By Marc Reed

It’s easy for your art career to get derailed. The important thing is to get it back on track. In my case that took about 15 years.

I discovered Lambertville, New Jersey by boat.  I literally paddled to its shores at the end of a long canoe trip and fell in love with it overnight.  I remember walking along Bridge Street, looking through the gallery shop windows, and being amazed by what I saw.  Lambertville is linked culturally and physically to New Hope, PA, which is known for its New Hope School of Impressionism, which dates back to the 1800s and has produced several notable American Artists.

When I arrived in the mid-1990s, Lambertville was climbing out of a decades-long depression. Its economy, once linked to a historic rail and canal system that ran along the Delaware River, had been rendered obsolete by the advent of the New Jersey Parkway and Turnpike and Lambertville fell on hard times. But by the mid-90s it was being reborn as an arts and culture destination and its art scene and historic, post-industrial aesthetic drew me to live here. I joined the fledgling Artists Gallery cooperative. Its busy pace and demand for new work powered the most creative and productive years of my life.

My art was fixated on the decaying industrial relics that dotted the landscape in and around my native state of New Jersey. They spoke to me. To me, they weren’t relics they were contemporary symbols of America’s tectonic shift from a manufacturing to a service economy. I grew up in this shift. I painted them because they had a story to tell, and they always generated fascinating conversations wherever I showed them.

But as life happened it brought with it the expensive and time-consuming stuff of adulthood until art lost priority in my life. Eventually, I left the Artists’ Gallery. I tried to stay engaged in the creative process by dabbling in photography and short art films, but if I’m honest my creative output went from a firehose to barely a trickle. A pattern easily recognized among artists with kids.

In time the high pressure of family and bills began to ease, and as room for new things began to open I wanted to return to my art. It was January 2024. I had let 15 years slip away without really painting a thing. My New Year’s resolution was to assemble and exhibit new works, but what was I going to paint? In the last 15 years, many of the old crumbling factories I knew and loved had been demolished.

Writers say “Write what you know” and I believe the same is true of artists. I still live in Lambertville.  When people I knew from my days in the art world asked where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing I often replied “Hanging around Lambertville,” so I decided to make that the subject of my New Year’s Resolution art show. I needed to paint and a place to show but after 15 years I was, once again, an unknown in my local art scene. Bucks on Bridge Coffee Shop is a coffee shop, not a gallery, but it has quite a lot of gallery space with an ever-changing roster of emerging artists so I pestered the owner Babs until she found a spot for me — in December. My January New Year’s Resolution was fulfilled by the end of the year!  A humble rebirth but a rebirth nonetheless.

I am not a failed artist because I haven’t given up. Neither should you.

So without further ado, I present to you “Hanging Around Lambertville.”

Marc Reed is a painter, photographer, film maker, animator, web designer and developer, illustrator, casual trespasser, home improvement afficionado, wine maker, hiker, paddler and father – not necessarily in that order. See more of Marc Reed’s films, paintings, photography, and musings here.