After she graduated from Midway High School, Carrie Potter-Devening put her own visual art on the back burner, but for a good reason.
From 2003 until 2011, she worked on a project that turned into “For Music’s Sake: Asbury Park’s Upstage Club and Green Mermaid Cafe the Untold Stories,” a 268-page book that chronicles two clubs on the New Jersey shore operated by her grandfather, Tom Potter.
“It’s a book about Asbury. It’s a book about the times. It’s a book about the kids and what happened, the bands, the musicians, my grandparents, my family,” Potter-Devening said.
She called upon her high school yearbook experience to put together the family stories and more than 1,000 photos that ended up in the book. She took numerous trips to the East Coast to conduct research and made frequent visits to San Antonio to meet with former Midway teachers Paul and Beverly Wilkins, who offered assistance in creating the book.
“It was a big job, and as I was grasping for how to do this, they were my first line of guidance,” Potter-Devening said.
And even though the book has been out for nearly 15 years now, Potter-Devening still finds herself working on other aspects of it.
“I still do things with the book,” she said. “Last year, I licensed photos from the book to multiple networks. But I’m not having to make the book anymore. I have some time to breathe.”
Even though creating art was on hold during her work on the book, Potter-Devening did manage to make a few pieces, though she had not made art her career just yet.
“It was sort of like well, if I have time, I’ll paint a mural if someone needs it. Or if I have time, I’ll put something that’s in my mind onto canvas because I just thought would be a really cool piece in my own home,” she said. “Or if I have time, I’ll take on a commission that someone wants for their home or their office or something. Just trying to pay the bills, raising three children.”
Potter-Devening’s thought of commissioning a piece of her art became a reality when she was approached by Startup Waco. Startup is a nonprofit whose mission is to create community amongst local entrepreneurs. Inside their main conference room is Potter-Devening’s rendition of artist Georges Seurat’s iconic piece “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” where, instead of the Seine River in the background, it’s the waters of the Brazos and the Waco Suspension Bridge.
Potter-Devening’s artistic talents are varied; she creates across any number of mediums.
“I can’t find joy in just one thing all the time,” she said. “I do photography professionally. I’ve done china porcelain painting classes and a lot of different faux stained glass. I’ve never done real stained glass, but it’s not beyond what I might do in the future.”
“A lot of my friends go, ‘Carrie, why don’t you just focus on just newborn photography or just focus on fine art landscapes or something?’ I know a lot of artists will do that. They’ll just be one thing. I just get very bored, and I can’t do that. So, I do what comes up.”
Potter-Devening has worked in interior design and currently works at Rita Gordon’s A Hat Above the Rest, where she burns custom designs on a variety of headwear.
“Sunday on the Banks of the Brazos River”
While working on her book “For Music’s Sake: Asbury Park’s Upstage Club and Green Mermaid Cafe the Untold Stories,” Carrie Potter-Devening came across a postcard of Waco, “and it really struck me as something that very much looked like the French painting by Georges Seurat, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” The painting, completed in 1886 by Seurat, a French post-impressionist artist, depicts several folks enjoying an afternoon on the banks of the Seine River in Paris. That painting is now at the Art Institute of Chicago, which acquired it in 1926. One source says that the institute paid $24,000 — $453,400 in today’s dollars — for the piece, though the Institute’s website said the painting was donated by Frederic Clay and Helen Birch Bartlett, who bought it for $20,000 in 1924.
Potter-Devening’s Central Texas interpretation of Seurat’s work, “Sunday on the Banks of the Brazos River,” a 7-foot-by-11-foot oil on linen, is available on her website — CPDFineArt.com — for $380,000. There are several other original pieces on her site that start at $265.
