The artist in her studio, Goshen, CT
Danielle Mailer, Artist Extraordinaire
I love art but I don’t think of myself as a real collector, although I do have three Danielle Mailers!
Several years ago we were invited to an auction fundraiser by our friend H. At the time he was director of Wellspring, a residential treatment center in Connecticut for teens and young adults with addictions and other mental health issues. Of course we were delighted to go and were impressed by the testimonies given by young people who’d been helped by the program.
And of course we bid on many of the items being auctioned, among them a work by a local Connecticut artist named Danielle Mailer. We went home with her print entitled Downward Dog, a representation of a woman in a yoga pose, but with a lyrical and fanciful touch. The more I looked at it, the more I loved Mailer’s bright pallet, and her expressionistic style.
A year later we went to the same fundraiser and came home with another Mailer print – as a local resident the artist is very generous in donating her work to our friend’s center. That print the artist had entitled The Other Side of Fifty, which by then I surely was!
And by then we had also seen the wonderfully colorful 186’ X 22’ mural entitled Fish Tales painted by Mailer on a wall facing the Naugatuck River in Torrington, our Connecticut town. The artist had been granted funds to create a mural to celebrate the return of many fish species to the once polluted river.
And recently we spent a delightful afternoon visiting the artist in her studio, and of course bought another work entitled Bella in the Tree. Bella is the artist’s daughter we learned, and although we didn’t meet her, the red chair she posed in was at the studio. And of course the black cat in the print made it irresistible to us cat-lovers.
We’re thankful we went to that first auction, bid on a painting that caught our eye, eventually bought two more, and finally met Danielle Mailer, artist extraordinaire!
– Dana Susan Lehrman
