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diggThe Best Year of Her Life
How Martha Wherry rewrote her life by transforming job outsourcing into books of art.
Sara Gilbert
Ze Bernardinello
“I have had the best year of my life,” Wherry says. “I have the gift of time. I should say ‘thank you.’”
At the age of 51, Wherry has finally been able to give her artistic endeavors the time they deserve. She’s been painting landscapes. She’s made jewelry and knitted scarves. She’s been creating assemblages, or mixed media “books” that illustrate everyday emotions, ideas and concepts, including The Book of Outsourcing, a visual reaction to her lost job. “People get a laugh out of that one,” she admits.
Although she was always artistically inclined and even studied fine arts at the University of Kansas, Wherry found herself drifting away from that passion once she started working as an illustrator. She went back to school and earned a master of fine arts in painting from Wichita State; she later received an IT degree. All the while, she worked full time, moving from illustrating to engineering to computer science, all with the same company. And although any artwork Wherry did was squeezed in late at night, the ideas came at her all day long.
“All of those years while I worked at a technical job, when I would have rather been somewhere else, my head was full of thoughts for artwork,” she says. “I was always writing down titles and notes of things I wanted to do. Sometimes it was things people would say. Overheard conversations make great material.”
Wherry worried that those great ideas might dry up once she was no longer in a corporate setting. So far, that hasn’t been a problem. “The ideas keep coming,” she says. “I thought I might lose my edge when I was no longer at a Big Brother employer, but no, I still have plenty of material. I just look at what people do, look at the politicians, and I find plenty of ideas.”
Many of those ideas are being stored up for future installment in her series of “books.” So far, she’s done about a dozen, ranging from The Book of Dogs to The Book of Bad Advice. Each one is a collection of related objects arranged in what Wherry describes as a “real wacky way.” The Book of Love, for example, features a torn heart, a pair of handcuffs and a bright red yo-yo, with a bouquet of roses in the background.
“The books each operate on a number of levels,” Wherry explains. “There are a lot of messages in each one, a lot of common denominators in life, and that’s what I’m getting at with these.”
Her aim is entirely different with the large landscapes she paints with lots of thin washes of acrylic and latex. With each of these, she deliberately walks the line between realism and abstraction. “There’s a fine line between landscape and abstract,” she says. “I really like that line. That’s where I want to be, with one foot happily on each side.”
Her feet straddle as many as ten paintings at a time. Each time she thinks she’s finished a piece, she walks away from it for awhile. “I’m a great believer in leaving it alone,” she says. “I go work on another piece so that I can come back and see what it needs later.”
Sometimes it’s another painting that she works on in the meantime, a piece of jewelry or a handmade scarf, or one of the “jobs” she holds to help pay the bills. She works part-time at Jacob Liquor Exchange, helping with their Web site and IT needs; she also teaches children’s art classes. “Teaching children is great—they give you a lot of great ideas,” she says.
In fact, she likes her life a lot better now that she doesn’t have that full-time job anymore. She recently spent a month as the featured artist at Gallery XII, the downtown artist cooperative. Her work has been finding an audience, including The Book of Love, which someone bought last year as a Valentine’s Day present for their spouse.
And she’s been enjoying the time she can spend with her art. “I have a really good life,” she says.
