Master Pieces
Folk Art Studio & Gallery
11-A Loudoun Street SW
Leesburg, Virginia
For years there was a green and cream sign hanging from a wrought-iron bracket at 11-A Loudoun Street SW in Leesburg, Virginia, across from the historic log cabin. It said Master Pieces, Folk Art Studio & Gallery. If you painted, you probably knew it. If you did not, you may have walked past it a hundred times without ever going in.
This page is for the people who went in.
What it was
Master Pieces was a studio and gallery devoted to fine art as well as traditional American folk art, tole and decorative painting. Its classes and seminars reflected that range.
We sold paints, brushes, surfaces, packets and patterns. We hung finished work on every available wall. And we taught.
The classes and the seminars
The teaching is what Master Pieces became known for.
There were weekly classes for local painters, and there were seminars that brought students in from across the country. Some drove for a day to get there. Some flew. They came for a few days at a time, took over the tables, and painted from morning until the light went.
Most of the seminars were taught by instructors I brought in, each with their own specialty. Running the studio kept me busy enough that teaching became something I did now and then rather than every week — though I never entirely gave it up.
Over the years, thousands of students passed through those rooms. Master Pieces was advertised several times a year in Decorative Painter, the magazine of the National Society of Tole and Decorative Painters, and the studio built a reputation well beyond Loudoun County.
What I hoped for, more than anything, was that people would feel welcome. Serious instruction matters. So does a room that people are glad to walk into.
The students from Japan
One seminar holds a particular place in my memory. A group of students flew from Japan to attend a seminar taught by Betty Caithness at Master Pieces. To my knowledge, they were the first group of Japanese decorative-painting students to attend a seminar in the United States.
The lounge
There was an electric fireplace, and in December there was garland on the mantel. Students sat there between sessions with coffee, comparing what they had painted and arguing cheerfully about technique.
Some of the friendships that started in those chairs outlasted the studio itself.
Christmas on Loudoun Street
Leesburg did Christmas properly, and so did we. Red bows on the sign, lights in the greenery, and the shop full of people looking for something to give.
The people
A studio is a building. What made Master Pieces worth remembering were the people in it — the instructors who taught there, the students who kept coming back, and the friends I made along the way.
Betty Caithness is one of them. She turned down my very first phone call, and went on to become one of the closest friends of my life.
Afterward
Master Pieces eventually closed. The sign came down and the tables were cleared.
But a great many people learned to paint in those rooms, and some of them are painting still.
Recently I discovered that the wrought-iron bracket that held our sign is still being used. Another shop's name hangs from it now.
I have written about the studio and the years around it in my memoir, The Lives I've Lived. Several chapters are set on Loudoun Street.
Contact David