Emerson Artists Collection

One of Lois Andersen’s earliest memories is “making things.” Her father was an artist, and Andersen’s early childhood was a nurturing environment that provided the freedom of unstructured time with the provision of simple art materials. “I had lots of time to wonder about things, and try to make them,” says Andersen. As she grew, Andersen’s art-making focus turned to 2-D before she eventually became a painting student at Pratt Institute and the Art Student’s League in NY. “Painting is an on-going inquiry,” says Andersen, and that process can “never fully be realized,” because there is always more to reach for. “It’s deadly to focus on the idea of a perfect product; there is no such thing and you will be robbed of the joy that comes with the pursuit.” Andersen describes her painting as Expressionist/Realist; she teaches at the EU, and does some illustration. She taught art for more than twenty-five years, before making the decision to focus on her painting. As a resident artist at Emerson Umbrella, Andersen says, “It’s the perfect place for me where I am able to pursue my painting and also have opportunity to teach.” As a teacher, Andersen welcomes students from many levels of experience. She explains, “My job is to help people get a little further, in each effort, to move forward. To learn what their strength is and help them pursue it. It’s fun to teach someone who is completely new to art because they are so open, and usually surprised at how good their first efforts are.” Andersen believes that training in the basics of the elements of design, handling of mediums and lots of practice is key and that structure is the route to freedom of expression later on. Andersen explains a growing desire to move forward—take on new direction—in her painting. She grew tired of her “little paintings and landscapes; I knew something was going to change but I didn’t know what it was going to look like.” Andersen’s family heritage is Norwegian, and she spent time in Norway as a student. She has been to her father’s homeland many times with a recent trip to the Norwegian Arctic this past summer. “As I became absorbed into that austere landscape, it resonated so deeply. These images have become the focus of new work; much larger paintings, deep and moody, huge, ponderous landscapes.” Anderson references her most recent painting, a large abstract with sweeping brushstrokes and fun, bold colors. “I love that feeling of feeling like I’m nothing in a huge space…it touches on the eternal…it’s so big and so far beyond you.”

Resident Artist Deborah (Deb) Loverd has been at The Umbrella since 1996. Equipped with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Syracuse University, and further art study at Columbia University and the DeCordova Museum School, she finds the collective wealth of experience, shared freely by the artists who have studio space at the Umbrella, a constant inspiration. One of the major themes in Deb’s colorful artwork is the humorous depiction of what she calls “Portentous Moments,” found in fables, legends, nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Deb traces her fascination with the important choices made by storybook characters back to childhood. As a young girl listening to “Little Red Riding Hood,” she wanted to jump into the story and intervene, “No! No!” she would have warned, “Don’t talk with that wolf! Don’t do it!” Deb’s caption for this moment in time: “Red Riding Hood shares her afternoon plans with a stranger.” You might be curious as to the portentous moment Deb chose for the Sleeping Beauty story. The answer is found in her studio where a painting of Sleeping Beauty in an imagined luxurious bedroom, complete with prince gazing intently down upon her, hangs in her studio. The caption reads: “The Prince ponders his level of commitment.” The highly detailed and colorful illustrations portray a moment in children’s literature that rings familiar to almost all of us and captures favorite characters including Hansel and Gretel, the three men in a tub, or the cow jumping over the moon. Each scene is a colorful and visual delight, while the captions offer a humorous and thought-provoking point of view. Funny, indeed, yet also serious, the illustrations cause us to ponder new perspectives on the fabled moments. Deb’s “LetterSpeak” series, is an inventive collection of paintings based on the shape of the letters of the alphabet. Letters show personality by way of humorous comment to another letter: Capital “P” says to “pot-bellied” capital “B” “I warned you to lay off the carbs.” A simple “F” looks at a flowery Victorian “F” and quips, “No. No one will notice you’ve had a ‘little work’ done.” The artist’s medium of choice is gouache, an opaque watercolor with extremely vibrant hues. She sketches out the design on tracing paper, before transferring it to a sheet of Lanaquarelle, a fine-arts watercolor paper. This high quality cotton paper absorbs many layers of color and is sturdy enough for vigorous brushwork. After Deb lays the base colors down, she slowly builds layer upon layer to provide depth and richness, wetting the areas that she’ll paint, adding color, dabbing it with tissue, repeating the process as many times as she feels is necessary to get the desired effect. “The multiple layers make the picture more lively,” says Deb. The tiny details that are added as the last step of the process are the hallmark of Deb’s painting style. “The details are the dessert,” she says, and with very sharp colored pencils, she punches up little areas to make the color “pop.” Deb acknowledges that the painting is finished when she stands in front of it with a pencil or paintbrush and can’t find a spot that needs anything. Not all Deb’s paintings are part of these two major series. Her walls also hold pastoral scenes of yesteryear in “New England Spirit” and “Welcoming Shade.” In “Literary Lights of Concord,” Deb pays tribute to Concord authors, past and present. There are also acrylic paintings—many boast a bold graphics style or display her signature touch of whimsy and humor—adorning the walls of her Umbrella studio space. Deb looks forward to Open Studio days, when she welcomes visitors to her space. “I like to hear the ideas and suggestions that people have for future work,” she says. Deb is delighted that select pieces of her work have been exhibited in such venues as the Concord, Fowler, Carlisle (Gleason) and Bedford Libraries, Concord Art Association, Trinity and TriCon Churches in Concord, as well as various art galleries.

