and use it as her brush,” Ms. Goddard Shambaugh said. “I used to stare at it as a little girl, wondering how she got it to look like that, how she got it to look so real.”
The other work is by Colin Page, an artist, teacher, and gallerist in Maine, and “a very nice man,” she remarked. “If you ever go to Camden, stop in and see him.”
Ms. Goddard Shambaugh began her own art journey in a continuing education class for adults at a local school, stating by copying the techniques of artists like Gauguin and van Gogh, whom she admires. “We were living in a big house with all these empty walls. I was past the poster stage, but I couldn’t afford original art, so I started filling the walls with paintings.”
She took more classes — “a practical place to start” — working first in acrylics and switching to watercolors after their first child was born. The Shambaughs spent
four years in Paris for his career during that time, then lived for a while in Maryland.
They wound up finally in Portland, Me., and stayed for 18 years, where Ms. Goddard Shambaugh, who holds a master’s degree in art therapy from George Washington University and had a previous career as an art therapist, worked at a high school for students with special needs. She retired only when she and her husband moved to East Hampton for his ministry at St. Luke’s.
“I do miss the wilderness in Maine,” she said. “I feel incredibly lucky that we have always lived in beautiful places. That’s important to me. The visual is what brings me a sense of both calm and excitement. Being outside brings me a lot of joy and a sense of awe and even wonder. I try to bring that back into my work, and I think occasionally I get there.”
The prospect of starting over again in this new place seemed daunting at first, but “the kids were older, and I thought, it’s a new start, I’m going to finally do oils, which I always wanted to do but was always sort of intimidated by them.”
Art has helped her make valuable connections here. Last year she joined the Wednesday Group, the plein-air painting collective, and sold two paintings in Guild Hall’s Clothesline Art Sale. More recently, she sold a painting to a friend who immediately recognized the setting as Barcelona Neck in Northwest, even though Ms. Goddard Shambaugh couldn’t put a name to it.
Pretty soon, a great many more people will see her name on an artwork: The East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society has selected her as the poster artist for the society’s annual summer fair in June.
The scale of Ms. Goddard Shambaugh’s work may fairly be called boxlike — six-by-six-inch squares, to be exact. Another Maine artist, Jessica Lee Ives, inspired this format, she said. “Her work was small, so that she could do it every day . . . it was about her everyday life. She did a lot of things that I did. I looked at it thinking, ‘Why am I not doing this?’ “ She now makes one painting a day, for weeks or months at a time.
“To do 6-by-6 every day is so freeing,” Ms. Goddard Shambaugh said. “You don’t use a lot of materials and spend a lot of time on it. And if it doesn’t work, it’s just a little painting — not a big deal.”
Branching out a bit more onto bigger canvases has proved challenging. “It’s hard to scale up from that and still achieve the sense of freshness that I like to have. It’s much different to be struggling with a painting that’s bigger — do I give up? Do I keep going? Is it done? Is there a harmony that I missed? It can ride around with me.”
“I have thought about stopping painting at different times of my life,” Ms. Goddard Shambaugh confessed. “It takes up space, it takes time. But I can’t leave it. It just keeps pulling me back.”
