Graphic designer on quest to pay last year's tax bill with art

As long as you can buy a 50-pound sack of potatoes for $9 at Eastern Market, Julie Fournier won't truly be a starving artist. But she is by any definition broke, with continuing brokeness in her economic forecast.

She lives in Hazel Park in a 750-square-foot house that's worth about $30,000 less than when she bought it three years ago, during a period when she was an $8-an-hour secretary and hence less broke. Her summer taxes were due at the end of June and she doesn't have the money, but that's not why she sent an e-mail last week to everyone she knows.

She was e-mailing about last summer's taxes, and her continuing campaign to finish paying them. She's making progress, one cut-rate painting at a time.

Employment-wise, Fournier is caught between the dog and the fire hydrant. At 43, she has a 4-year-old degree in graphic design from Wayne State. The problem there is that compared to the hundreds of other graphic designers looking for work, she's inexperienced.

She does have experience waiting tables, and she's perfectly willing to do it some more. But when a restaurant says it's looking for someone "energetic" or "enthusiastic," Fournier says, what it really means is "younger than 43." Besides, managers tell her, you're a graphic artist. You'd be bored here.

I should point out that Fournier is not complaining. She's not asking anyone for a handout or a benefit rock concert or even free chives for the potatoes.

Of course, if you're in need of artwork, calligraphy or automotive pin-striping, she won't mind a bit if you drop by http://www.juliefournier.com">www.juliefournier.com. But all in all, she says, aside from the grinding poverty, life's pretty good.

Injured in action

I first spoke to Fournier in April 2007. She had answered an ad for a volunteer to pay her own way to suburban Atlanta and paint the names of the first 3,252 U.S. casualties in Iraq onto someone's 2002 Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Some people saw the Jeep as a tribute, others as a protest. Fournier was fine with that; art, she says, should be open to interpretation. The project took four days, 8 a.m. to midnight, and she cried off and on throughout.

Then she came home and cried some more, because her right shoulder felt like someone had bashed it repeatedly with a frozen leg of lamb. She'd trashed her rotator cuff painting the Jeep, and when you have to teach yourself to brush your teeth with your other hand, artwork is out of the question.

After 18 months of grinding inactivity, a fellow artist referred her to a deep-tissue masseuse. Slowly, the arm came back to life. Fournier thanked the masseuse with a painting of a peacock she'd seen strutting around a house near Wayne State, and went back to work.

Meantime, her house was lurching into forfeiture.

An art fire sale

That's not as dire as it sounds, at least not when you're used to living on the edge. She's keeping up with her $344.80 mortgage payments, so foreclosure is not an immediate threat. But Fournier had only been able to pay half of last year's $2,500 tax bill, and Hazel Park was growing impatient for the rest.

At Fournier's level, art is sort of famine or worse famine. You get into an art show, and optimism abounds. Then it rains all weekend. She's good at frugality -- for the cost of a $50 used part, she just personally replaced the alternator on her 1986 Mustang -- but you can't grow tax money in your little backyard garden.

OK, she said. Time for a fire sale, without the fire. Prints, $20. Original paintings, marked down from $600 to $100 or whatever someone might care to offer.

"I've been chided for devaluing my art," she says, "and it's true. I should be chided." On the other hand, while it's embarrassing to be publicly desperate, she took in about $900 in a month, leaving her only $400 short of making the bill go away.

That's close enough to leave her optimistic, and there's good news, sort of, about her 2009 taxes. Since her house is worth so much less, her newest property tax bill is only $1,700. She can't pay it, but give her a year. She'll figure something out.

nrubin@detnews.com">nrubin@detnews.com (313) 222-1874