Growing up in Detroit, Michele Marceau’s mother had a friend who was an oil painter. Her house was the type of place that children could wander into. She gave haircuts and taught piano lessons, and was often Marceau’s babysitter. Marceau loved being in that house — and she loved the paintings on the walls.
“That was my first kind of inkling of how powerful art was to me,” Marceau said.
Years later, after earning her business degree, she came across a posting for a job at Deco Art Gallery in Georgetown. She landed that job and two years later, the opportunity came to open her own gallery, Principle Gallery, which is celebrating its 30th year anniversary this month.
Principle Gallery, which focuses on contemporary realism,first opened in a location at 315 Cameron St., but has been housed at 208 King Street for 27 years. They have cultivated decades-long relationships with artists, many of whom are participating in the 30th anniversary show that will be on display until April 22.
Faraway Near, by Gary Myers
Looking back over the last 30 years, Marceau is proud of the ways the gallery has grown. They expanded to a second location in Charleston in 2013 and she hopes to open another location in the future. However, she is most proud of talented artists they have been able to recruit since the beginning.
“You definitely have to earn the right to show some of these artists who are in very high demand,” Marceau said.
One of the artists who have been working with Principle Gallery since the late 1990s is Gary Myers, a painter based in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Myers said the gallery is very honest with their artists and focused on giving them the best possible representation. Most of the time, he says it feels more like a family than a business partnership.
“It means a lot because as an artist, you know once it leaves your hands, you never know how your work is being represented to other people,” Myers said. “I have complete faith that they will represent my work properly.”
Clint Mansell, director of Principle Gallery, stands next to the 40x60 inch painting that he challenged Christine Lashley to paint.
A main part of a gallery’s function is to sell artwork, so Director Clint Mansell measures success partly by conventional metrics like sales and traction on social media. But the relationship between gallery and artist is not merely transactional. Mansell and his team at the gallery have an ear to the ground in Alexandria and can inform artists about what buyers are looking for. And when artists are clamoring to be included in shows, Mansell knows they are doing something right.
It’s been 15 years since Mansell came to Virginia looking for art jobs and landed in his first role at Principle Gallery. Originally from Ohio, he studied photography and sculpture at Ohio University and experienced the typical skepticism from friends and family who didn’t see how he could turn an art degree into a living. Directing Principle Gallery is his dream job in many ways. He relishes the opportunity helping artists make a career out of their passion, something that few people have the means to do.
“Our main focus is to really help those artists, who I see in a lot of ways as underdogs,” Mansell said. “Helping people create a name for themselves and a life for themselves out of just making things — there's something beautiful about that.”
As a curator of the art that is displayed in the gallery, Mansell’s goal is for anyone to be able to walk in and find something that inspires them. And for the artists, the gallery not only serves as a source of sales and marketing, but a source of inspiration and challenge.
Christine Lashley is an oil painter whose painting is largely inspired by places and landscapes. Prior to working with the gallery, her focus was on smaller works, many of which were done on-site and under strict time constraints at plein-air painting competitions.
Principle Gallery has supported her in building her body of work and branching out to larger scale projects. She sees them as her partner in creating art, saying that sometimes, the constraints and parameters of an art show can actually spark creativity.
For the current 30th anniversary show, Mansell challenged Lashley to translate some of her smaller paintings of Paris into a larger piece that would have even more impact. Lashley had previously exhibited smaller studies of Paris at the gallery and Mansell prompted her to see what she could come up with on a larger scale.
“That’s wonderful,” Lashley said, referring to Mansell’s vision for her work. “That makes me want to rise to the challenge. And I did.”
The result was a 40x60 inch piece, “Montmartre Last Night,” (shown above) that is housed on the main floor of the anniversary exhibition. It’s a view of Paris at twilight, with hundreds of soft lights lighting up the windows of the white stone buildings and mingling with the fading daylight.
Similarly, Myers has found his ongoing collaboration with the gallery to be a helpful motivator. The quality and variety of the artwork has improved steadily over the years, meaning that artists who want to continue working with the gallery have to grow with it too.
“As an artist, it can be intimidating. Or you can use it as inspiration, and that’s what I’ve tried to do,” Myers said.
The gallery presents artists with worldwide exposure and other opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise. For Myers, events hosted by the gallery gave him some of his first opportunities to talk in public about his work, something that he says artists don’t always get the chance to do. Artists spend most of their time alone in the studio, and Myers said that for much of that time, he doesn’t concern himself with what his work means.
“You're just kind of immersed in actually doing the work,” Myers said. “To have an interaction with the people that are looking at your work gives a greater perception of the meaning that they find in the work. And a lot of times that translates into that becomes the meaning that you find in the work.”
This bridge between artists and their audience is what the work at Principle Gallery is all about. It’s there for the person who wanders off the bustle of King Street and simply finds a quiet moment in the knotted wood floors and variety of paintings. It’s there for the artist looking to rekindle awe at what the human mind and hand can accomplish.
