July 15, 2005

THE ARTISTS AMONG US

Work is play for local artist Constance Jordan focusing on serenity, beauty

By Marilyn Fahey
Staff Writer

Constance Jordan gently dabs at the drawing on her easel with a stick of pastel. “Let’s add some color here, and here, and some there …”

For Constance Jordan, working with pastels is more like playing. Photo by Marilyn Fahey

The scene is a sandy path leading through a field of wildflowers—a carpet of pale lilacs, vibrant yellows and mellow sage. Jordan makes it look so easy, creating something so beautiful, and says, “Really, it’s just like being a kid again, and playing with crayons.” When I tell her I could never stay within the lines when I played with crayons, she’s quick to say, “That’s a very good sign.”

It’s that kind of encouraging attitude that made Jordan, now retired, a popular teacher with Evergreen residents. For years, Jordan taught art classes in her home, which sits at the top of a steep drive in the hills east of Mt. Pleasant High School. Although her teaching days are over—for now, anyway—Jordan remains a vibrant presence in the local art scene, and the lessons she’s taught still resound with her former students.

Suganda Iyer, who took classes from Jordan for three years, regrets that her teacher has retired. “If Connie ever comes out of retirement,” she says, “I’ll go back to her class in a heartbeat.”

Not only did Jordan teach Iyer the mechanics of painting, she taught her to see colors in objects she’d never noticed before. “I tried to paint a leaf green once,” Iyer says, “and Connie kept telling me, ‘Honey, it doesn’t look right. Mix in this purple and orange.’ I kept telling her, ‘It’s a leaf—it should just be green.’ But there was purple and orange in that leaf that I’d never noticed before.”

Iyer was a student in Jordan’s last class, targeted toward artistic-bent, stay-at-home moms who were looking for a creative outlet. Jordan herself had been in the same situation years before.

“When I was raising my kids, I worked as a seamstress and a designer—that was my creative outlet,” remembers Jordan. A sewing machine still resides in the room next to her studio—a symbol of a former life amid the watercolors and pastels from the life she leads now.

“Oregon Sand Dunes” was one of two paintings by Jordan that was accepted in the Los Gatos juried open show this year. Photo courtesy of Constance Jordan

But Jordan felt she needed something more and, since she had always enjoyed art, in the early 1990s she decided to explore it. She enrolled in art classes, joined art clubs, and began to visit other artists’ studios. When she walked into Oneida Hammond’s studio, she says, “I knew that this was the lady I wanted to take classes from.”

A painting by Hammond, another local artist who has since moved to New York, is displayed in Jordan’s studio near her watercolor worktable. In it, the calm, luminous waters of a wharf scene reflect the moody tones of a twilight sky. You can see Hammond’s influence in Jordan’s work—there’s something about the subtleness of color that makes their works similar—yet Jordan’s work remains distinctly her own.

Jordan mostly paints landscapes and flowers. “Anything that’s serene and beautiful, I’m all for it,” she says. She used to paint outdoors and would even make an annual trek to Yosemite to work, but now she finds material mainly in photos. The new deck being built along the southern part of her house will be ideal, she says, because she’ll finally be able to take the exact photos she wants—from the exact elevation she wants—of the tree-studded hills in the distance.

Jordan also works from photos taken by others. When a friend sent her a picture from a horseback riding trip, Jordan decided to try creating a painting from it, even though she is just beginning to incorporate people into her work. In the painting, three men on horseback approach a river in the distance.

You get the feeling you’re following in their lead: The sun is hot, the air is dry, and the only sounds in the stillness are the soft clop, clop of the horses’ hoofs and the whisperings of the river. You’re out of your element and yet somehow finding your place in it. You get all this from a painting of three men on horseback.

Jordan’s work is like that: deceptively simple, yet deeply evocative the more you soak it in. It’s not surprising she sold a painting at her very first show, which was held at the Mount Hamilton Grange soon after she began painting.

Jordan works with watercolors, pastels and mixed media in her studio, dubbed “A Perfect Place for Art.” Photo by Marilyn Fahey.

All these years later, she says, “I can remember it so well. The woman who bought my painting said, ‘You paint so serenely.’ Wow!” Now, after many other paintings sold and many awards won, Jordan still believes that “it isn’t about the money. It’s that someone saw my work and appreciated it.”

The latest show Jordan entered was the juried open show at the Art Museum of Los Gatos —one of the most popular shows in California, sponsored by the museum and the Los Gatos Art Association. Jordan submitted three works; two were accepted, only five other artists had two works accepted. When her watercolor “Orange Canna” won Honorable Mention, Jordan says she “almost fainted over dead.”

Jordan may participate in another show later this year—if she’s not in upstate New York, visiting Hammond. Until then, she and a group of artist friends keep the creative juices flowing by meeting every Wednesday at her studio—an enclosed porch on the east side of her house that’s been converted into a well-lit, quiet space with white walls and indigo carpet.

The worktables under the windows that line the eastern wall look out onto a thicket of branches, dense with dark green leaves, while at the room’s southern end the view is expansive, taking in a vista of rolling golden hills. The studio thus has a feeling of being a safe, sheltered place to create, where the possibilities are endless.

It’s “A Perfect Place for Art”—which, in fact, is what Jordan calls it.

Jordan and her Wednesday group start their work at around 10 a.m., break for lunch and maybe a little wine at noon, then go back to work for a few more hours. They also take a class once a month from noted artist Claire Schroeven Verbiest.

When asked if she paints every day, Jordan sheepishly admits that “if it weren’t for my Wednesday group, I’d be in big trouble.”

All of us inspired by her work would be in trouble, too.