Saturday, December 19, 2009
COLUMBUS (AP) — Go ahead and watch. Megan Burkholder wants you to.
See her tap on a laptop or play fetch with Bentley, her 3-year-old whippet.
Gaze in as she fires up the microwave oven for an evening meal of macaroni or split-pea soup with her husband.
Oh, yeah, and she paints, too.
The 32-year-old Merion Village resident is a little more than halfway through a monthlong residency in the lobby of an abandoned bank downtown, where her work and personal life are on full display (at least from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., when the curtains close).
The project, which blends public art with a touch of voyeurism, emerged from a growing desire to remove the typical isolation from her one-woman craft.
“In my house, I’m painting by myself. It can get very lonely,” said Burkholder, a Bexley native who studied fine art at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
“I miss the social aspect of the classroom — having people around me while I’m painting.”
These days, she has plenty of adjacent, if impersonal, company.
Pedestrians walk by constantly. Bodies huddle out front inside a bus shelter. A nonstop string of city buses rumbles past, their automated voices announcing arrivals like clockwork.
“I see the same people every day,” she said. “They smile and point. Some people try to communicate through the window; it’s really hard.
“They are interacting here.”
Burkholder, however, doesn’t unlock the doors at 90 N. High St. to curious onlookers — although an open-house reception was planned for today.
She hopes that people will want to watch through the glass and indirectly serve as a springboard and motivation to produce — with a personal quota, she said, of one piece a day.
Her work, created with acrylic paint and charcoal on wood, reflects an abstract, self-directed style that deviates from her classical training.
Her painting hours are 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 to 6 p.m. daily.
The urban backdrop, seen easily from the sweeping floor-to- ceiling windows of her studio, provides extra inspiration.
During one recent session, her canvas facing north to avoid the afternoon sun, her piece unintentionally borrowed the hues of the landscape — blue skies, brown bricks, silver-toned reflections.
Other effects, too, have resulted.
“When people are watching me, there’s someone who I’m accountable to,” she said. “I’m painting faster. I have more energy I’m putting into the canvas.”
Years ago, the building housed Mid-America Federal Bank — and, until 2007, the headquarters of Experience Columbus, the convention and visitors bureau.
Because relatives own the property, Burkholder lives there rent-free.
Yet she is quick to point out that the quarters are far from posh.
The sparse living space contains a minirefrigerator, a folding table, the microwave and a hand-me-down couch, all of which she moved there upon her Nov. 27 arrival.
She also has a small desk and a shelf with books and board games, and a full-size mattress on box springs.
The rest of the 6,000-square-foot building involves a labyrinthine mess of construction supplies, empty rooms and dark crannies — most of it uninhabitable.
A makeshift shower was erected in a basement restroom, the hot water provided by a propane heater hooked to a garden hose.
It represents a minute sacrifice.
While studying abroad in Rome, she said, “We never had hot water.”
She purposely left the television at home — an added incentive to keep her focus on work and her husband, Derik Gunsorek (who “thinks I’m crazy,” she said).
The 27-year-old Gunsorek, who goes to Columbus State Community College and works as a bartender, declined to say much about the endeavor.
“I support her,” said Gunsorek, who is also living there temporarily. “If it makes her happy, that’s what we needed to do.”
They are to move out on Dec. 24.
Until then, Burkholder is relishing the experiment.
“It’s about immersing myself in the art,” she said, “and just living as an artist and not having the distractions of daily life.”