Category: My Books

Total 15 Posts

Art and the Writer

Edouard Manet’s “Boating” featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
“Plum Brandy” by Edouard Manet featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think that my earliest memory of art originated as a young child in New York’s Greenwich Village during the Sixties. I loved the scent of the Crayola crayons and paper my first grade teacher put out for us, and later on, I enjoyed working with poster paint on large sheets of paper. My father sometimes took me to the art show in Washington Square Park. Although I didn’t understand some of the pop art I viewed or the quick portraits in charcoal or pencil done by local artists, I felt the vibrancy. At age seven I attended a pottery school in the neighborhood. The moment I walked into the pottery studio, I inhaled the earthy smell of the clay and enjoyed using my hands to shape it into some object.

In high school, I took an art major elective when I was able to. My art teacher, Mrs. Rose, headed the art department and believed in my abilities. She even suggested that I attend an art school after graduation. However, I decided to go to St. John’s University where I majored in English and took classes in creative writing, literature, and communication. After graduation, I worked in advertising, public relations, and much later as an English teacher. I continued to enjoy viewing art and dabbling in creating it from time to time.

I also visit art museums when I travel. These included the Museo Nacional del Prada in Madrid, the Louvre in Paris, and both the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum  in Amsterdam. I’ve enjoyed viewing western art at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma (temporarily closed for construction), the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. However, my two favorite art museums remain New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art or MOMA.

As a hobby when I was a young mother, I created stained glass at the Glass Gallery Stained Glass Studio in Nutley, making stained glass panels, lamp shades, trinket boxes, and kitchen items. I used patterns and enjoyed picking out the various colors and textures of the glass for the creations.

 

I took art classes in drawing, pastels, and watercolor in the evening at the adult ed. program in a local high school. Pat, the instructor and a professional artist, taught me a great deal and provided a lot of information from the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. It’s all in how you look at things. Focus on the negative space, rather than the subject matter. She even invited some students to her home to do watercolor paintings and sketches of her garden. Unfortunately, the adult ed. program got cut along with other school programs because of budget cuts.

In the last few years, I returned to art classes at the Montclair Art Museum and at the Montclair Institute for Lifelong Learning and learned a lot more about how to see things as an artist, techniques for both drawing and painting, and learning to loosen up and enjoy the process. I’ve studied under an excellent instructor, Karen, who encouraged me and other students to keep on keeping on and learning. A couple of my art pieces even ended up in an art gallery and as postcards in a museum shop.

Chickadees in winter was made using watercolor, fine markers, and plastic wrap to create texture.
A collage for Fall which I made using Yupo paper and watercolor paint.

Art compliments my writing. In learning how to see things, taking note of details that I might have overlooked, such as the colors in the leaves, the patterns in a seashell, the reflection of the sun on water, I’m paying attention to a lot more. I can bring the visuals into my writing.

It’s no coincidence that in three of my five published books, A Kiss Out of Time, A Dance Out of Time, and Angels Among Us, my main character is an artist. Art provides what words cannot.

My birds on a bough is unrealistic but was fun to paint in watercolor.
This is a watercolor I painted based on a photo. I enjoyed using napkins and cotton balls for texture.
My still life in watercolor based on a photo of jars of jam and jelly.

I Believe in Angels

By Cathy Greenfeder

Where did my fondness for angels come from? Partly from my early years at a parochial school where the nuns taught about them and I saw the statues of angels in the church. I had also received pictures of guardian angels on prayer cards and learned the prayer to guardian angels along with the “Our Father” and “Hail Mary”.

As a child inflicted with severe bronchial asthma where each breath took tremendous effort, I held those prayer cards like a beloved teddy bear close to my chest as I lay beneath a pile of blankets inhaling the scent of Vicks vapor rub steamed into the air in the dead of winter.

Once, perhaps in a state of delirium from the medication I’d been given, I imagined my guardian angel standing by my bedpost, glowing and smiling down at me.

“Hello,” I managed to say. She smiled in response, and that somehow filled me with relief and aided my recovery better than the medications given to me at the time.

As a parochial school student you had to be at church every Sunday and holy day of obligation. You had to be with your class, and attendance was taken. Unlike some other children I knew back then, I enjoyed going. I found it comforting. Once  I attended twice. My mother asked, “Why are you going back to church?”

“I forgot to take her?”

“Who?”

“My guardian angel! I forgot to take her. So, I’m going back with her to church.”

“Can’t she fly there?” 

I didn’t laugh because to me the guardian angel and all the angels were real sources of protection and perhaps to a lonely child that I had been then, a companion who’d never leave me. I used to picture my guardian angel, dressed in long white robes and glittering wings, walking with me and guarding me wherever I went in our Manhattan neighborhood.

In the second grade Christmas pageant at my parochial school I played the role of the archangel who announced the birth of Jesus to the Wise Men. It didn’t matter if Gabriel was considered male, I wore a pink costume. My mother made it from a soft, pink fabric. She also made my wings from foil covered wire hangers and used silver tinsel to make my halo.

