October 2021 - Art Show and Opening

Eilandarts Center has a new art show up:

We will celebrate HALLOWEEN IN MONSTERVILLE and dedicate our monthly gallery show to all things:

Mystical, Magic and Spooky

Join us for the opening reception this Friday, October 1st 6-9pm. Stop by meet the artists and enjoy some refreshments.

The Show will be up from October 1st-31st. All Art is for sale!

When I was a small child growing up in the brick row house canyons of South Philadelphia, art was a scarce commodity and even more scarce as an accessible education or career to a working class child like myself. My experience and introduction to art was through the Norman Rockwel covers of the Saturday Evening Post. That they were paintings and that they told stories that I, a child, could understand had a powerful effect on me although I didn't quite comprehend it until I was much older. To be able to draw that way, to be able to express your feelings through images, these were indeed MAGICAL AND MYSTICAL things to me. I drew, but I can clearly remember being disappointed in my efforts. It was a clear goal to me - I wanted to be able to REPRESENT the world as I saw it. Fortunate child that I was, my mother (an indirectly my father) supported my interests. My mother bought for me and for herself those large format HOW TO DRAW books, How to draw trees, landscapes, seascapes, faces. And my mother bought me art kits - impossibly complicated oil painting sets which instantly repelled me witht their evil smelling potions, and Paint by number kits. One paint by number kit I remember was of a German Schepherd dog, a head in profile. A huge event in my early artistic life was when an Ironworker friend of my father's gave me a box of bond paper. Such an immense treasure - all for me - an unheard of resource, especially in the post world war 2 period when people were still used to scarcity of such items.

We didn't have Art Class in my Philadelphia public school, but our grade school teachers sometimes did art projects with us and the one I remembered with wonder my entire life was when we brought a tree leaf to school, placed it on a square of construction paper, and then dabbed a toothbrush in white paint and ran it over a screen to make a sprinkle of white that silhouetted the leaf against the paper. I was wonderstruck!

It wasn't until decades later that I was able to actually take art classes, it was my minor in college, and eventually I found my way to printmaking as a result of that leaf spatter paint experience. My first goal in college was to take a degree in English with certification to teach so that I could support myself and also so that I could show other working class people like myself that through reading and literature, you could make a better world for yourself. The standard issue path for working class girls like myself would have been early marriage to a lusty, working class man, followed by rapid pregnancy, childbirth, endless repititous household tasks, laundry to wash, hand out on the line, fold and iron, endless meals to cook, dishes to wash, grocery shopping, vacuuming, dusting, changing beds, more pregnancy, more children with their endless and incessent high pitched demands, wet pants, and a husband going out on Friday nights after work to the local bar with his buddies and coming home drunk. He would be social, then sentimental and drunkenly affectionate, then irritable and beeligerant and finally shouting and raging. That would have been my life without book and education. It was what I saw all around me. But my life detoured because I read books and saw different worlds and because we moved to New Jersey to a town that didn't have its own high school so we went to the high school in the upper middle class town next door - Marchantville. That was a different world for sure - less violent in speech and behavior, more refined, a world where kids had the goal of going to college. Even though originally my prior education and my behavior had not adjusted to land me on the path to college, still the dream had been planted, and I had a best friend who was going to go to college, so I knew it was possible. Eilandarts Center has a new art show up:

We will celebrate HALLOWEEN IN MONSTERVILLE and dedicate our monthly gallery show to all things:

Mystical, Magic and Spooky

Join us for the opening reception this Friday, October 1st 6-9pm. Stop by meet the artists and enjoy some refreshments.

The Show will be up from October 1st-31st. All Art is for sale!

When I was a small child growing up in the brick row house canyons of South Philadelphia, art was a scarce commodity and even more scarce as an accessible education or career to a working class child like myself. My experience and introduction to art was through the Norman Rockwel covers of the Saturday Evening Post. That they were paintings and that they told stories that I, a child, could understand had a powerful effect on me although I didn't quite comprehend it until I was much older. To be able to draw that way, to be able to express your feelings through images, these were indeed MAGICAL AND MYSTICAL things to me. I drew, but I can clearly remember being disappointed in my efforts. It was a clear goal to me - I wanted to be able to REPRESENT the world as I saw it. Fortunate child that I was, my mother (an indirectly my father) supported my interests. My mother bought for me and for herself those large format HOW TO DRAW books, How to draw trees, landscapes, seascapes, faces. And my mother bought me art kits - impossibly complicated oil painting sets which instantly repelled me witht their evil smelling potions, and Paint by number kits. One paint by number kit I remember was of a German Schepherd dog, a head in profile. A huge event in my early artistic life was when an Ironworker friend of my father's gave me a box of bond paper. Such an immense treasure - all for me - an unheard of resource, especially in the post world war 2 period when people were still used to scarcity of such items.

We didn't have Art Class in my Philadelphia public school, but our grade school teachers sometimes did art projects with us and the one I remembered with wonder my entire life was when we brought a tree leaf to school, placed it on a square of construction paper, and then dabbed a toothbrush in white paint and ran it over a screen to make a sprinkle of white that silhouetted the leaf against the paper. I was wonderstruck!

It wasn't until decades later that I was able to actually take art classes, it was my minor in college, and eventually I found my way to printmaking as a result of that leaf spatter paint experience. My first goal in college was to take a degree in English with certification to teach so that I could support myself and also so that I could show other working class people like myself that through reading and literature, you could make a better world for yourself. The standard issue path for working class girls like myself would have been early marriage to a lusty, working class man, followed by rapid pregnancy, childbirth, endless repititous household tasks, laundry to wash, hand out on the line, fold and iron, endless meals to cook, dishes to wash, grocery shopping, vacuuming, dusting, changing beds, more pregnancy, more children with their endless and incessent high pitched demands, wet pants, and a husband going out on Friday nights after work to the local bar with his buddies and coming home drunk. He would be social, then sentimental and drunkenly affectionate, then irritable and beeligerant and finally shouting and raging. That would have been my life without book and education. It was what I saw all around me. But my life detoured because I read books and saw different worlds and because we moved to New Jersey to a town that didn't have its own high school so we went to the high school in the upper middle class town next door - Marchantville. That was a different world for sure - less violent in speech and behavior, more refined, a world where kids had the goal of going to college. Even though originally my prior education and my behavior had not adjusted to land me on the path to college, still the dream had been planted, and I had a best friend who was going to go to college, so I knew it was possible.

A lifetime later, and while reading the Sunday New York Times and reading about Art Shows and the Art World, I reflected not for the first time, on how much I enjoy my simple, humble, low key current art life. I have a piece in the current October how at the eiland Arts Center which is in the saved and restored Merchantville Railroad Station Depot. It is so gratifying to me that they saved the Depot and made it an art gallery and coffee shop. The gallery operator, Nicole, is from Switzerland, a brilliant artist herself who has a terrific book art sculpture in a corner on the 2nd floor, is both discerning and accepting. She has gathered a very fine group of artists to her center and I am proud to be able to show my work with theirs. I became an English teacher and an Art teacher, and I never had to do the gallery schmoozing, coctail circuit or kiss the hands of the contemporary Borgia's to try and make my way in the modern art world. I have freedom to paint as I wish to, and Idont have to pander to critics or collectorss. As the old Shaker song goes "Tis a gift to be simple; tis a gift to be free!."

Hope you can make it to the show! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com