Northsider turns art hobby into something more.
Afternoon sunlight streams through the windows of Christie Farese’s studio, kissing her beach scene oils with a golden glow.
A painting in progress on the easel is a charmer of a scene, with a pair of tiny girls playing in the sand. In another sweet setting on the wall beyond, two little girls in playsuits and sun bonnets sit on a beach, their backs to the viewer. Perhaps they’re sharing secrets as they watch the waves.
Farese grew up with a love of art that deepened in college at Ole Miss and graduated to collector status (including paintings by Mississippi artists Wyatt Waters, Sammy Britt and Miriam Weems) as a young adult. She’s long been drawn to the work of Claude Monet and other Impressionist painters.
When her daughters, Lucien and Mary Manning (now 16 and 14), were still very small, an artist friend heard potential in Farese’s casual comment, “I just wish I could do that. I wish I could paint.” Her art lessons suggestion sounded fun to the stay-at-home mom, so she took the plunge and found a passion.
Farese started weekly lessons with artist Julie McCartney. “She is one of the most talented artists I know, still, to this day,” says Farese, who has a huge painting of her girls by McCartney hanging over the mantel. Farese, who had never drawn or painted before, fell in love with the creative outlet.
McCartney taught in the tradition of influential 20th century painter and teacher Henry Hensche (a huge influence, too, on Britt and his long tenure at Delta State University). Farese keeps a copy of John W. Robichaux’s “Hensche on Painting” handy in her studio. ‘It’s all about color and light,” she says, grateful that’s the way she learned and for the many artists in that tradition she’s studied with, such as Camille Przewodek in California.
A hobby at first, painting quickly grew into something more. There was an art show with fellow students of McCartney’s, then friends asked her to paint works for them. She fit art around mom duties, while her girls were at school and after they’d gone to bed. An early painting of Mary Manning, “Meme,” at age 3 shares the sort of moment moms must want to freeze in time — captured from behind, in a ruffled pink ballet costume, looking out like the whole world’s ahead of her. Farese painted it from a snapshot she just happened to take. “That’s one’s really old, but I keep it in here, just to remind myself to keep it simple.”
That viewpoint has become a pattern. “I am going to learn how to do faces at some point,” Farese says, and she has done some. But from-behind views dominate, evoking nostalgia, wistfulness and even the earliest tugs of parental protection vs. personal independence.
“I feel like it’s almost easier, without the face, to capture the essence of the child, because you get their gestures and the way they hold their body,” she says. Moms can even pick out their own, or friends’ kids, when she shares paintings on social media. “To me, it just captures a little memory.”
She adores painting children. Beach scenes are frequent, too, wrapping in Farese’s love for the colors and the water. Her palette leans toward calming, pastel shades. “I just like pretty colors. Those are pretty colors to me. … In the last year or so, I’ve just started to paint what I want to paint, and not what I think everybody else wants me to paint,” she says. “It feels good.” Two small studies recall a recent Fort Morgan, Alabama, weekend and its opportunity for plein air painting on the beach, early morning and sunset. “It was really awesome.”
Commissions keep Farese pretty busy, but her art also includes tasteful watercolor and ink nudes, faces inspired by Henri Matisse’s work and other subjects. “It’s just a journey. I’m always going to be learning.” Her work is carried by Caron Gallery in Tupelo, and locally at Courtney Peters Interior Design, with smaller gift art at Gifts by KPEP.
“It’s a joy for me to do paintings for people, because I know it brings them happiness,” Farese says, counting the relationships and friendships made through her art as one of its most significant blessings.
Her cozy studio, “my happy place,” is just off the patio and pool at her home in Reunion. There, colorful drops fleck the painted concrete floor like scattered confetti underfoot. She teaches art to a friend’s 4-year-old daughter and let her color on the floor one day — a freedom limited to just that floor, she adds with a laugh.
Art can be an eye-opener. “I see beauty in every single thing,” she says, to the point it’s become almost a joke with her daughters. “We will be riding down the road … and I’ll say, ‘Look at the way the light’s hitting that cow. Somebody get a picture!” She likes painting cows, too, and several pastel-hued bovine portraits stare placidly from a studio corner.
The creative spark also glows in the next generation, but in a musical direction. Lucien, 16, sometimes brings her guitar to the studio to share a song she wrote, adding welcome company and live music to what can be a lonely pursuit. Building on vocal coaching, classical guitar and violin lessons, talent shows and local theater work, the young singer/songwriter aims for a musical career, and perhaps a move to Los Angeles after graduation.
For now, the spark nudges inspiration closer to home. “We feed off each other’s creativity,” Lucien says of her mom and herself. “If I’m singing, she’s probably going to get an instinct to paint. If she’s painting, I’m probably going to want to go sing. We’re always talking about it to each other and hyping each other up.”
“She’s kind of my go-to person,” Farese says, supplying names for a series of paintings that might work their way into song titles, then lead to a video with Lucien singing in the background. “It’s just a fun little cycle.”
