Laura Spong: Still painting at 90

Something is wrong with the bottom half of her painting, but Laura Spong doesn’t know what it is.

She’s standing in her studio in the Vista surrounded by paintings, which are wedged like books on shelves lining three of the four walls. The floor beneath her sneakers is spotted with accidental drips of paint. It’s quiet save for the scratching brushstrokes emanating from an adjacent studio.

The painting in question rests innocently enough on an easel in the center of the room, and is an amalgam of blue hues with two intersecting ovals outlined in black. Titled “Winging It All Summer,” it dates to 2010, but Spong has yanked it off a shelf and found it wanting.

“I love this one section,” she says, pointing to the ovals, “but they might have to go to make the whole thing work.” She pauses. “I’m sure I’ll get fed up with it and just start scribbling paint on it again, which will eventually solve the problem.”

Having painted for 60 years, Spong knows her process, and thinking too hard about a problem isn’t part of it.

Spong has been painting regularly since the 1950s. At nearly 90, she is the grande dame of Vista Studios, a slight yet spry woman who still paints five days a week, usually following a daily walk.

“She’s there every day, without fail,” fellow Vista Studios artist Michel McNinch said. “She wants to know why everyone else isn’t working.”

For the past year, Spong has been working on new pieces for her largest solo exhibition to date. “Laura Spong at 90: Six Decades in Painting” will include work from Spong’s early painting years up to 2016. Newer works will be shown at if ART Gallery, while a retrospective will hang at Gallery 80808. Both shows will be up Thursday through Feb. 29, and there will be an opening reception Thursday at both locations.

Spong’s actual birthday is Feb. 20. “Oh, I don’t believe it,” she joked. Then, more seriously, “I feel extremely fortunate that I’m still here and can do what I want to do.”

She first became interested in art while taking a few drawing courses at Vanderbilt University in her home state of Tennessee. But after marrying, moving with her husband to Columbia and having six kids, life tended to get in the way of picking up a paintbrush. It wasn’t until she retired in the late 1980s that she devoted all of her time to working as an artist.

“I did not have a natural gift, but I just loved doing it,” she said.

Her current reputation as one of the best abstract expressionists in the state belies such humility. Her work has been included in shows across the state, from Greenville to Spartanburg to Florence, as well as in Georgia and Tennessee. You can see her paintings on the walls of Midlands Technical College, the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center, and in the background of the show “Drop Dead Divas,” whose producers rented her work for filming.

“Laura never disappoints,” said Wim Roefs, if ART owner and Spong’s art dealer who curated the “At 90” show. Roefs has written numerous essays about Spong’s work over the 10 years he’s represented her. He’s written of her “arsenal of marks, shapes, forms and scribbles” that “interact at once with ease and tension” in her pieces.

Asked what kind of painter she is, he answered simply, “A very good one.”

Other than several classes here and there, Spong remains largely self-taught. Becoming a full-time artist in her 60s didn’t allow time to train under an expert. And that’s OK.

“Had I had more training, I think I might have ended up painting like someone else,” she said. “And the most important thing to me is to feel like I’m painting like myself.”

Many of Spong’s paintings are bright and bold. Vermilions and Kelly greens. She eschews straight lines in favor of squiggles, which she makes in loose strokes wielding a paint pen like an oversized crayon.

She used to trace plates and dishes on her canvases to make perfect circles. Then she would go back and mess them up, “because that has more personality,” she said.

The challenge of abstraction, she added, is using those non-objective shapes (you might see a face in that yellow blob; someone else might see a boat), to make a pleasing composition that takes the observer on a journey.

“I’m trying to give you an experience. When I look at art, I want it to take me somewhere,” Spong said.

When she begins a piece, Spong tries to make her mind as blank as the canvas.

Sometimes she doesn’t even know what color she is going to use. She picks up a brush and starts smearing. She doesn’t like people to watch her paint, so the particulars remain a mystery.

“My best work comes when I don’t think too much. If I sit here and think about a problem and what the solution might be, it will be very predictable,” she said. “I feel like my intuition is better than my thinking process.”

When the ideas aren’t forthcoming, Spong turns to other artists at Vista Studios for input. The first time she asked painter Eileen Blyth for advice, she left the younger artist nearly tongue-tied.

“It was humbling that she would ask me what I thought,” Blyth said.

The exchange opened up a regular sharing of ideas between the two artists, who are close friends.

“For me, to have access to Laura Spong every day is invaluable. She inspires me,” Blyth said. “She paints to paint. She doesn’t paint to finish a painting. The outcome is important, but her drive – to be 90 and getting up and going to work everyday and loving it – is inspirational.”

A week after Spong’s trouble with “Winging It All Summer,” the piece is finished and hanging – still wet – at if ART. Spong couldn’t recall what, exactly, she had done to fix it. She had turned her mind off and let artistic intuition take over.

“I just did it,” she said.

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This story was originally published February 4, 2016 at 9:33 AM with the headline "Laura Spong: Still painting at 90."