Editorial: Midlife Discovery at Silvermine Arts Center

One night in January 2020, my wife yelled out from the other room. Dexter lay on his side near the front door—shaking, frothing at the mouth, all four paws paddling in the air. It was his first seizure. We soon learned that epilepsy is relatively common for golden retrievers. He was just four years old.

Our lives changed. We vowed to make sure one of us was always with Dexie, who soon had his own neurologist. We realized that we couldn’t travel or vacation together (car rides can trigger seizures in Dex). 

So in the summer of 2021, instead of going on holiday alone, I signed up for a landscape painting class at Silvermine Arts Center. I had it in mind to paint the Mill Pond, near where I grew up in New Canaan. But that class was canceled because it didn’t fill up. The people at Silvermine said I could take an introduction to painting class instead, one that included a section on landscapes.

That’s how I ended up in Painting 101 with instructor Alex McFarlane.

***

I hadn’t painted anything since Mrs. Knize’s art class in fourth grade at East School. What I remember most about that was staying after class with fellow fourth-grader Angela Kourembanas to help clean up. Soon I was in love. One afternoon, we started racing as we put the stools on the tables. We smiled at each other when we finished. I seized the moment to voice my first romantic overture.

“I don’t like you,” I said.

Later that year, I found a note (pencil on yellow construction paper) tucked into the hardcover copy of “Lassie” inside my homeroom desk. The note said, “I love you. Marry me on the swings tomorrow.” I had no idea who’d placed it there or when. I’d never opened the book before. It was there to signal that I read big books. For weeks, I scanned the swings at recess. Nothing. I searched my memory for a misunderstood swing set interaction (I had been a swing set regular). Still, nothing. I spent the rest of fourth grade examining the faces of classmates for a telltale sign of my future wife. All for naught—my future wife was in Ireland, I would learn 16 years later.

***

Painting 101 was divided into three segments—still life (two classes), landscape (three) and portrait (two).

Most of the other students were fellow novices. Some had an art school background. I chose an easel and stool in a back corner where no one could see.

Immediately and unexpectedly, I found myself immersed. Each step of creating a painting posed a problem-solving opportunity—problems of composition, color, texture and shading. For the first time in a long time, I felt myself working toward a goal. From my back-corner I eyed the still life objects—jug, milk bottle, bowl of red potatoes on a yellow tablecloth —and tried to make them materialize on the canvas.

Alex roamed the class, course-correcting his students and saying things like, “What’s the first thing that a person sees when they look at a painting? A mistake.” And, “You are all like Rembrandt. It took him 21 tries to get an elbow right.” And, “You can’t learn anything from looking at a painting in a museum, because all you see is the last 2 percent of the work.”

I relished all of it, not least because Alex—a professional sculptor and painter of many decades’ experience, among other creative pursuits—had an uncanny sense about when I needed correction and when I needed to work things out on my own.

Though I sometimes misquote people on the New Canaanite, news writing is not a creative exercise for me. I found myself enjoying the activity of painting itself, and my new interest extended beyond the classroom.

I got a membership card for Jerry’s Artarama on Route 7. I started using my “April + Kelly Real Estate” tote bag for transporting tubes of paint and brushes. My wife Marie tore up the frayed and stained T-shirts that I loved and said I could use them as rags. I bought and assembled an easel (and I’m bad at assembling things). I set it up in a little-used corner of our dining room, which turned out to be unacceptable. Marie cleared out the sunroom and moved the painting setup there.

I snapped some photographs of Mill Pond to use as a reference for the landscape painting, which Alex rightly labeled as overly ambitious. Even so, I found that while I was working on the painting, it transported me back to that pond in the 1980s—my first lesson in how it can feel that you’re “spending time” with a chosen subject to paint. During the three-hour sessions at Silvermine and while working on it at home, memories of our old neighborhood crew around Millport Avenue—my brother Terry, Ron Bentley, Terry Ruffin, Francis Jordan, Chris Wilson, Ronnie Rich—returned to me.

For the portrait painting, I couldn’t work out the live model we were supposed to do in class so, instead, painted Dexter looking at me on the living room sofa where I do my work as a reporter.

I signed up for another painting class with Alex for the fall 2021 session at Silvermine. This was more of an independent study-type class, with each student working on his or her own painting, be it oil, acrylic or watercolor. I started an oil painting of my dad working in his old auto repair shop, but soon put it aside when my mom, retired after 35 years as a speech pathologist in New Canaan Public Schools and living in North Carolina, received a serious medical diagnosis.

She moved back up here, in fact moved in with me and my wife for a time in early-2022, to take advantage of a fabulous team of all-women doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

I found an old photo to use as the basis of my next painting—me and my mom sitting outside the duplex on Seminary Street where we lived in the fall of 1975, when I was six months old. We’re both smiling in the photo. Spending time in that moment was catharsis for me during the early weeks of her diagnosis and treatment.

Similarly, the weekly painting class at Silvermine became a kind of getaway for me. Though I’ve only learned the first names of my fellow students (and judging by their faces, I often get those wrong)—many of whom are highly accomplished and gifted artists—together we formed a group where I felt I belonged, something I hadn’t experienced since I sat in the bow of an eight-man rowing crew in college 28 years ago.

After finishing the painting of me and my mom, I went back to the one of my dad in his auto shop (I’m still working on it). I set it aside again to do one of Louis, our German shepherd mix who had died in March 2020, weeks after Dexter’s first seizure. Again, it felt like I was spending time with Louis while painting it—when I got to his eyes and began to draw out his expression, I heard myself saying out loud, “There you are, Louis.”

***

Learning to paint is connecting me to some part of myself I didn’t know was there, something that may not have been tapped since confessing my love to Angela Kourembanas.

I look forward to each new class during the break between sessions. The class makeup changes while remaining the same—some of us return, others leave and are replaced by new students, or leave for a period of time and come back. It’s an atmosphere of collegiality, fun and support.

The last painting I did during the spring session that just ended was a request from Marie’s sister, Roisin, to do the family’s 12-year-old golden retriever, Jake. I worked on it at home and finished it after receiving feedback from Alex during a Saturday make-up class.

***

Dexter is doing well. His seizures are managed as well as possible, and he gets back to his sweet, loving, playful self within an hour of having them, sometimes sooner. 

My mom is also doing well. She’s thriving in this area, making new friends and signing up for multiple book, bridge, Mahjong and social groups. She goes to all the shows at the Powerhouse Theatre and all of Andrew Armstrong’s New Canaan Chamber Music concerts. We went to The Glass House’s Summer Party last month—her first time on the world-famous property.

My mom is always trying new things—she got her first tattoo at age 64 (“Dog Is Love” next to a bearded collie)—an enviable trait, one of many I’d be lucky to inherit from her. New Canaanites are fortunate to have so many quality opportunities to learn new things, be at the new library, Carriage Barn Arts Center, Town Players of New Canaan, Grace Farms, Lapham Community Center, School of Rock, New Canaan Music, Mead Park pickleball courts and other Recreation Department offerings.

Or the Silvermine School of Art.

Registration is open for the summer session, and I’ve signed up again, this time to take Alex’s painting and drawing class.

It starts Thursday.