Copyright © 2020 by Wendy Waszut-Barrett
The following article was written by Henry T. Parker and published in “American Magazine” (August 1923, page 68). Keep in mind that this was the same year that Sosman & Landis closed their doors. Times were certainly changing.
“A Successful Woman Scenic Artist.
When Mabel Buell was a child of two, and barely able to crawl about a California beach, she grasped a stick and began to draw figures bigger than herself in the sand. When she was ten she painted two heroic tapestries for a hotel in southern Florida. When she was a year older she “splashed” huge signs over a theatre curtain in Savannah, Georgia, and when she was fifteen she climbed an eighty-foot ladder to a ‘bridge’ above a theatre stage and began to paint her way down, rung by rung, to success, paradoxical as that may sound. To-day, at twenty three, she is called upon for some of the biggest productions along Broadway. She is the only woman scenic artist in America.
“Her success, she says, is due to the fact that she has always held to one ideal and has reused to be swayed from it by criticism, handicaps, or disappointment. Even from those earliest days on the California beach she knew that she could never deal in the miniature in art. She wanted only the heroic, the statuesque, the bigger-than-life-itself. But once did she try to evade the issue. Then, at the insistence of her father, she studied landscape and portraiture for two years in London.
“Scene painting is an exacting art. It calls for a physical strength and endurance that is not demanded in any of the allied arts. Many times, especially when one is working in stock, and one or more complete sets must be turned out each week, the scenic artist is called upon to work for thirty and forty hours at a stretch. And when one considers that every minute of each of those hours is filled with wielding a brush that weighs from five to eight pounds, turning the big windlass that raises or lowers your canvas, mixing one’s own paints, and forever considering the details of colors and lights that are involved, it is easy to realize that scene painting is not child’s play.
“I talked with Mabel Buell of the arduous side of her work, as she paused after ‘sweeping’ a sky line across a forty-foot canvas that was destined to be a back drop for a new production by the Coburns. Miss Buell looks all of five years younger than her confessed twenty-three. She is small, slim, and dainty, and her trim knickers and tailored smock were so bedaubed with pigments that she looked as though she should have been in a nursery, coloring cut-out dolls, rather than tackling the huge canvas that hung before here.
‘Hard work? Of course, it is hard work,’ she said; ‘but then so is everything else that is worthwhile. I am never so happy as when I am ‘way up here on my bridge with my paints, brushes and canvas. It is only then that I am really living my life as I first conceived it, and I know that I would be miserable if I couldn’t do it. I despise the detail of little work, and have ever since I was a child in pinafores. Making a set in miniature drives me to distraction and sometimes – even when I am in a hurry to finish a model to show to some manager or director – I have to quit and come up here in this atmosphere of bigness to think things out and get the right perspective.
‘But I do know that it is the so-called drudgery of the thing that turns most women against scene painting as a means of expression and livelihood. I have had hundreds of girls come to me and ask about my work and by what means they, too, might take it up and succeed at it. And they have all seemed highly interested until I have told them that the real scenic artist must of necessity do all or most of his own painting, then they have turned away.
‘It was simply too much for them, and very wisely, I presume, they have sought other fields more suited to their tastes. Not necessarily that they are afraid of so much of it and also of the handicaps that beset every woman who takes up scene painting as a profession, for there is, as always will be, a great prejudice against women in this field.’
‘It was probably the knowledge of this fact that, more than anything else, led my father to try and discourage me against it. Even to-day many theatrical managers are inclined to refuse to allow women on the bridge, and it is only there that one can work satisfactorily. The scenic artist naturally sees only part of his work at the time. The vast canvas is stretched out before him, and, unless he knows the exact scale on which he is working, the perspective is likely to go all wrong.
‘I have found many men, managers, electricians, stage carpenters, and others, who have been only to glad and willing to help me in every way. That is – as soon as they learned that I knew my business and was competent to do the work for which I have been employed. But they must be convinced, and therein lies the hardest part for the girl who is trying to break into the game. Of course I learned much from my father, though even he was more often than not loath to have me around. It was my brother who used to act as his ‘paint boy,’ cleaning his brushes and mixing his paints. But I made the most of my opportunities. I hung around and picked up what information I could, and always kept in mind that some day I was going to climb to the bridge and do scene painting all by myself.’”
To be continued…
