Artist in a Hard Hat

Why is an artist – Professor of Art and Department Chair Tamie Beldue – spending hours standing in the cold, day after day, drawing scenes of the renovation of Owen Hall?

“It actually started at the Asheville Art Museum when that building was being renovated. I was part of a hard hat tour of the museum and I just found myself looking around thinking ‘this is an incredible urban landscape, and I want to draw it,’ says Beldue. So she and faculty colleague Suzanne Dittenber, a painter, got permission, and for a time, set up easels inside the museum during its renovation.

That project was relatively short lived, and Beldue has instead become an unofficial solo “artist in residence” amid the reconstruction of Owen Hall, the once and future home of her beloved Department of Art and Art History. “It’s been fun and the people have been really awesome,” she says. “I am grateful to our campus facilities folks – to Dan Croisant for initiating my contact with the contractor and to Kevin Gibson for ensuring my safety, even coming in on one very cold Sunday morning so I could work. Vannoy Construction has been incredibly accommodating with allowing me safe access.”

As for the construction workers, Beldue says, “They’re really curious about why I’m there. They want to see what I’m doing. One said, ‘you couldn’t find anything better to draw?’ And I said, ‘actually, this is pretty exciting to me.’ So I’m hoping my presence helps them look at their own environment through a different lens.”

And what brings the excitement for Beldue? “It’s not held still – everyone’s working. Most of my drawing has been during construction hours, so I have all that chaos. The light is constantly changing, people are moving, so it’s a big decision about where to set up. I did one drawing centered around an open doorway in the distance, and as I was drawing it, they starting boarding the doorway up! It was kind of comical. Then they had a whole pallet of some kind of pipes and they picked the pipes up and moved them, so it was ‘thank you, now I don’t have to draw them anymore!’”

The question, “why not take some photos and draw from those,” brings Beldue to a more serious discussion about drawing. “There is something significant in the experience of working directly in front of the motif,” she says. “We have two eyes and a camera only has one. So just taking a photo and working from that is copying a different experience than what you would relay if you were standing in front of the subject yourself.

“I’ve been trying to stay really true to working from life. And so, when they boarded up that doorway, that was the end of that drawing. The environment really dictates when I’m finished. It’s kind of nice to have something outside of my orbit to bump up against, if that makes sense. There are still some pretty elaborate moments in the drawing but you could say it’s a less polished drawing than if I were in the comfort of my own studio and using photographic images. It’s making the drawing have a raw, construction feel in itself in the making as well as in the subject matter that’s depicted.”

Raw also describes some of the weather conditions Beldue has encountered, drawing in an unheated construction site in the middle of the winter. “The sun does not shine in there, and standing on that still-somewhat-uncured concrete, it feels like your feet just soak up that moisture and cold. I found some two-by-fours and put them down to stand on just so my feet weren’t touching the concrete and I could stand a little bit longer. I’ve been trying to stay for three or three-and-a-half hours at a time.”

As for what will become of the fruit of this long hard labor in the cold, Beldue hopes her drawings might be part of the first faculty art show when renovations are complete and galleries in Owen Hall reopen. “We’ll definitely be excited to get back in when the project’s completed,” she says.

But in meantime, she uses her special hard-hat access and her cell phone camera much more than her drawings, to share news of construction progress with faculty and students at the Art Department’s temporary home at 838 Riverside Dr. “I’m pretty excited about the changes, so I snap a couple of pix and show them to my colleagues.” It is hoped that Owen Hall will reopen in time for fall semester 2021.