The fact that my mother who worked hard all day made my costume meant a lot to me, as was being part of the school Christmas pageant.

Later in life, I had experiences which enhanced my belief in the angels.

A near drowning at Davy’s Lake, a man-made lake in New Jersey, when I was about ten was one. I didn’t know how to swim, so I tried to stay close to the shoreline. However, I grew bold and ventured out further. A voice warned me not to step too far out, and when my foot felt a slippery dip in the ground, I managed to move back to the shallows.

As an adult, I remember driving home late one night. I’d been about to change lanes, but I heard a voice telling me to wait. I did. At that moment, a car whose driver was doing well above the speed limit passed me in the lane I would have entered.

There have been other times. Some may call it coincidence. Some may call it intuition. I call it the work of angels.

This inspired my reading and my research, and subsequently my writing of my first published book Angels Among Us, where a psychic artist encounters her guardian angel who saves her from danger and helps her heal from a broken heart.

I’m grateful for my own guardian angels. I believe we might have more than one. I do believe that in these times especially, our angels are here to work with us, to guide us, and to listen to us, and as messengers to intercede on our behalf.

Prayer to Your Guardian Angel

Angel of God, my guardian dear,

to whom God’s love commits me here,

ever this day be at my side,

to light and guard, to rule and guide.

Amen.

Halloween: Pumpkins and Ghost Stories

Last month I traveled to Maine to visit relatives and do a little hiking.  While there I stopped at a gardening shop which sold souvenirs, local produce including maple syrup, blackberry and blueberry jams, and pumpkins. So, I walked about looking for the best pumpkin to bring home. I found a nice, round one with a strong stem. Thus, I bought my first pumpkin of the season before heading back to New Jersey.

Then I volunteered at a thrift store and food pantry in Montclair, New Jersey.

Hundreds of pumpkins in all sizes amassed together on the lawn outside the church. Proceeds from their sale were to help provide services for Navajo. So, I bought another pumpkin, another medium sized one with a nice, round head for carving and lighting up.

I prefer to go to those pick-your-own pumpkins and apples places, but I took the easier route by buying off the lawn.  

 

 

Why are pumpkins used on Halloween?

Long ago in Ireland, people took turnips or other root vegetables, hollowed them out, and carved hideous faces on them to frighten away evil spirits. When Irish immigrants came to America in the early 1800’s, they used pumpkins to create jack-o-lanterns. The name Jack came from an Irish folktale about a stingy man named Jack. The tradition of carving faces on pumpkins, or painting them was born.

Where did Halloween come from?

Halloween, itself, has its roots in the ancient Celtic celebration of Samhain which marked the end of the harvest season in Ireland. Bonfires were lit, and people dressed in costumes. Today, Samhain is still celebrated all over Ireland. Some of the rituals associated with it include dancing, feasting, taking nature walks, and building altars to honor one’s ancestors.

How come ghosts are associated with Halloween?

There is an ancient belief that the veil between the living and those who have gone to spirit, is thinnest during Halloween. It is also felt that this is a good time for divination, or fortune telling. Halloween is “All Hallow’s Eve”, the day before the Christian remembrance and holy day of obligation of All Saint’s Day, which is November 1. In Mexico, the celebration of The Day of the Dead or El Dia del Muerto, is November 1 to November 2, which are recognized as All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day in Christian beliefs. Tales about ghosts have been around for thousands of years and have come from all parts of the world.

I have had a few paranormal experiences, which are experiences which are beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. I stayed overnight at a haunted inn in Sweden. Although nothing very unusual happened, there were some strange occurrences, like water dripping from a faucet at odd times and what seemed like a shadow passing the doorway. The room had witnessed the tragic suicide of a young man who’d been jilted a century earlier by a former inn owner’s daughter. During an overnight stay years ago at the Parador de Carmona, a lovely and ancient castle near Seville, Spain. A gust of wind blew in despite the windows being shut, and I thought that I heard sounds of an army charging outside the castle walls. Vivid imagination? Maybe or maybe not. I’ve spoken to people who claim to have had similar experiences and have sensed the presence of departed loved ones or had premonitions which later happened.

Ghosts are considered to be the soul or the spirit of a human or a non-human animal, who has died but has not gone to an eternal rest. In 2018, a yearly survey asking people in the United States about their belief in the paranormal, found that 58 percent of those polled believed in “haunted places”. In addition, “one in five people in another survey conducted by Pew Research Center, in Washington, D.C., said that “they’ve seen or been in the presence of a ghost”.

A Kiss Out of Time book coverMy young adult books, A Kiss Out of Time and the sequel A Dance Out of Time features ghosts, a fortune teller, and a psychic teenager who tries to help troubled ghosts cross over to the Other Side and find eternal peace. 

So, do you have a favorite Halloween tradition? Do you believe in ghosts? Write a comment, and let me know. I’d love to hear from you.

In the spirit of Halloween, I will be treating the first three who respond with an appropriate comment to a copy of each of these books. 

Thank you. — Cathy G.