newjerseynewsroom.com

BY PAT SUMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Welcoming a visitor to her studio, a visual artist remarked on how most artists lead solitary lives so they welcome the chance to talk about their work.

Five central New Jersey artists have done something to break out of that solitary situation – with one another. Now their occasional togetherness has led to an art exhibition . . . together.

Their show, “5 x 5,” opens Saturday, October 22 at the West Windsor Arts Center, with a reception the next day, 4-6 pm. Each artist will display a series of five 10 x 10-inch panels and four individual works. The question is, will there be any artistic connection among the pieces stemming from their group interactions?

Before deciding to form a group a couple years ago, they were Jean Burdick, Susan Kubota, Renee Kumar, Arlene Gale Milgram and Judy Tobie. Those individual artists now exchange info and share expertise to navigate the art world.

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When you see Susan Kubota’s “narrative wall hangings” (which could also be described as humorous slices of life), you know you’re dealing with an uncommon artistic sensibility.

A fiber and mixed media artist, she’s accomplished at sewing and familiar with fabrics of all kinds. Like those of many artists, her home studio in Lawrence township is chock-a-block with materials she uses or may use, found objects, things that inspire her, including family photos and other artists’ work, and her own widely, wildly varied output.

Kubota’s work – not like that of many artists — ranges from polymer jewelry to sculptures, from boxes and reliquaries to the hanging fabric images she calls “narrative fabric wall hangings.” It’s not exactly whimsical, yet not quite macabre. It’s off-beat but not off-kilter.

Pointing around her studio, Kubota says, only half tongue in cheek, “This wall is the emotional trauma wall,” while another wall is filled with her artistic responses to quotes or incidents she encounters – her “narrative wall hangings.” One work, “The Cat God” features a giant black cat playing with tiny humans much as cats “play” with their prey.

“We’re all at their mercy,” Kubota comments, in earshot of her cat, Mr. Kitty. (Under the circumstances, was that wise?)

Another narrative, “Foiled,” is a “drawing” made of collaged fabric pieces that represent a woman objecting to a doctor’s treatment of her mother. The doctor is comparatively small and getting even more so: he’s being pounded into the ground with a huge mallet by a woman whose size may suggest her rage.

“I’ve done art all the time,” Kubota says. She also studied art in Japan, Hawaii, Wisconsin and Princeton, N.J., where she worked as director of the YWCA artisans guild for nearly a decade. Her work has been recognized at regional venues including Ellarslie, the Trenton city museum, the Gallery at Mercer County Community College and the Plainsboro Library.

She’s atypical in another way: unlike the visual artists whose schedules include fixed studio time, Kubota doesn’t report in each day at 8 or 9, ready to work. “Some times I avoid it because it takes a kind of digging down energy and looking into yourself, and I don’t want to do that all the time.”

Kubota values the others’ constructive criticism and suggestions, “especially when I’m stuck on something. It’s easy to get a little lost when working in a vacuum.” That all five artists work in different mediums is a bonus, she believes: “It’s stimulating to talk technique, process and materials.”

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Jean Burdick gains insight about the intent and direction of the others’ work through their sharing of processes, she says. In turn, their questions about her art often prompt further thought. A Yardley, Pa. resident, she says her recent paintings and works on paper incorporate silkscreen printed elements of botanical images with patterns and textures.

Renee Kumar believes “art is like speaking a different language sometimes and you need to communicate with others at this level to both understand and be understood.” She has found understanding, and inspiration, from the four other group members. A mixed media collage artist, Kumar lives in West Windsor and serves on the Arts Council exhibitions committee.

For her panels in “5 x 5,” Arlene Gale Milgram, of Trenton, will show work in encaustic on paper. Her process involved dipping drawings into hot beeswax and layering them with stitches before working into them. They may have a landscape-like feel, but it’s landscape remembered, she says, “obscured and scarred by layers of time.”

Milgram cites the group’s sharing of “news about new marketing methods, framing, galleries and printing and other professional aspects of art.” They’ve also rented films and gone to exhibitions together, and done group art challenges, such as a work a day for a month.

“We are a small but varied group in style, medium and experience and it is this richness I value,” says Judy Tobie, a paper artist who makes her own pulp from a variety of fibers. Lawrenceville-based, she works both sculpturally and in two dimensions, and has shown regionally as well as in France and Korea.

“Art is something generally made alone in a studio and . . . the group keeps us from feeling isolated and brings us into the art community and the realization that we are not alone.”

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The West Windsor Arts Center, in the historic Princeton Junction firehouse, 952 Alexander Road, West Windsor, NJ. Office and gallery hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 12-6 pm. Phone 609-716-1931; www.westwindsorarts.org.

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