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.
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.
