MARCIE HONERKAMP
Putting the Pieces Together
By Kate Maier
(01/23/2007) At the age of 23, a “mixed-up kid” from New Jersey abandoned her studies at one of New York’s finest art colleges, failed in her halfhearted attempts at haircutting, and found her way to East Hampton, drawn by the solitude of winter and her envy of the artist’s lifestyle of her aunt, Adrienne Mim.
 Morgan McGivern |
Marcie Honerkamp had always been enamored of her aunt’s life as a sculptor on the South Fork art scene since the late 1960s. “My aunt was my big inspiration. She was an artist, a divorced mother, I just thought it was the most fun life to be an artist,” Ms. Honerkamp said.
“I didn’t really know what it meant, that it would be a blessing and a curse. I’m not like a normal person, having a normal life, doing normal things,” she said. “My kids wish I was a regular mom . . . you don’t fit in all the time.”
It’s been an uphill struggle. In 1981, when an art professor at the Parsons School of Design told the fourth-year student she probably “didn’t have what it takes” to sustain herself by painting, Ms. Honerkamp admitted, she “just kind of lost it.”
More than a quarter of a century later, however, she can make a boast that even many classical artists could only dream of. This month, Ms. Honerkamp, the mother of a teenaged son and daughter who only stopped making art while they were toddlers, will quit her part-time bookkeeping job, and, for the first time, sustain herself completely as an artist, in arguably one of the most difficult communities to support oneself.
“Don’t let anyone ever tell you it doesn’t matter if you sell,” she said over the coffee table at her house on Three Mile Harbor Road in East Hampton. Her house is cozy, with splashes of color from her mosaics and thick-lined paintings decorating the walls as well as some of the floors. A sizable Pez dispenser collection looks down from a shelf next to the mantel, on which a giant tile Christmas wreath was still displayed last week.
“I don’t think I’d get to the point I’ve gotten to if I didn’t sell. That’s just pedaling backwards,” she said, a remarkable statement for someone who recalls cutting class on critique days because she was so intimidated by her classmates.
“When I was in school, I was so shy, all these kids that went to [the High School of] Art and Design. . . . On critique days I wouldn’t go to school; I was too shy to put my work up. Over the years, I’ve learned how to do it.”
Ms. Honerkamp never enjoyed commercial success as a painter, but perhaps if her teacher had suggested a different medium, she would have stayed in New York City and become a successful mosaic artist. As it was, she did not realize her passion for the intricate tile work that has become her trademark until the aftermath of her divorce in 1996.
She discovered mosaic almost by accident, stumbling upon the work of a ceramic artist named Carlos Alvez in a storefront in South Beach, Miami, in 1999. “My mouth dropped open, and I said, ‘This is what I need to do,’ ” she recalled. Later, at a conference for the Society of American Mosaic Artists, “there were a couple of speakers that just blew me away,” she said.
By then she was hooked. She bought a couple of books, started hunting for tiles on the Internet, and before long began producing unique frames made from layers of peeled paint. “That’s how I started, peeling paint,” she said. “I’d take paint, dry it on plastic, and cut it up.”
“I liked the crisper line; I couldn’t get it from the brush, the saturation,” she explained. “This color is so much more intense.”
Before long, she moved on to her present style, snapping tiny glass fragments into shapes with handheld tile cutters and gluing them together over sketches on wood cuttings. She uses a form of liquid glass to glaze and seal her work, creating a smooth finish over the design.
Flanked by two dogs, a Westie and a cockapoo, and a homely-looking tabby kitten, she spends most afternoons in her basement studio listening to NPR and putting together the puzzles in her head. Shelves upon shelves hold bins, buckets, and Tupperware containers of tiles. The studio looks something like a Crayola crayon factory, with sheets of plastic hanging from the ceiling around the area where she uses a blowtorch to harden the resin coats on her work.
It has to be airtight, she explained, recalling the time she blew a fly into the finish on one piece. “I think we got it out and were able to sell the piece,” she said.
For the first time in her lifetime she is confident that she has found her calling. “It just suited what I needed to say better — the color — just the way I could work with it,” she said.
“It’s funny when you make a decision like this,” she said. “I sold four pieces the week I decided to quit.”
She’s come a long way since 1981, when she at times “didn’t have enough money to buy cigarettes and feed the cat. The only thing going on out here was the movies, O’Mally’s, and the Laundry,” she said of her first East Hampton winter. “But I knew I could work.”
When she met her ex-husband, Peter Honerkamp, who owns the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett with a few members of Ms. Honerkamp’s family as investors, “he was writing a novel [and] I was kind of this funky kid. . . . I was painting and kind of lost . . . and we figured we could work all summer and do art in the winter.”
The couple bought the Talkhouse when it was still a summertime venue, in 1986. “Then it became a year-round place . . . and then I got pregnant,” she said. After that she took seven years off from painting.
Over the last six years, the most relaxing and fulfilling moments she can recall have involved what many would consider tedium — gluing thousands of tiny glass tiles to tables, guitars, surfboards, anything that might look interesting as a mosaic.
“People are drawn to it, there’s something about putting little, little things together,” she said, adding that the popularity of artists like Chuck Close proves her point.
By now she has left her mark around town, where her work can be seen in the most unlikely places. Mosaic guitars adorn the windows of Crossroads Music on East Hampton’s North Main Street. A little farther up the road, her house is easy to find because of the mailbox covered in brilliantly colored tiles.
At the Springs School, a giant mural occupies one wall in the library — Ms. Honerkamp visited the school last year and worked on it with the students. One of the things she enjoys most about using tiles is that “it’s a little bit different than doing a painting, because there’s a permanence to it. It becomes part of the building.”
A friend had her design tables for Michael’s restaurant in East Hampton (now they’re at Cyril’s Fish House on Napeague). “At Cyril’s, they get a lot of use. We’re talking about maybe doing a bar one day,” she said.
“As an artist, a lot of times you get worried you’ll run out of things to do. I perpetually keep myself busy,” she said. “A lot of times someone will just throw an idea at me, like, ‘You should do album covers,’ ” she said. She was working on a table with a guitar design on it when she came up with the idea for her first guitar, a model of one of Jimi Hendrix’s.
She charges around $3,000 for an intricate piece like a guitar or a table, and has always sold at least one piece when she has a show. The next one is scheduled for Feb. 10 at the Cellar on Hampton Road in Southampton, and Ms. Honerkamp’s work will be displayed at Gallery Merz in Sag Harbor from April 28 to May 20. As she has in the past, she will collaborate in a women’s show at Ashawagh Hall in Springs in June, and her mosaics will appear in “Vito Sisti Presents” at the same venue in September. They can be seen at her Web site, www.meesespieces.com.
Recently she has been making mosaics that look like famous album covers, or cigarette boxes about the size of small hardcover books. They usually sell out when she has a show, because “someone like you or I, we can’t really afford to go out and buy art.”
But, “if it’s $85, regular people can buy it. I’d rather just price it to sell it, and keep going.”
The commissions and larger pieces are what keep her going in the meantime. A few years ago, she took a class for tile contractors at the Board of Cooperative Educational Services in Riverhead, and now she practices on her own house. “I tiled my own bathroom,” she said. “It’s hard work, but I know how to do it,” she said.
When she has big commissions, like a tiled backsplash for a client’s kitchen, she usually brings a “tile guy” to make sure things go smoothly. “Usually with commissions they tell me what they want, and I love to do it so much it doesn’t matter.”
With any luck she will continue to make enough to support her habit. “If I don’t sell it,” she said, “my kids will have to take it to the dump when I die.”