Danielle Mailer
Danielle Mailer’s studio is housed in a red clapboard building on the side of the road in Goshen. Based on its size, I am expecting her space to be one enormous room with a bay of windows. Instead I enter a quite small room leading into another equally small room. Both spaces are chockfull of her work. It is like walking into a wonderland of shapes and colors and not being able to decide what you like best. The subjects range from animals, birds, female forms and flowers, and are in various sizes, including a 12-foot by 18-foot piece that will be part of her new show. I am shown to a colorfully upholstered settee where I am offered a piece of her homemade banana nut bread. What could be better?
Mailer has been painting since she was a child, influenced by her mother, Adele Morales, who was an abstract painter. “My parents were divorced and we spent every weekend with my father, who would take us straight to the impressionist wing at The Museum of Modern Art and give us a lecture.”
Eager to develop her talent as an artist, Mailer wanted to go to the Rhode Island School of Design. “But my father insisted that I learn to write. We all had to be able to put sentences together in a creative way. Of course, if your father was Norman Mailer, nothing less was acceptable.”
Mailer is one of nine children that span her father’s six marriages; she is the second oldest. “Amazingly, even though my father had a somewhat chaotic life and was quite tyrannical, he loved his kids; he called us his muses. I am very close to my siblings and all of us meet for lunch and are always in touch.”
Has the creative influence rubbed off on the others? “ Except for my oldest sister who is a psychoanalyst, we are all in the arts.”
Although her father was renowned, Mailer did not ride his coattails. “I’d never mention my father unless someone else brought it up. I needed to feel I was making it on my own. For years, in fact, I was reticent to talk about being Norman’s daughter. Now that he has been dead for almost a decade, I feel freed up to explore our relationship without being eclipsed.”
Mailer’s early work focused on still life and collage interiors. But she felt strongly that she wanted to introduce figures into her work. “Every time I did a piece, I wanted to add people,” she explained.
She also began to think larger and began producing her massive pieces, working in aluminum, wood, and Masonite. “I prefer aluminum because it’s more durable,” Mailer said. She makes a drawing and then brings it to a sign maker – Giordano’s – who cuts the piece for her. In most cases, the pieces have painted images on both sides.
She has received three grants to produce outdoor paintings. Two are exhibited in Torrington, -- a cat and a horse. A 16-foot-long mountain lion is displayed in Salisbury. She is now working on producing a 40-foot-long piece depicting fishes that she hopes to mount on the wall facing the canal in Torrington.
Meanwhile she is preparing for her show which will open on January 3rd at Five Points Gallery in Torrington where her husband, jazz musician Peter McEachern, will play as he does at all her openings.