About the Artist

Welcome to Crab Meadow!  

I created this blog to express my love for my home on the coast of Long Island.  I would also like to share with you my art work, impressions, and newly added writings and I look forward to meeting and sharing ideas with the many other artists I encounter on this amazing road called the world wide web.

To tell you a bit more about me, and how I've arrived in this place of beach, paintings and photography....

I studied under the late Robert Barrell from 1975 until his death in 1993.  Bob was an amazingly talented artist, who I had the great fortune to meet when I was very young.  He left his Greenwich Village apartment in New York City around 1965 for a small sleepy town named Woodhaven (in the outer reaches of the boroughs) where he opened up the Forest Park School of Art.  

It was there that I met him (at the ripe old age of fifteen), after enrolling in adult art classes held on Tuesdays and Thursday nights.   The Forest Park School of Art was part studio, part library and picture collection, part garden, part private gallery of Bob's own work and part speakeasy.  It was in Bob's terms "a happening".   It was a fantastic place to learn, grow, and create...surrounded by Bob's creative ability and vision as well as the many talented students drawn there both to work and explore ideas on art, politics and life.  Bob shared his guidance, nurturing and friendship willingly and his creative genius and legacy lives on in the hundreds of paintings, drawings, pastels and sculptures created while he was with us.  

Besides The Forest Park School of Art, I also studied under some pretty phenomenal artists at Queens College, part of the City College of New York.  I graduated with a degree in Fine Art in 1985.  Some of the professors I was lucky enough to work with were Elias Friedenshon, Robert Bermerlin and Buddy Bileck.  I consider myself extremely lucky to have had these positive influences in my life.

At the start of a Sophmore year painting class with Eli Friedensohn he came up to me and said "Virginia, I have a present for you. Over the summer I found something that reminded me of you and I will give it to you the next time we meet."  I was intrigued.  Friedenshon was a world traveller and a wonderful storyteller. I imagined the present as something exotic and mysterious, picked up from overseas. Imagine my surprise when he dropped a dried out horseshoe crab in my lap the following day. At first I was a little taken back...a horse shoe crab!?!? What kind of freaky symbolism is that? But he was right and I have had a love affair with my little muse the horse shoe crab ever since. They are astonishing prehistoric creatures and although they have been around forever, literally, we still have things to learn about them. I have painted them over and over again and each time I see something new. How appropriate is it that I now live in a place called Crab.  I am hoping to participate in a NY State Horseshoe Crab study over the next three months and will be tagging, counting and taking pictures. Who knows, maybe a few new paintings will come out of it as well. So you can see that along with painting, I have a passion for the great outdoors, environmental issues, travel and Crab Meadow is the perfect place to grow in that regard.  

A journal of 3000 miles begins with a single step...I am so glad that the road I have been traveling has brought me here to this magical place which is now my home.

I look forward to sharing it with you.

 

Photographs available on www.OpenRoadCreations.com

Paintings and Limited Editions available on http://www.etsy.com/shop/OpenRoadCreations