Artist Dannielle Mick wears many hats, which should come as no surprise.
She started her career in the fashion industry, after all.
During the 1980s her line of women’s sportswear, Dannielle’s Fashion Design, appeared in high-end boutiques along the East Coast.
Then she realized it was time to change hats.
“It’s a very, very tough, competitive business to be in,” Dannielle said of the fashion world. “It ran its course, it was time to move on. It was a little negative, a little cut-throat.”
So she took a class at the Morris County Art Association in Morristown. Twenty-five years later, her pastels and acrylic paintings are in demand at shows all over the place–including Gallery Egan, just a couple of blocks from where art career began.
Dannielle’s exhibition at Gallery Egan runs through April 30, with a 7 pm reception on April 8.
And in a coming-full-circle sort of twist, she will give a free lesson in pastel techniques on April 9 from 1 pm to 3 pm at the gallery, on Community Place.
On May 13, her works be featured at 40 Park, the luxury condo complex fronting the historic Morristown Green. That month she also has a solo show at Johnson & Johnson headquarters in New Brunswick.
Amongst all this she will be teaching workshops, doing consulting gigs, taking classes, promoting her shows with extensive e-mail blasts, and roaming the Jersey Shore in her perpetual hunt for new galleries to pitch.
She is especially excited about a Girl Scouts painting expedition in the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. The girls’ creations will be sold at the Arts Council of the Morris Area’s annual Giralda Farms concert on June 26, with proceeds benefiting the refuge.
“I don’t think any artists wear just one hat,” said Dannielle, 56, a native of the Berkshires community of Blandford, Mass. “You have to be multi-tasking all the time. And marketing, marketing, marketing.”
Her paintings at Gallery Egan range in price from $100 to $1,400. If there is a theme, it is meteorological.
“It’s not your typical sunny day. Usually, there is some kind of weather condition going on.”
A lot of that weather is observed from her studio on the shores of Lake Parsippany, alongside her faithful assistant, Gigi, a Shih Tzu-poodle mix.
“I bought this house because of the water views. It’s my inspiration for a lot of what I do. I paint at the lake, on the lake, around the lake,” said Dannielle, who envisions a book of her paintings and photos of Lake Parsippany.
In recent years she has been influenced by the works of Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning and other abstract expressionists.
It’s one hat that fits her well; she finds abstraction liberating.
“There are so many rules in everything you do. There are no rules in art. You just go after it. We all need to get loose.”