Lonnie Harvey calls herself a printmaker. Technically, this is true. The walls of her studio are lined with prints, each depicting a single snippet of the natural world—ears of corn, milkweed, water, leaves, brooding open sky—imagery one might expect to find wandering bucolic Concord or nearby Carlisle, where the artist lives. Yet there is a looseness and painterly quality to Harvey’s work, a spontaneity from one piece to the next, that makes “printmaker” feel more like a misnomer than accurate descriptor. Take the corn for example. A grid of four prints is pinned to the studio wall, each containing the same image: two pieces of corn lying parallel to one another, wrinkled husks still intact. The first image in the series is vivid and crisp, warm and brightly colored and full of detail, the husks standing out in bright yellow relief. The image next to it, though still containing the same objects, is foggy and muted, its palette cool, an impression more than anything else. Beneath it lays another ghostly image, this one highlighting the ears of corn alone, the husks all but buried under a streaky haze. Though the prints contain the same imagery, it is abundantly clear that each is markedly different than the one before it. This is in stark contrast to most forms of printmaking, in which multiples of the exact same image are reproduced again and again. Instead, Lonnie Harvey’s prints have more in common with painting; each print is a one-of-a-kind piece. Harvey’s technique is known as monoprinting. “They are called painterly prints because you paint onto Plexiglas and then print that image onto paper,” the artist explains. This differs from other printmaking techniques in which an image is permanently affixed to a plate, such as a woodcut or engraving. Instead, Harvey explains, “When you take the paper off, there might be something left on the glass, but it’s not the same image. That’s why it’s called a ‘monoprint’.” Because she is working from glass or mylar, another non-permanent base material, the image is transient, and invites fluidity to the artist’s process. Often, Harvey begins with her own photographs of nature taken as she goes about her day-to-day. She transfers these photographs onto the plate with ink before going in with a paintbrush or some other tool and modifying the image. This offers the best of both worlds, the precision of a real-life recording along with the ability to expound upon the idea with her own marks drawn freehand with a vibrant and startling combination of colors. It is precisely this that has held the artist’s attention for over two decades. A Wisconsin native, Harvey earned a degree in fine arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison before taking up watercolor and heading east to Massachusetts. Here she realized watercolor was too unforgiving a medium for her—“too precise”—and decided to take a monoprinting class on a whim. Twenty years later, the attraction holds strong. “Some of it can be predictable, some of it is not. And I like that part of it. I know I can get a certain effect, but it’s not going to be exact. Which is what monoprinting is. That’s the best part—pulling that paper off. That’s the part that will always keep me going with it—the unpredictability. I love it.“

Painter, printmaker, teacher, and Emerson Umbrella board member ― February Artist-of-the-Month Did you know that a typical adult human skeleton consists of 206 bones? And that each of those bones is a complex living organ made up of many cells, protein fibers, and minerals? Jonathan Smith, whose fascination with human anatomy stems largely from his graduate school days as a figure drawing student, has sketched and painted an astounding variety of bone structures with remarkable precision and attention to detail. In his Bones series, Smith, a painter, printmaker, and figure drawing artist, has carefully sketched each piece from direct observation of a human skeleton, then gradually developed each one through a process of experimentation with form, color, texture, and the like. While he has no preconceived notion of what the finished product will look like, the end result is an abstract yet accurate likeness that captures what Smith calls, “the beauty and interesting surfaces of these fascinating structures.” It was also in graduate school when Smith was required to take out a publication entitled Artistic Anatomy ‒ a book widely acknowledged as one of the greatest of its kind due to in-depth descriptions and drawings of muscle forms and functions. The same copy he acquired in graduate school is still with him today and, while torn and tattered from years of constant use, Smith would not be without it. “It’s an incredible book,” he says. “It sparks my interest to learn more.” Mr. Smith’s other art works are no less compelling. His Bugs series, for example, is a case in point. One winter’s day, Smith noticed a yellow jacket that had been trapped between layers of melting ice on the ground, its frozen body obscured by the elements surrounding it. Smith was taken with the image, and years later, sketched and painted a number of what he calls his “memory pieces,” a sequence of unique dream-like compositions depicting wasps. In addition to his artistic achievements, Mr. Smith also teaches painting, printmaking, and figure drawing in the Visual Arts Department at Concord Academy, an independent high school in Concord, MA, where he has worked since 1989. The Academy offers the part-time Art Department faculty, who are considered working artists, a four-day work week with the fifth day as a “studio day” to pursue their artistic interests. Mr. Smith spends his studio day in his Umbrella studio and occasionally shows the results of these efforts at a variety of local venues. “The two lives of teacher and artist blend together so beautifully,” he says. “When working with my students I try to relate to them the experiments and discoveries I make while developing paintings in my studio. In turn, I learn a great deal from my students.” Most gratifying for Smith is seeing the spontaneity and fearlessness with which his students work. “They take risks effortlessly with their art and challenge themselves each day,” he says. Jonathan Smith’s most recent work, The Look of Our Land, centers on the use of aerial map imagery ‒ another one of Smith’s interest. Using an out-of-print book (of the same name) that contains photomontage images of farmland in the Midwest United States, Smith combs each page with a magnifying glass in search of interesting compositions. Once located, each composition is then transferred to a painting surface, where it is layered with another composition he has selected from a different map. Between each composition, Smith applies thin, transparent layers of color (glaze). The result is a variation of sloping lines that streak sharply through brilliantly colored patchwork. Jonathan Smith is an Artist-in-Residence and a member of the Board of Directors at Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts. For further information, please visit his website at jonathansmithartist.com.

