Physical [Art] Therapy

Gay Germain arrived at art late in life. Her thriving professional years were spent on the island of Manhattan, N.Y., as a headhunter for banks in the financial district. But during the early 1990s the banks experienced a bit of a downturn. Germain seized the moment and took the advice of her husband, Tom, and decided to retire.

When thinking about what to do next, Germain’s thoughts drifted to her childhood. Her father had encouraged his children to go into different careers; while Germain chose finance, her sister became an artist. But she had always felt a pull toward the arts. After retiring, that pull transformed into a purpose.

“When I left finance, I took up art with the energy of a teenager,” says Germain, 71.

She dove into books, attended local art seminars, visited local galleries and sought out artistic mentors, such as Westlake, Calif.-based abstract painter and printmaker Katherine Chang Liu. The first five years as an artist was one of solitude and reflection. Germain didn’t display her work publicly and only showed finished work to those she trusted. She acted like an artistic monk, taking a vow of singular focus and solitude to hone her technique and burrow into the canvas to find her artistic voice.

“Even now, I go to Liu once a year to refresh and to learn,” says Germain.

It wasn’t until a happenstance encounter in 2003 that Germain took her first step to transition from a private artist to a public one. She and her husband had just moved to Sarasota and were having new furniture delivered from Design Impressions Gallery on Palm Avenue. As the store owners were unpacking the furniture, Germain showed them her work. They loved it.

From then on, Germain entered juried shows and earned several honors for her abstract paintings and sculptures that play with dark and intense use of color combined with a defiant sense of space and line. She exhibited her work at the State of the Arts Gallery in 2007 and later in galleries in Miami and Denver.

In 2011, Germain battled a staph infection that waylaid her creative output. Her vibrant, naturally lighted studio behind her house transformed from an active art mill into a quiet garage.

“I didn’t know if I was going to be able to get out of bed and didn’t know what the future held,” Germain says. “My work isn’t easy, and it was a challenge just to hold a brush again.”

During her two-year recovery, Germain hoped that she would one day be back in the studio. After regaining her strength she started slowly, and over a six-month period she reintroduced art into her life.

Now she is working again with the same familiar quality and vigor — and making up for lost time. Her current 15-painting series, “Sculpture Garden Conversations,” takes up the entire wall of her expansive home studio.

But perhaps her most vocal re-entry into the Sarasota art community was her violin statue piece she submitted in the Perlman Music Program/Suncoast’s “Art of the Violin” series. The series tasks 20 local artists with the assignment of transforming a violin into a piece of original artwork. Germain’s is a vacuum of black accompanied by her patented curved-wood sculpture style added onto the rear of the violin.
According to Germain, it is already receiving advance interest in the silent auction being held in February.

“I don’t want people to look at my work and see other people’s art,” says Germain. “It’s all my own.”