WORDS BY ANDREW JOE POTTER
ARTWORK BY MEGAN CHARTIER
Megan Chartier’s resumé bears all the usual hallmarks of a career musician: a number of awards for young artists, a long list of placements with quality touring ensembles, and collaborations with heavyweights from both the classical and contemporary worlds. It’s all there for the Detroiter, who is currently based in California as the Principal Cellist of the Opera San Luis Obispo and core cellist of the Astralis Chamber Ensemble. No, what makes Chartier unique among her contemporaries is how she’s chosen to fill the spaces between the stops on her musical journey. In classical composition, the intermezzo is a minor piece of music that bridges the major sequences. That’s the spirit of Chartier’s alias as “Inkermezzo.” In between rehearsals and performances, she swaps out her bow for ballpoints, entering the world of portraiture and still-life drawings.
It’s a side gig that goes well beyond idle doodling for the self-trained visual artist. Chartier says she’s intentional about the goals of her Inkermezzo project, placing emphasis on educating and the political. Among the few pieces unrelated to the music world are portraits of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Black Americans whose killings at the hands of police in the spring of 2020 ignited fierce protests for racial equality and justice in America and abroad.
Other pieces are less overtly activist. One drawing titled A Cellist’s Self-Portrait features a left hand, disembodied from the wrist up, with the forefingers instinctively curled from years of cradling a bow. Rendered timeless by the grey graphite, the hand gives the impression of years of voluntary abuse. As with the leathery mitts of a prizefighter, the work asks us to consider the physical toll of expertise.
The latest Inkermezzo project is the 2023 Classical Card Collection, a weekly series that will ultimately feature the portraits of 52 classical composers, stylized as a deck of playing cards. Ambitious both in terms of breadth and focus, Chartier’s deliberate approach as a multi-hyphenate artist remains on full display with each pencil stroke.


INTERVIEW
RE-SHUFFLE
CAN | While your selection of composers for this series features the usual suspects of the classical canon, you’ve also selected composers that have historically been neglected from canonization (Florence Price, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Clara Schumann, to name a few). What is the underlying motivation for your selection of composers?
MC ─ I see the card series as a little chance to rewrite the canon. From my perspective, the canon needs updating. We’ve got stuck in this old-school programming mentality, which excludes composers because of race, gender, ethnicity, or even just exposure. I mean, somebody had to add Bach to the canon at some point. His popularity faded for a time.
I’m also tired of composers getting grouped into subgroups like “women composers” and “Black composers,” and I’m totally guilty of that too. I think these cards give equal exposure to each─you’re gonna see the Beethoven card just as often as t
he Florence Price card. I like to picture kids in an orchestra room playing with these many years from now and not being able to differentiate between the old white musical canon defined in the early 20th century and the updated 21st century canon.


BACKGROUND MUSIC
CAN | How do you settle on the score excerpts that you use for the background?
MC ─ The musical choices have been a really fun part of the process. I need organisation or I will go crazy. So all of the royal cards are organised by the titans of each era, as defined by me: Aces are Baroque, Kings are Classical, Queens are Romantic, and Jacks are early 20th century. The musical choices for those are usually well-known B-side types of works, or personal favourites.
I want the cards to be super nerdy and overly kitschy, so I like to pick something more interesting than Beethoven’s No. 5, for instance. So I use his Opus 131 String Quartet instead. The numbered cards are chosen by the better-known symphonies, opus numbers, or concerti type of thing. And I do have to get creative sometimes, like Louise Farrenc, her number is nine for her Nonet. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a great chance for a little bit of musical education, neat organisation, and fun debates with colleagues. All of the drawn music is what accompanies the Instagram reels, and it gets uploaded into a big playlist to accompany the card deck. You can find them on Spotify and Apple Music. I do have to admit that as a cellist, a lot of the choices lean harder into cello repertoire.


IMPRINTING #1
CAN | What do you tend to listen to as you’re working on these pieces?
MC ─ I listen to a wide variety of music while drawing, but I usually do start out with the music I’m using in the background, or other works by the composer. I like to imagine that the tempo of the music creates a unique rhythm to my cross-hatching strokes, making the length and the density like a little fingerprint from the music that I’m listening to─but it’s more of a nice afterthought, really. Drawing is usually how I come down from long days of playing and rehearsing. That sometimes means that I need something more relaxing or mindless, so I often listen to indie music as an alternative to classical.


IMPRINTING #2
sM | The painstaking level of detail that often enlivens your illustration is reminiscent of the high resolution of detail in the works of the composers you’re depicting. As a cellist, how would you compare the type of focus and clarity of vision that you engage when you’re performing in front of an audience versus when you’re working on a graphite piece alone in your studio?
MC ─ That’s a super interesting question. When I’m performing, I feel like I’m showing off a polished gem. I might polish it in a particularly dramatic way, depending on the engagement and reactions of the audience. But either way, it’s a prepared gesture that was completed before I ever walked on stage. Because of that, I tend to associate my art brain way more with my practice brain. So I have a loose idea of how something’s gonna turn out, but I end up letting the journey of the process surprise me. There are many times when I’m adding detail to a drawing, and I’m convinced that I’m close to finishing it, but then I realise that means I’m close to finishing just that one layer, and that’s exactly how I treat my practice as well. I’m constantly adding more phrasing, more colour, more dynamics, and when I think I’m finally sounding great, it’s still just the starting point. Now, of course, I can go overboard with the details, both in art and music, but I try to wait until the end to see the bigger picture─that being what the composer was actually saying musically, or in this case, what they actually looked like.
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