Midway through an art class at NewBridge on the Charles, Harry Kaplowitz called painting with watercolors “great recreational work.”
“Because with something like this, all your worries go away, and you can see that in the intensity of the work, how tight you were,” he said. A piece – whether dark and ominous, or light and airy – reveals your emotions as you did it, he noted.
Kaplowitz was one of a half-dozen NewBridge residents attending the first class taught by Francesca D’Elia, the winter artist-in-residence at the senior housing campus on Great Meadow Road. D’Elia, of Bullard Street in Dedham, is a painter who creates watercolors, acrylics, and mixed-media works, and teaches a wide range of students.
Later in the class, D’Elia held up a piece by Kaplowitz: “Now that’s really mixing the medium. He’s got pastel, he’s got water. It’s really interesting art.”
She was full of praise for her students’ work, and frequently urged them to experiment. “You’re really letting it go, and that’s the point of painting,” D’Elia said to the class at one point, and this at another: “You’re doing exercises that make you freer. And the exercises are works of art.”
The six senior students responded, making many watercolors each.
On one paper, Glorianne “Glo” Wittes painted broad swaths of bright purple and blue – with the piece morphing into curvier boundaries as she devised its second half.
“It’s so nice how you did the waves,” D’Elia told her. “It has so nice movement.”
Wittes, who has painted on and off throughout her life, has several large works on easels in the studio, including a striking gold and brown piece that features animalistic figures galloping about.
Wittes explained that she went to Canyon de Chelly in the Southwest, which has wonderful caves. At the bottom it was very dark, but when she looked up, there was brilliant light. “I used gold leaf to capture the feeling of the brilliance against the dark brown,” she said, adding that she will do more work on it yet.
“I love landscapes, but I don’t like them to come out like a camera takes the picture. So I like to distort somehow,” she said.
D’Elia, the second artist-in-residence at NewBridge, will teach classes on Fridays through March 5. D’Elia gave a lecture Jan. 12 on herself and her art, and her work is being displayed at NewBridge while she is there.
Director of marketing Ruth Stark said the class is part of a broader emphasis on art at NewBridge, which has a collection of more than a thousand pieces of original art brought together by curator Natalie Wolf.
Art has always been an important part of Hebrew SeniorLife, Stark said: “It adds to life. It makes people think.”
But “thinking is dangerous” when painting, because then you lose creativity, D’Elia said during the class, after a reporter asked Mildred Cohen what she was thinking when she created a piece with dark green trees above rolling plains of teal, orange, and purple.
Later, Cohen finished a beautiful ridge scene, with yellow and orange mountains against a blue-green sky. D’Elia said it reminded her of German expressionism, or Gauguin. Cohen said Van Gogh.
“I never did anything like this before. Never,” she said, smiling.
Dedham Transcript staff writer Edward B. Colby can be reached at 781-433-8336 or ecolby@cnc.com.
