Check Out Jo Ann Mauck’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jo Ann Mauck.

Hi Jo Ann, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Let me introduce myself. My business is to draw pictures for people while they watch. I do it while you watch! So, as an art exhibitionist for the past 40 years, I have elicited a vast array of responses from my audiences, which vary from the carnival lots of America and Canada to the swank ballrooms where I am hired by corporations and Bar Mitzvah mothers alike to be a crowd pleaser! I have been a portrait artist in The French Quarter of New Orleans. “Painting mugs,” as John Singer Sargeant said as he tired of his illustrious career in Boston, painting the hoity toity stewards of industry and their wives. Underneath the space needle in Seattle, you’d find me in the summer, capturing those mugs of tourists, and at the rodeo in the Calgary Stampede, I’ve worked for McCann Erickson advertising in Tehran Iran, doing story boards and layouts for Coca Cola and various big clients in the 70’s, hand lettering the Coke logo in Farsi(which I cannot read.) ” It doesn’t say Coco Cola, Khanoom, it says something bad, we’re not telling you what!” my Persian colleagues in the bullpen, all male, by the way, would laugh uproariously at my expense. That office had its foyer bombed a few months later in the Marshall law days before the Shah left. If you want to hear more about that, you’ll have to read my book. Through it all, for 45 years, I have drawn, painted and sprayed pictures for money. I am an Art Whore. I need attention, constantly, or so I’m told. Well, 3 husbands have said so and now, so does my fiancée. But I’d say, I am an authentic artwhore. I give the people what they want. When I use my airbrush gun, I aim to please. So, when the Hotel Del Coronado hired me to paint a plein air large oil painting in 3 hours, on stage, of the Del and of the party at their elegant tables,of 400 exclusive members of the Del Club, I wasn’t nervous…I was terrified.! But… I did it! Even though the sky went from bright summer evening to a dark moonlit night in those three hours. Be in the moment, I tell myself when I’m painting Au Plein Air. Find the essence, the feel.. “If there’s one thing you can’t lose, its that feel” or so crooned Tom Waits and Keith Richards famously in a duet. I always love ugly guys with bad voices. My favorite rock stars. The painting was on the block this December at the Del Club’s charity auction. All the proceeds, which were respectable, went to benefit an orphanage in Baja. It’s come to me after all these years to try to do good jobs and make people happy (like an Art Whore should..) That’s a business value that’s important to me. I try to be authentic in my work while expressing a client’s unrequited desire. I come from a small logging town in southern Oregon. There I felt like I didn’t belong, I was an oddball, and I was always afraid of having a mundane life. Like I would die of ennui. So I bounced around the world , looking for the excitement of it all. Or…am I just ADHD? I try to help other artists and have mentored many as I was once mentored. I am proud to say that at least one of my protegees has become famous. Well, he outta, he’s way better than me! I always seek to hire artists who are better than me. That’s my trick! 2 Anyway, the Hotel Del Coronado is giving me a solo show for the Exclusive Member’s club this summer. I am up nights banging out preliminary drawings for a series of Impressionist style (apropos as the hotel was built in 1888) paintings of the Del featuring its legendary ghosts. I always hoped to be a fine artist someday, ( when I finally grew up), as my education ( BFA painting and Printmaking) warranted. But the pesky dilemma of making a living always loomed above my easel. I had a professor once who was a famous northwest abstract expressionist. He would growl, “women can’t make it as fine artists, they don’t know how to suffer, as artists must. Frank Okada was a tough teacher, always carried a jug of cheap Gallo wine around the studio with him at the University of Oregon. Frank was imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in Washington State as a child during WW II. As a matter of fact, today is the day FDR signed Executive order 9066 which ordered all residents of Japanese descent into camps in 1942. I saw him make a grown man cry in a critique in Watercolor class once. ” You have no business being in art class!” He scolded the poor guy, I stayed after and asked him, why did you embarrass that guy? ” I’m doing him a favor; he is wasting his time.” It dawned on me, I should be a professor, make