Discovering art in stone

By Diane Daniel, Globe Correspondent, 11/17/02

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Margot Grallert of Acton believes an education in art should have as much to do with color and feeling as with technique. As a consultant at McCarthy-Towne School, a nontraditional public elementary school in Acton, she works with teachers to help them understand the thought processes behind their students' artwork.

Grallert, 65 and mother of five grown children, said she is "interested in the expressive part that comes unconsciously," largely through use of color and abstraction. She also is working on a school project called the Art of Learning Institute, a Web-based archive site that would document the art education process of "learning from the inside out."

Grallert wanted to see how her educational ideas fit into her artistic experience. So this summer, with a grant from The Philanthropic Initiative Inc. in Boston, she returned to Perugia, Italy, where she had spent six months as an artist when she was 21. She wanted to revisit the sites and reflect on the emotions — and colors — fueling the artwork she made there.

She traveled with her sister, Kathy Ross of North Haven, Conn., and used Idyll Untours (www.untours.com), a service of "independent travel with support." Untours set them up in an apartment in a tower that had been used as part of a farm in La Bruna, about 40 minutes south of Perugia. "The view was astronomical," Grallert said. Untours supplied a rental car, stocked the refrigerator for the first couple of days, and provided a local contact. For a two-week stay, including air fare, the cost was around $1,800, Grallert said.

Perugia is in the hilly Umbria region of Italy, in the center of the country. They were there in late June, during "an unbearable heat wave," the only downside of the trip, Grallert said. She decided to base her studies on four paintings, several sketches, and a collage she had made when she was a student in 1958 at the Museo Dell'Accademia di Belle Arti. She called her time then "like a dream. I had no one to talk to. It was total experience. It was an amazing, amazing time."

Grallert photographed those pieces and put them in an album to carry with her. A woman at the art school was able to direct Grallert to the Perugia sites she had painted 44 years ago.

She packed limited art supplies. "I knew I wasn't going to draw. I was collecting information, and my interest is in the color, space, and light of what it was like." She considered collecting stones and glass, but "I ended up making color swatches. . . .

"My first day in Perugia I just walked around and stumbled on places that I knew," she said. Her most overwhelming sensation came "with my first step into the major piazza. It sort of flooded me, the memory of the place."

The art she had not noticed as a young woman was "the stone. The life is in the stone. So I started to photograph close-ups of stones and people patching their walls and washing the streets. It's part of their daily lives." During a side trip to Rome and Vatican City, "everybody was looking up at paintings and the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and I'm looking at the floors and walls. There's more timelessness and authenticity there."

When Grallert returned to Acton, she made large sheets of color to replicate the swatches. "When I got all these photographs back and started fussing with them and putting them alongside my paintings, what bowled me over was the enormous accuracy of my color." She is now using the photos and colors to make a collage of the landscape, but said, "I'm more interested in trying to write about the experience. I don't even know yet where it's going. It's opened up so much in my head."

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