“Being creative gives you a reason to get up every day (…) I see all these women artists perhaps it is because they are creative that this energy keeps them going”: Marjorie Williams-Smith, 55+, artist and art teacher, Little Rock, Arkansas
self-portrait
Marjorie Williams-Smith has started off her art career as a print maker and graphic designer in New York City. In Little Rock, Arkansas has she found her favourite technique: silverpoint – a very old technique from the Renaissance that uses silver wire to leave a mark on canvas or paper.
silverpoint
When Marjorie was a little girl she admired a little friend of hers, Maria, for being able to draw so beautifully, “she could draw horses”, when Maria left town, Marjorie needed to find inspiration journals and on TV. Not until later she decided to become an artist and art teacher. Her mother who did crafts around the house – she liked to sew and did crochet – was very supportive to Marjorie’s choice of becoming an artist.
Marjorie during the interview
“Being creative gives you a reason to get up every day: “I see all these women artists perhaps it is because they are creative that this energy keeps them going”
Marjorie told me that she is over 55, she did not tell me her exact age. But when I ask her to give me a visual of her own becoming 80 one day, she told me older female artists’ names, who “did their best work when they were 80 or even 90”. Marjorie mentions Elisabeth Catlett who was still alive at the time of the interview, (she has died in April 2012 at the age of 97).
interviewed: 20. 9. 2011