grown men cry! I forgot to go to graduate school, instead, followed my architect graduate student boyfriend, heretofore referred to as “The Great Satan”, to his homeland, Tehran, Iran. A year later, I was on the last Pan Am flight evacuation flight out…The Ayatolla Khomeni (or as they said in New Orleans, when i arrived there 48 hours later, the” I dun tol ya” had triumphantly returned after 40 years. The Sha-han-shah Ariamehr (King of Kings Light of the Aryans, as he affectionately required to be addressed, had been driven to exile. So, when I got to New Orleans, they called me “Jo-Ann from Eye-ran”. How I do go on. It will all be explained in the book I am writing,” The Art Whore’s Sketchbook” an autobiography of a deranged traveling artist. 3 I forgot to go to graduate school and couldn’t find a job with my fine art degree, which qualifies you for nothing, in the working world, when I returned to the Pacific Northwest. I joined the circus instead. Travelling full-time in an RV for 7 years. Motoring to State Fairs, airbrushing “fantasy portraits” to the amazement of the fair goers in 40 states and 3 provinces in Canada. I sprayed fantasy drawings in big state and provincial fairs for almost 40 years, production airbrushing, making my hands as gnarled as my heartthrob, Keith Richards. I met my husband, second year in, he first was my manager, then my husband and then the father of our son, who was born on the road. That little boy travelled with us for 5 years, until he had to go to school. So, we opened airbrush stores in Phoenix. and only did the big summer fairs, Del Mar and Orange County being the two that I still have today, since 1985. In 2018, the dreadful day came, when my husband and business manager /partner, father of my son, my love, died, I found myself alone, adrift. I stayed drunk for 2 years. Still production airbrushing endlessly, airbrushing hats and t-shirts. but without a purpose. I wanted to die. Almost two years to the day my husband died in my arms, covid lockdown hit, I lost all my gigs, had to give back deposits, the fairs shuttered, Del Mar dragged its feet sending back the $16,000 fair fee which was paid 6 months in advance. Some whispered that they didn’t have it to return to us all. It was now June. I sent it in January. and I couldn’t work’ for 14 months. I had to stay home. What was I to do? My handyman got lock downed too while working in my home, as he was renovating my house. He had slept 1 whole year on a makeshift bed in my office downstairs, The young lady artists who worked gigs for me rented the two bedrooms rooms upstairs. I drank alone in the master suite, next to theirs, rarely slept, didn’t eat much, but drank. From 4 am on… I drank. Tim, my handyman, was a kind and humorous guy who listened quietly as I spilled my inebriated misery out on the patio, late at night. He had suffered his own pain in life. He would listen quietly; he would watch me cry. I just couldn’t get past my grief. 4 It was that very day, March 13th 2020, a year after he started working on the house, two years after Byron died, that I finally invited him to join me upstairs. He is my fiancée today. He was, after all, the guy who 3 months prior, in December of 2019, convinced me up to the steps of the Kaiser Addiction Medicine office ion Pt. Loma, where I got treatment for alcoholism. Yes, it sounds corny, but on the day of the California Covid lock down, I realized that I loved him and that I was sober. That I had a future. So, I wrote a proposal to the State of California, and low and behold, the Fair Fee check came back the same day that California sent me a $15000 grant for my project. We bought an RV with the grant money I received, and off we went! We traveled to many of the awesome State Campgrounds of California, which, for the most part, stayed open, as little else did. There, I painted 30 oil paintings au plein air, of those beautiful places. These paintings can be viewed on my website, www.fahlgrenart.com

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I am 72. and finely, I realize, obstacles are all in the mind, if only you can figure out how to support a family and pay the mortgage, all in your mind.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
plein air oil, pastel

acrylic

portrait painter

Paint the party
live artist

What matters most to you? Why?
Art matters. Without it we are old and torn cardboard boxes, blowing end over end, down a drab alley.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ficklefingrairbrush.com ; www.fahlgrenart.com
• Instagram: @ficklefingerairbrush @fahlgrenart.com
• Facebook: [email protected] [email protected]