Women Use Art to Beat the Blues

The women had been kvetching.

Like most of us, they lead stressful lives, although theirs are somewhat more interesting than most of ours.

Marilyn Kentz and Caryl Kristensen are performers who have had two shows canceled out from under them: The NBC sitcom “The Mommies” and the ABC talk show “Caryl & Marilyn: Real Friends.” Nancy Alspaugh is a longtime friend and TV producer, waiting to hear if her latest project is a go.

The women were dealing with the multiple problems (can we please not call them challenges?) of growing up and older.

Caryl’s children were in the full throes of adolescence. Marilyn’s oldest daughter had just been married, and she was experiencing serious empty nest. Nancy had gone through the purgatory of infertility treatment and was seeing a marriage counselor.

All of them were facing the unpleasant reality of being a woman older than Britney Spears in a culture and a city in which women begin considering cosmetic surgery at 30 because they have to. Needless to say, various parents were failing as well, forcing the women to face the long ache of watching older loved ones decline.

But enough about the bad stuff.

The women decided to do something.

This is the way Marilyn and Nancy described their strategy in an e-mail to the The Times’ Valley Edition: “As they were comparing notes, [the women] decided to stop complaining and try something new. Someone suggested that the next best thing to Prozac was art. So right then and there they cleared out a garage, hung a drape in one corner, placed a wooden bowl of lemons and blood oranges in front of it, slipped on a smock and a beret and began their first oil painting ever. That was the birth of the Art Colony of Valley Village.”

In fact, they wear aprons, not smocks, and berets are strictly optional.

The Art Colony of Valley Village is a deliciously pretentious name for a wonderfully simple idea. Every Monday and Wednesday afternoon, six or more women meet at the home of one of the members to paint. The core group includes Ellen Ellison, a Westside attorney currently involved in Rampart litigation; Charlotte Derrick, an operating room nurse whose specialty is neurosurgery; and Debbie Alpert, also a TV producer.

Nancy speculates that the women came up with an artistic solution to their growing dissatisfaction because “We’re basically hippie chicks. We were looking for nirvana.” Moreover, she says, “I said to Marilyn, ‘Do I want to be remembered as Pamela Lee or Georgia O’Keeffe?’ ”

Marilyn thinks the reason was even simpler: “You can be remorseful or depressed for the rest of your life, or you can choose something else. It’s how to have your midlife without a crisis.”

Most of the women had no formal training in art. So they turned to Marilyn’s 14-year-old daughter, Marcy, who had taken franchise art classes at Sherman Oaks Fashion Square. Remembering what she had been taught, Marcy showed the women how to do preliminary sketches of their paintings in charcoal, then fix the sketches, begin their paintings by determining the lights, darks and midtones in each still life or other subject, and finally how to add color to their work.

“Marcy’s our muse” and teacher, Marilyn says.

In the beginning, Marilyn remembers, most of the Colonists, as they delight in calling themselves, knew so little about the artistic process that they sometimes had to stop mid-painting.

“I knew to sketch it in charcoal and spray it with hair spray and then we had to sit there and wait for Marcy to come home from school,” Marilyn recounts with a laugh.

A recent Monday found the Colonists hard at work in Marilyn’s airy, light-filled home. A half-dozen women worked on their current projects while music, including the feel-good sounds of the Temptations, played softly (sometimes incense burns as well).

Marilyn is working on a self-portrait, a personalized version of Ingres’ “Odalisque” filled with symbolic references to her Italian heritage and her family. In one hand, the painted Marilyn holds a pancake turner. Charlotte, the group’s best-trained artist, is working on a medieval-style dragon in a large piece with an ornate red and gold border, one of a series featuring mythological beasts.

Charlotte says membership in the Colony allows her to interact with other creative people, in contrast to the sometimes lonely work she does in her studio.

The women encourage each other as they paint, laugh a lot, make suggestions and inevitably talk about the other things in their lives that concern them. The fact that they are here to paint does not mean they can’t function as a support group. Problems are solved here, triumphs shared, loneliness and doubt ameliorated. As women do, as recent scientific studies have established, they respond to stress by tending and befriending. Do you think the women that came before did nothing during all those hours of sewing but make quilts?

Because these are essentially ambitious, high-powered people, they can’t help being entrepreneurial about their personal discovery of the therapeutic nature of art. Marilyn and Nancy have begun holding retreats and seminars that include producing an oil painting that they have titled “The Girl Within.” They have also begun writing a book tentatively titled “Midlife Goddess.”

The women insist their families love who they have become in less than six months at their easels--more creative, more fulfilled, less tense, able to imagine futures for themselves beyond their current careers. (Lord knows, the nearby art supply store should be grateful, as well).

And then there are the paintings. Debbie is currently working on a portrait of her late mother, based on a favorite family photo. Her mother was a dancer, Debbie explains, and in the picture she is dancing with gleeful abandon in shorts and a striped shirt on a local beach.

“That was her spirit,” says Debbie.

But time weighed her mother down, and the joy seeped out of her. Debbie is capturing the moment of her mother’s bliss and promise in oils as a tribute to her, but also as a reminder of how to live her own life.

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Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.