Climb Every Mountain

In a milestone year, artist Merle Citron proves she has hit her prime.

By: Susan Van Dongen

"Jenny Lake, Grand Tetons," by Merle Citron, above.

   Saddlesore but happy, Merle Citron, Lambertville’s lady about town, just got back from a special visit to the Canadian Rockies. She hiked, went mountain climbing and white-water rafting, got a helicopter to drop her off on a glacial ridge and, of course, went horseback riding. Supercharged from the vacation, she bursts with energy over the telephone line.
   "And it didn’t kill me," she says with a laugh. "(Our accommodations) were really rustic too — no phones, no TV, no radio, no shower. But it was like seeing God in the snow-covered mountains and the emerald waters. In my dotage, the mountains and the lakes are really calling to me more than the city. You go to the mountains to go inward and find peace."

	Top, "Trees #1" and above, "Entrance — Grand Teton National Park."

   Ms. Citron makes no apologies for the fact that she will be 60 in August. One of the reasons she went on such a remote, physically demanding vacation was to celebrate her milestone year, but also to challenge herself.
   "It’s real important for all of us to test our mettle," Ms. Citron says. "I’m ‘climbing every mountain’ to see if I still can. (As we age) it’s not just a physical thing, like ‘are you still strong?’ but are you strong mentally as well?"
   Time hasn’t turned her into a shrinking violet — if she ever was one, which is doubtful. If nothing else, the years have graced her life with creativity, humor and wisdom.
   Ms. Citron will help mark her milestone year and show off her visual talents in Double Vision, a two-person show at the Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville. The gallery will host her mixed-media works along with paintings by Peter Petraglia. The show runs July 11 though Aug. 3, with a reception July 12.
   In addition to her signature oil paintings, Ms. Citron will be showing dry-point etchings, ceramics and some new ventures in sculpture. She imitates something that can only be described as North Jersey Italian-American accent — she’s originally from Hoboken — when she describes her sculptures of "Uncle Tony and Aunt Josephine." She says they’re like the old-fashioned moose heads that hung on hunting lodge walls, except they’re people, with hair crafted by extruding clay through a garlic press.
   "They’re just three-dimensional examples of my people," she says. "My whole home is filled with my people."
   When she talks about "my people," Ms. Citron is referring to a genre she began to explore in the mid-1980s, explained in her artist’s statement.
   "I began to walk around Lambertville with my camera, photographing the ‘locals,’ the longtime residents of old-world Lambertville," she writes. "I began to paint these people, struck by their lack of pretension. In the years since then, I have looked for ‘my locals’ everywhere I’ve traveled. My people paintings have expanded to include New Yorkers, Parisians and Italians from the hills of Tuscany. In these paintings, I seek to communicate my abiding love for and fascination with people. Although my people are strangers to me when I photograph them, when I paint them, they become my missing family."
   She felt a need to try to capture the mixed emotions of New Yorkers after 9/11, taking her camera into the city and asking residents if they would pose for her.
   "When I saw someone whose face really hit me, I stopped and asked if I could take their picture," Ms. Citron says. "Only one person said no. If van Gogh had his postman, I now have mine — a lovely dark-skinned man just graying at the temples."

Above, "Up River."
At right, "Two Pears."

   Ms. Citron is a graduate of Douglass College and taught English "in all forms" on and off for 25 years. She also has been a screenwriter, film producer, project director for state- and federally funded career-education programs, a waitress, an actress, a certified handwriting analyst and a strolling street vendor.
   "Those were my starving artist days," she says. "I was so poor, I traded paintings for fruits and vegetables from Bountiful Acres in Buckingham (Pa.). Then I rolled a pushcart around Lambertville, singing to sell them. Whatever didn’t sell on Saturday became a still life on Sunday." She also writes a column for The Beacon in Lambertville.
   Above and beyond all these activities, however, Ms. Citron has always been an artist.
   During the past 30 years, she’s studied art with Marvin Goldstein, Al Gury, Jacob Landau, Joseph Smith, Edith Teitelbaum and the noted portrait artist Nelson Shanks — an experience she can only describe as "intense."
   "He and Al Gury — who I studied with at (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) — said the same words to me: ‘Be bold,’" Ms. Citron says. "That echoes in my head, particularly when I’m playing with color, and I’ve become more and more fascinated with color. If I’m feeling tentative I can hear their voices."
   Ms. Citron also studied with the late Jacob Landau, whom she describes as "tender and lovely."
   She names colorists Wolf Kahn and Amedeo Modigliani as influences.
   "I love Modigliani’s palette and ‘his’ people," she says. "Also, I love Georgia O’Keeffe because she said something early in her career on that kicked my behind. They were trying to teach her to paint like (someone else) and her reaction was ‘I might as well figure out my own style and do me.’ I also admire the poignancy in Edward Hopper’s work. There’s that same strip of loneliness that runs through my person, that reflects on the human condition."
   Her 60th birthday has been cause for gratefulness as well as reflection.
   "This has been the best year I’ve ever had, as nutsy as that sounds," she says. "I’ve had numerous commissions. People just seem to want to hunker down with my people paintings. The universe has shone down on me."
Double Vision, paintings and mixed media by Merle Citron and Peter Petraglia, will be on view at the Artists’ Gallery, 32 Coryell St., Lambertville, July 11-Aug. 3. Reception: July 12, 5-9 p.m. Gallery hours: Fri.-Sun. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. or by appointment. For information, call (609) 397-4588. On the Web: www.lambertvillearts.com