The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Creativity drives local artist Schempp
Gay Schempp sits in her spacious studio in Whiting Mills located off Route 44 in Winsted. She is surrounded by her art in myriad media, ranging from sculpture to watercolor paintings and the ancient art of encaustic.
“My friends say I could probably find a great deal of success if I stayed in one medium,” she says with a smile. The statement highlights the fact that most galleries prefer consistency from their artists, not moving from one art form to another every couple of years, as is the wont of Schempp.
But this multi-talented and energetic lady is happy working in a wide range of media, and the critics and gallery owners can take a backseat to her own personal and professional enjoyment if they so desire.
Indeed, Schempp, 67, who lived in Fairfield County prior to moving to Winsted seven years ago and finding a home for her studio in Whiting Mills in 2006, lives by the credo that creativity is what drives the human spirit, no matter what form or shape it takes.
She began her career as a potter, producing functional and sculptural stoneware for some 20 years. She exhibited nationally and coordinated and led craft and mythology tours to Japan and Greece. She also led workshops nationally and founded the Connecticut Clay Artists Association. Then, a motor vehicle accident left her with a broken neck and a loss of the strength and dexterity needed to throw pots.
“It was a very tough time in my life,” she recalls, as sunlight filters through the large windows in her artist space at Whiting Mills, a converted factory that has become home to a growing artist and artisan community. “I was unable to continue doing what I loved and it was a financial hardship because my family depended upon my income. My husband wound up leaving and I was suddenly searching for something to transition to for a career.”
She says with a slight chuckle, “I took a class at Fairfield University about changing careers and took a test that showed me what I would be good at. The first choice was a tugboat captain, which, when I thought about it, made sense because I like to work at night, my highest intelligence is spatial, I love the water and am somewhat of a loner.”
But a second recommended career path seemed more appropriate than becoming a modern day Tug Boat Annie. “The results also showed I could be successful designing, fabricating, and marketing my own products.”
She attended the Rhode Island School of Design to help her move into a new artistic endeavor, and upon graduation a friend told her of a job opening in the New Canaan school system teaching sculpture.
“I didn’t think I was qualified because I wasn’t technically a teacher. But the person
I interviewed with knew my work, liked what I could offer and hired me with the proviso that I would get my master’s in education.”
Thus was launched a most successful career as a teacher of the arts. For 20 years, she taught at New Canaan High School. She was awarded “Teacher of the Year” by the Connecticut Art Education Association and is a National Board Certified Teacher. In 2006 she retired from high school teaching and established her studio in Winsted.
Since 2000, she has been co-leading art and yoga retreats in Madison, and Tuscany, Italy. In all, Schempp has been making and teaching art for more than 40 years. She brings her philosophy that “Creativity Matters” to her teaching, now done at her studio. Students learn the skills of making art as well as the process of creating unique works.
“I teach art making with a classical approach to technique and composition, and a creative approach to helping students find their own voices in creating original work. I bring to my classes freedom for experimentation and imagination. Individual creative expression combined with the confident handling of technique is the goal.”
While she loves teaching, creating art energizes her. Her oil and watercolor paintings are imbued with a strong sense of impressionism and many of her scenes are of lakes or the coastline of New England. One of her most interesting and locally inspired series consists of paintings that reflect the majestic power and the emotional tranquility of deep-water surfaces.
“I have been a strong ocean swimmer for most of my adult life, and find swimming far out to the big rolling waves and hanging out there to be the essence of feeling totally alive. The paintings in the wave series were created from the kinesthetic experience of swimming rather than from photographs. Instead of merely mirroring the real, the water images dwell in passages of exuberant brushwork that convey the physicality of the rise and fall of wave sets. Whether painting the ocean or the lake, my intention is to convey the sensation of being in the water.”
Many of her works are inspired by morning swims in Highland Lake.
For the past five years she has also immersed herself in what is known as encaustic art, an ancient practice that uses beeswax to produce textures and shapes that rise up off a panel and capture a variety of other materials within the wax to create unique mosaics.
“I have been exploring encaustic collage over the past five years. I work in a variety of media and in this work I am incorporating my love for drawing, painting, collaging and composing visual stories. I use a painterly approach to combine drawings, pieces of found images, photographs and textured papers in a narrative style.
“The encaustic wax medium allows me to work in layers, trapping fragments of color, memory and message in time,” she explained. “The content of my imagery expresses a life-long fascination with mythology, symbols and the cultures of ancient civilizations. Travel, history, music, spirituality and the exploration of personal mythology are the inspirations for my images.”
She begins these works with a pigmented wax painting to seal the substrata. Layers of collage materials, including ephemera gathered in travel or papers she has painted, are composed between wax layers and fused into the surface of the developing piece. For the final layer, she uses Xeroxed copies of sketches or photographs and burnishes the ink into the surface of the waxed collage, dissolving the paper to leave the image embedded in the wax. This process allows her to create the illusion of depth and mystery as images float over each other in transparent veils of color.
Her most stunning series of encaustics is titled “Koine,” one of which is a two-panel piece that creates the impression of a cave drawing or runes chiseled into a wall.
“The concept for this body of semiotic images is the simulation of a universal, intuitive language,” she says. “I am investigating the expressive force of language rather than its traditional cognitive associations.”
These encaustic paintings on birch panels record gestures from “automatic writing” carved into the warm wax surfaces as well as impressed designs from carved clay stamps. “Calligraphy explores expressiveness by combining vigorous gestural marks with a sumi brush fused into the surface as a counterpoint to the sensuous fields of subtle color. Color, gesture and texture create the illusion and mystery of ancient tablets,” she said.
The result is simply stunning and the works have a depth that holds the viewer’s attention and draws him or her in to seek the deepest meaning within the work.
Encaustic was first used by the Greeks between 200 to 300 B.C. in Alexandria, Egypt, to create portraits on sarcophaguses, Schempp says. “The use of bees wax is important because it doesn’t yellow, fade and chip. You create something with it and let it be for 2,000 years. It also has a beautiful texture to it and is very seductive to the viewer. I sometimes use as many as 15 layers of wax fused onto a wood panel, letting it cool, fusing again and again and creating different colors and adding a collage of other medium to create depth.”
Some of her most recent work has been paintings of the Santa Fe, N.M., area, inspired by a trip to that region of the country she took a year ago. She has arranged for some of her work to be shown in a gallery in the Santa Fe area. She also displayed at the recent Hartford Open Studios that involved some 200 artists working in a variety of media.
Schempp offers private and group art classes at her studio in Winsted. Private classes are available on weekdays and evenings. Group classes are limited to six students or less to insure that each person gets individual attention and ample workspace.
Classes include painting in sumi ink, watercolor, acrylic and oil; drawing in pencil, charcoal, pastel and ink; encaustic painting; and creative journaling.
She also conducts “creative party experiences,” hosts an art tour “Art and Cooking in Italy” and watercolor and encaustic workshops at New England art centers. Schempp is an active member of the artistic community at Whiting Mills and will demonstrate encaustic painting at the annual Open Studios there in June
For more information about classes, workshops and tours, visit www.gayshempp.com.