BRATTLEBORO — The very private and much-loved artist, Mallory Lake, died in 2017 at her home in Marlboro. While there has been no memorial service up to this point - her husband, Bob Engel, was diagnosed with a brain tumor only days after her passing and died in February - there is now a memorial exhibit at William Baczek Fine Arts in Northampton, Mass.
Baczek has been showing Lake's work for 30 years. He was given access to her estate and is showing some less-exhibited paintings as well as one that has never been shown before.
Lake was born Mallory Oldroyd but eventually took her mother's surname, liking the sound of it, feeling it to be more lyrical.
She grew up in the coastal town of Milford, Conn., hometown for generations of her family on her mother's side. Simon Lake, her great-grandfather, was an engineer who invented the modern submarine, and the family name is well-known there. A school and other institutions in the town are named after Simon Lake.
Mallory Lake's immediate family were the “poor relations,” and she grew up in a carriage house on her grandmother's estate. Her father was ill for much of her childhood; her mother supported the family with work as an interior designer.
Lake drew from a very young age - a photograph from a gallery catalog of 2006 shows her at age 3, intently bent over paper, pencil in hand. A childhood friend, Craig Comstock, in this same catalog, recalls his meeting her then, that she drew “with the considered patience of an older child. She was an only child, and had grown accustomed to 'keeping her own company' amongst adults...she came to value her time alone.”
According to her good friend, botanical illustrator Bobbi Angell, Lake came to Vermont as a young woman “to be a ski bum.” In the 1980s, she eventually established a graphic arts company, Oliver and Lake. From 1990 to 1993, she was art director at Vermont Life. She left to pursue her art more intensely.
Lake's partner for a time, local artist Harry Saxman, who was working in pastels, inspired her to explore the medium. She had success early on at the Stratton Arts Festivals painting local landscapes before discovering the landscapes of Italy - in particular, the region of Tuscany and city of Venice.
“She had a very specific aesthetic,” says Angell. “She went to Ireland, [to] Provence. They didn't inspire her the way Italy did.”
And what was that aesthetic? Her work could be said to be moody, dark. But they are far from dreary.
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Gallery owner Baczek is fond of quoting Lake: “If you want to paint light, you have to paint dark.”
Lake's soft light caresses the forms ––a villa balustrade or cypress tree becomes a paean to form and tone. Shadows and reflections have a lyric poignancy.
The Italians of the Renaissance had a word - or two, in fact - for the stylistic methods Lake used in her paintings: “chiaroscuro,” epitomized by Caravaggio and meaning the highlighting of form through light and shadow, and “sfumato,” used principally by Leonardo DaVinci, who described it as “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane.”
For her pastels of Tuscany, Lake would travel to Italy and return with copious photographs to use for the basic outline of a painting. Of course, these were not your typical tourist photos.
“She was extremely particular about the composition of her subject,” Angell recalls. “In fact, she thought as highly of photography as an art form as painting, and had many books in her home about photography and photographers.”
She was especially fond of the Photo-Secession group of the early 20th century, led by Alfred Stieglitz. “She loved their moodiness,” says Angell.
The trips to Italy were lonely for her, says Angell, but it was impossible to bring others into her routine on these excursions. She would get up before dawn to be ready with her camera at the first light. Then she would repeat at dusk each day.
“These were definitely working trips,” says Baczek.
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Lake's love of the Italian countryside extended to her own home in Marlboro, where she created gardens that reproduced the formal landscaping of the Italian villas she loved to paint.
She briefly studied photography with John Willis, a professor at Marlboro College, sometime in the mid-1990s.
“Her final prints in the Introductory course were so accomplished they stood up to the advanced students attending the college at that time,” Willis recalls in an email. “She knew the aesthetic she wanted to achieve and was determined to learn how to achieve it.”
“I have appreciated her work so, and her attention to detail combined with a diligent work ethic, that I have told stories of working with her and shown her images to students every semester since,” Willis writes.
Lake was adventurous, artistically, exploring through workshops and classes different media - encaustics with Jen Jensen; studied with Charlie Hunter, the Bellows Falls–based plein air painter; and, in the later part of her life, had a separate studio where she could play with oil paint without the materials encroaching on her pastels, or vice-versa. But she did not try to impose these explorations on her collectors or gallery owners.
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One big departure from the Italy landscapes was her delving into locomotive-themed imagery, perhaps the reason was her work with Hunter, known for his love of painting all things related to the world of the rails.
Lake had gotten inspired to explore the locomotive theme by the film Casablanca, and other film noir classics, says Baczek. She'd watch them on YouTube, then pause and download still images she liked. Those frames would become her source material.
Perhaps the earliest showing of these paintings was a 2013 show at Pucker Gallery in Boston, “Light Reimagined,” which included three of them.
However, when Mara Williams, chief curator at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, asked for work for a BMAC show later that same year, Lake, recognizing the museum had once been a grand rail station, went full steam ahead on the train theme. That show, “Between Dark and Night,” was the only one devoted exclusively to the train paintings, according to Williams. They have proved to be among the most popular of her work.
Lake must have seen it as a perfect sfumato opportunity. In these pastel paintings, background and foreground are suffused with steam from the engines which contrasts with architectural or infrastructure detail that appears out of the mist. As in “Rainy Day” or “Late Arrival,” light is provided by the train's single headlight.
Writes Williams in the catalog for the show, “Lake's command of her medium heightens the dramatic tension. In the exterior scenes, she subtly shifts her gray tones - silvery mists, steely clouds, inky skies - to capture fleeting atmospheric effects. By contrast, the interiors are bathed in golden light, intensifying the darkness lurking around or beyond architectural details.”
Unlike many artists, a show for Lake was a pressure she welcomed.
“She worked toward the shows” says Angell, and reflects on a scene from her last days.
Lake's framer, she says, brought in paintings he'd completed for what would be her last show, at Baczek.
“She perked up!” Angell says. “The highlight of her life was seeing her work framed and ready to exhibit!”