BY LINDA DeNICOLA
Staff Writer
PHOTOS BY CHRIS KELLY staff Pat Halsey (l-r) puts together a screen she decorated and Patricia Smith installs her paintings in preparation for a joint exhibit at the Monmouth Beach Cultural Center. Halsey’s exhibit of floorcloths, screens and boxes is titled “Beyond the Canvas,” while Smith’s show of portraits of women and children done in outsider style is titled “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” Two women will be sharing the exhibition room at the Monmouth Beach Cultural Center for the next two weeks. Both have come to art later in life.
Patricia W. Smith of Long Branch started painting last year when she was 80 years old. She was inspired by the Biblical story of Abraham and Sarah, she said.
“God had promised them a child even though they were elderly,” Smith said. “When Sarah gave birth in her 80s, she named the baby Isaac, which means laughter.
“Isn’t that a wonderful story?’ she asked. “In creativity, you have the promise, and then you give birth to it.”
She said she hopes her first solo showing of her work will be fun and bring laughter.
Smith’s part of the exhibition is called “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” and co-exhibitor, Pat Halsey’s, is titled “Beyond the Canvas.”
by Pat Halsey An Oakhurst resident, Halsey also is showing her decorative arts for the first time. At age 64, she, too, came to take her artwork seriously relatively late in life.
The show opened Jan. 12 and runs through Jan. 29, with a reception on Jan. 15 between 12:30 and 4 p.m.
Smith’s work is considered “outsider” art because she is self-taught and does not follow traditional techniques. For one thing, she uses acrylic house paint instead of artist’s paints.
by Pat Halsey “When I decided to paint, I couldn’t afford artist’s paints, so I decided to use house paint. Besides,” she said, “it’s flexible, like women.”
Smith paints women and children she has met in her global travels. She has seven large canvases in the show and each one represents a woman from one of the continents. For instance, the woman from China has a Mandarin collar, the African woman wears beads, and the South American woman has the look of a peasant, she said.
by Patricia Smith Many of them have a background of roses.
“I’ve worked with roses for a long time,” she said. “I find them very appealing.”
The women, who are shown from the shoulders up, look straight at the viewer from worlds teeming with color and energy. The frames, splashed with color, become part of the work.
Smith didn’t begin painting until one year ago when she lost the use of one eye as well as her depth perception after a serious car accident.
“Ironically, it actually led me to this kind of art because it is flat, not two dimensional. A friend of mine in Australia told me there are Aboriginal artists who paint in a similar way.”
She said she feels as though this is what she was meant to do.
“All of the things that I’ve done in my life have led me to this point; I’ve evolved,” she said. “I was stifled for years and after a tremendous amount of loss and trauma, I’ve worked toward a more creative life.”
Her first painting, “Black Woman and Child with Purple Corn-rows,” won first place and best in show for her category at the art show sponsored by the Monmouth County Council on the Aging and then advanced to a state show in Flemington where it placed second.
Much to her delight, Smith’s work was most recently shown in the inaugural exhibit of the Shore Institute of the Contemporary Arts in Long Branch.
“They asked me to show,” she said. “I was so excited and surprised.”
The late-blooming artist, who lived for years in Middletown, said she has always been an interior designer and owned a shop in Red Bank that she sold in 1992.
“I renovated an old Victorian house on Monmouth Street and retailed items for Christmas and for the home,” she said.
Both women belong to an arts group that meets at the cultural center.
Smith was offered the exhibition space, but she did not have enough work to fill it, so she asked Halsey to share it. But Halsey’s work is off the wall, literally — she paints screens and boxes and tables.
As a young woman, she went to Hunter College in New York City and majored in English with a minor in art, but didn’t develop her talent as an artist.
“I really went to school to find out what my strong suit was,” she explained.
She found she was a good writer with a strong interest in design.
“I didn’t work on art over the years, except for one year, in 1983, when I created masks,” she said.
She focused on home decor and managed an antiques auction, sold Victorian furniture and custom upholstery.
A few years ago, she started going to Sarah Hilton’s Studio, on Ocean Avenue in Sea Bright, and began to work on her art.
“She [Hilton] provides workshop time and instruction, mostly in acrylics,” Halsey said. “Now I am painting furniture and walls as a freelancer for designers.
“I’m beginning to face the fact that this is what I should be doing,” she said. “I have a garage full of furniture with good bones. Furniture seems to find me, plus I’m always looking at yard sales, auctions, antique stores. I can imagine the furniture with a face lift.
“One of the tables in the show was inspired by a Louis B. Tiffany window,” she said. “I worked to create the illusion of translucence in the paint finish on the top, while leaving the rest of the table wood.”
Halsey has three tables, three floorcloths, five boxes and two screens in the show.
One of the screens, called “Beyond the Canvas,” depicts a deep red Moroccan door and greets visitors to the exhibition. At the other end of the room is another screen of circus folk and between them are decorated boxes, floorcloths, tables and perhaps the masks that she created 20 years ago.
Halsey said the reason she started to paint screens was to create something beautiful on the portable elements of decor. “I believe we are always interpreting what is beautiful,” she said. “When we love something our eyes fall on, we yearn to possess it as a picture, a weaving, a sculpture.
“In our own homes, everywhere we look could be captured beauty. I want to paint on fireplace surrounds and under the rafters, on screens and on tables.”
Halsey said she was inspired to paint off the canvas by an article about the Bloomsbury Group, a loosely formed group of literary and artist friends who painted decorative art on walls and furniture in Bloomsbury, the Charleston, S.C., home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.
In addition to the two women’s artwork, Louis Frederick’s pastels will be on exhibit.
The Monmouth Beach Cultural Center is located at 128 Ocean Ave., Monmouth Beach, and is open between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.
For additional information, call (732) 229-4527.