By David Rogers. BLOWING ROCK, N.C. — If Gina Marrale had a theme song, it might be titled, “Welcome to My Happy Place.”
“I paint color. I paint ‘happy,'” Marrale said on opening day of her exhibit at Edgewood Cottage as one of the featured Artists in Residence, July 6-12. “I am mostly an acrylic painter. I was a watercolor specialist.”
Born and raised in Amarillo, Texas, Marrale claims that artistic talent is in her DNA—and all signs point to that truth.
“I got it from my mother and have passed art talent to my daughter, and now to her son,” the versatile artist revealed to Blowing Rock News. “I guess you would call it our family legacy.”
Creating art takes your focus away from everything else.
Marrale confessed to starting with watercolors and pursued that medium “for years and years.” Then, there was that new discovery…
“Like a lot of artists, I took a lot of workshops. So I have spent a lot of money to do a lot of painting in workshops. It is rewarding, because you keep learning. While I primarily paint with acrylics now, I haven’t settled on them entirely. I also paint with fluid acrylics,” which she describes as “juicier” and “more liquid.” And then, she also works with gouache, a newer medium that uses an opaque water-based paint made of pigment, water, and a binding agent like gum arabic.
In her Edgewood Cottage exhibit, each painting is identified as either acrylic, fluid acrylic or gouache.
Getting To Now
Growing up in Amarillo, Marrale went to high school and junior college there, then moved on to the University of Houston to get a Bachelor of Science degree. In Amarillo, she met and married her husband, who also attended dental school at Houston.
After her husband’s stint in the U.S. Army, the couple returned to Texas, first to Richardson, then Plano and, ultimately, Dallas. Marrale spent roughly 50 years selling real estate in the Dallas, Texas and surrounding area.
“I did really well,” Marrale said of her real estate career. “I sold a lot of houses, won a lot of prizes but then I got out of it as I got older. The way Dallas has exploded, I could have made a LOT of money the last six years had I stayed in that business!” (emphasis added)
“I still have family in Dallas,” she added, “but I’d rather not live in those kind of cities anymore, even Naples, Florida, where I live now has gotten crowded with cars and people. It just isn’t necessarily a pleasant way to live life.”
I started out drawing pictures, usually in ink, that I would put in a calendar and mail to all my customers.
Having been coming to Blowing Rock and the High Country for the last 16 years, Marrale said she has seen a tremendous increase in the number of cars going up and down the mountain.
Perhaps naturally averse to the hectic and chaotic nature of city life, Marrale finds tranquility in painting.
“Creating art takes your focus away from everything else that may not be good or happy. You get lost in the world of your own colors and your own creations,” she said. “Time flies. It is a wonderful way to spend time because you are leaving something behind, whether it ends up in a gallery, someone’s home or a thrift store. You are leaving something you created behind. You have put a part of your life onto something that lasts.”
A half-century in the real estate business may not have sparked her interest in art, but there’s no question it reinforced her passion.
“I started out drawing pictures, usually in ink, that I would put in a calendar and mail to all my customers. It was mostly sketches. My mother was always sketching and talented in that way. I was a good real estate agent and won lots of awards. I have a bunch of plaques. My calendar sketches were just a personalized, free gift for my real estate clients,” she said.
While Marrale sketched for her customer calendars, “I also painted some on the side.”
Referring to the many workshops she paid for and attended, Marrale credited her workshop teachers as her most influential mentors.
“There are a lot of good, wonderful teachers in the art world,” she said, “and they know how to teach. Of course, there are others who were just doing it for the money but you could quickly tell that about them. I spent a fortune in educating myself about painting. I still do it, but not as often.
“When we put a brush to canvas,” Marrale added, “we are really putting our personality, part of ourselves out there. For me, it is color. It brings happiness and makes people smile. If that smile happens when they look at my paintings, then I have accomplished something for somebody.”
