STORY

Why does someone become artistically obsessed, driven to distraction? I was an unlikely candidate in my young years. I was seen wearing horseback riding boots, carrying a tennis racket, golf clubs or baseball mitt. I was surrounded by art but paid it no conscious mind. My mother was an accomplished artist who was always painting. She held a doctorate and taught first at Queens College and later at the University of Southern Florida. She also worked as a sculptor and printmaker. It was my maternal grandmother, Rose, who became my role model and inspiration as my passion for art emerged. Rose was a genius. She graduated from Cooper Union College, NYC, in 1914. Her diploma hangs in my apartment. She studied with George Brant Bridgeman (1865-1943), a Canadian-American painter, writer and teacher in the fields of anatomy and figure drawing. He taught anatomy at the Art Students League for 45 years in addition to Cooper Union. My apartment showcases Rose’s  charcoal nudes, scandalous for  the time they were rendered. Rose went on to get a graduate degree in engineering during WWII. Rose played woodwind and string instruments, spoke many languages and was a strong individualist with personal feminist determination. She went to work for a Japanese architect during the war in protest for the internment of the Japanese Americans. I can still picture her sitting in our living room strumming on a sterling silver banjo. Rose electrically wired her apartment in Queens, NY. and was obsessed with icecream sundays at 4 PM that I shared.

My mother applied to college in my behalf. She completed a portfolio and was accepted too many formidable colleges. I love to tell this story to my grandchildren when they  feverishly finish their own applications. It wasn’t until I found myself at Syracuse University on scholarship that I realized I had an aptitude and obsession for artistic expression. I panicked when I was greeted by a man wearing a long dress, earrings, with hair falling down his back. However, once in class my world changed forever. I married very young, had three children and in my late twenties enrolled in a masters program at Pratt Institute, a newly conceived program in the field of Art Therapy. It combined my love of portraiture and the psychological nuances underlying the experience. The subject, myself and the relationship between us, I found fascinating. I practiced Art Therapy for twenty years after graduation. While at Pratt I earned degrees in education as well and worked in Special Education plus hospital settings. I worked initially as a clinician and later as a volunteer because I watched miracles unfold.

Through ART, many young people as well as adults gain skills to express previously blocked, repressed feelings. The ART is in the relationship you create and the modality is dictated by the client with a infinite range of possibility from cooking, baseball, writing and if you are lucky…..painting.

Raising teenagers changed my focus and I went to work at the Metropolitan Museum as a  better balance with family life in the 1970s. I gave lectures throughout the museum in exchange for ongoing lectures, training and an invaluable education. I also enrolled as a sculpture student at Columbia University stone carving with pneumatic tools under the direction of Minoro  Nizuma. I studied with him for 12 years. After taking anatomy at Columbia University, I began studying with Chaim Gross initially at the New School and for ten years at the Educational Alliance. I was commissioned to do a bronze portrait of Chaim for his retirement after fifty years of teaching. Chaim and wife, Rene Gross became part of my family and we had wonderful  years together before Chaim’s death in 1991. I set-up a boutique architectural design firm, Rosebud Design and used my ability with sculpture and space to renovate apartments in New York City, designing residential and commercial interiors too.

I separated from my husband in 1992 and set-up my life as a serious artist in Nantucket, MA. It began a twenty-five year period of an artistic community life that ended in 2016 with the sale of my house and studio. As a member of the Artist Association of Nantucket I had featured shows on a variety of subjects, Horses, Cuba, South Africa in many mediums painting, sculpture and photography. I had sculpture shows at James Hunt Barker Gallery. I had solo shows at the Robert Foster Fine Arts Gallery on India Street both painting and sculpture. I still have painting and jewelry exhibited at the Nantucket Looms on Main Street. I had numerous workshops in New York with Everett Kinstler, Wolf Kahn, Bert Silverman, and on Nantucket David Lazarus, Illya Kagan, Sherre Liljegrin.

In 2016, after a year of moving to New York City full time, I enrolled at the Art Students League and found myself welding, an entirely new adventure. Welding has introduced me to a totally new range of opportunity. I have been concentrating on horses and dogs at present eventually hoping to produce outdoor sculpture on a larger scale. I am so fortunate to be studying with a master welder, Cliff Dufton. I was welcomed into the NYSWA this year 2019 and look forward to an inspiring relationship.