Meet Jon Schmalenberger Woodworker and Custom Furniture Designer ― December Artist-of-the-Month It’s opening day of Emerson Umbrella’s Winter Market. Every inch of the building’s 3 floors abounds with art enthusiasts streaming by resident- and visiting artists, who exhibit and sell their art to the public at this annual event. On the lower level, a throng of people buzz excitedly around a shelved exhibit of turned wooden trees, each a unique combination of design, size, and wood. “I have a collection of these at home,” one woman tells me, her arms filled with trees. “What kind of wood is this?” inquires another, comparing the two she is holding. These popular originals are the brainchild of Jon Schmalenberger, woodworker and custom furniture designer, who stands nearby, chatting with customers while wrapping up purchases. “I’ve been making those [trees] for years,” Jon later tells me. “I think their appeal stems from the fact that they’re one-of-a-kind.” Indeed, anything Jon crafts with wood is exceptional and of the finest quality. A friendly man with a gentle nature, Jon hails from rural Ohio originally, where he worked in plumbing and heating mostly as a way to earn a living. He would arrive home from work at the end of each day and head right into his shop to build. “Plumbing and heating are good skills to have,” explains Jon, “but they weren’t my passion, that’s for sure.” He began receiving orders for furniture pieces, but was continually frustrated by the fact that he lacked the knowledge and training necessary to achieve the quality standard he set for himself. Furthering his education appeared to be the answer and so he researched a number of trade schools with woodworking programs in the U.S. It was important to find a school whose teaching methods were hands-on (vs. academic), as that was how he learned best. At the time (late-’70’s), the North Bennet Street School (NBSS) in Boston was the only trade school of its kind that offered an educational environment where the learning comes from actually doing. (The school holds the reputation as having the finest woodworking program in the U.S.). Jon was so impressed with the school when he visited that he enrolled right then and there, despite the two-year waiting list. “I thought to myself, if I could make the kind of furniture they make here, I would just be over the moon,” he said smiling. In 1977, Jon moved to Boston to begin the Cabinet and Furniture Making program at NBSS. Over the course of the rigorous 2-year program, he learned the traditional skills, concepts, and values of fine craftsmanship the school is so well-known for. After graduating, a part-time job teaching shop at the Fenn School in Concord, MA. opened up, and he took it. During his free time, he focused on building clientele as well as working in the shop. A friend of Jon’s, who was an artist at Emerson Umbrella, told him great things about the Center, which inspired him to pay a visit there to inquire about renting space. A make-shift studio happened to be free, so he moved right in. It was there, in 1986, that he launched his own business, J.S. Classic Woodworking. Although now in a larger space that suits him better, Jon still works at the Umbrella, designing and building custom-made heirloom furniture in his shop. As the name of his business implies, each of his pieces is made with the same time-honored skills that craftsmen have relied upon for generations. Jon works with many types of woods (pine, maple, oak, cherry, and mahogany, to name a few), and in just about any style you can think of (Colonial, Chippendale, Queen Ann, Arts and Crafts, Mission). He’ll build each piece to exact specifications, which can range from an idea for something a person wants — to a detailed drawing — to no instruction at all. “One man came to me and said: ‘I’ve seen what you build, I like what you make, I need a 3’ x 6’ table. Make it.’ Says Jon, “That scared me a little. He had no style in mind, nothing. So I went ahead and made the table, and he liked it.” Jon’s love for his work and his appreciation of the materials he builds with are evident in the lasting beauty of all his pieces. “I’m a great fan of trees,” Jon says in earnest. “I like to treat the product with respect and I try to create pieces that will last as long as it takes for the tree to grow. That’s my goal. It’s not difficult to build a piece that will last 200 years if it’s built right.” ————— Jon Schmalenberger is the owner of J.S. Classic Woodworking, located at Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts, 40 Stow Street, Concord, MA. 01742. For more information and to view his work, please visit his website at: jsclassicwoodworking.com.

Mary Ann Gore - Painter Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts

Mark Sutherland specializes in models of 19th- and early 20th-century ships and boats, along with scrimshaw artifacts, decorative ship carving and figureheads... http://sutherlandshipmodels.com/ Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts