By: Dayna Blanchard
Wendy Freund, colored pencil and collage (Photo via Wendy Freund)
Recently, students of Purchase College have found themselves with a new neighbor: the residents of Broadview. Being just a short walk away from the Visual Arts (VA) Building, Broadview has become part of the campus. It might be an unusual transition for students, but the best way to turn a stranger into a friend is finding common ground, and we’ve found it—art. Broadview’s resident artists can inspire, teach, and provide new perspectives through their lifelong experience with art. Whether they’ve committed their lives to art or picked it up in their later years, their stories provide an invaluable perspective into the nature of art and how it grows with us. In the Broadview resident artists whose stories we’ll be exploring, we can find a part of the artist’s lifestyle that we have yet to experience.
Nancy Tong is a Broadview resident and retired documentarian, now a mentor to young filmmakers. Growing up in late fifties Hong Kong, Tong says she remembers “a cinema on every block.” Though film programs were rare during Tong’s college years, she managed to enroll in a film program in Toronto, marking the beginning of her classical education in art. With that formal training, Tong made her first project “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” (1987), exploring the racially motivated killing of an Asian man. Tong’s artistic voice is tied to her perception of the world, highlighting the oppressed voices of the Asian population in America without using narration to influence our perception of the event she is recalling for us as the audience.
Tong’s artistic life has seen a tangible evolution in the technology related to her craft, but that has not changed her process.
“What is the message you want to say?” is to Tong the first question a documentarian must ask themselves no matter what technology they are using. “You have to decide on these things very early on—the story can lead you in a certain way, but that has never changed, even with new technology, even with animation, whatever technology, those are the fundamental principles.”
Tong’s method of creating has refined itself over the years, to the point that now she finds it easy to choose the perfect soundtracks and film cuts for her or her mentees’ projects. Tong’s artistic progression is a product of a lifetime of formal training and career practice. As a career artist, Tong was a one-woman business for a while, relying on artist grants to make her dreams come to life. For those of us who hope to pursue art as a career, she is an inspiration: dedication, passion, and hard work have brought Nancy the name she has now.
Her latest and last project, “Rather Be Ashes than Dust”, explores a politically volatile time in Hong Kong where revolutionary fires blazed across the country, showing us that there is no end for the artist, even after we stop producing for ourselves. Tong now helps other filmmakers’ stories come to life; her artistic voice has taken on a teacher’s role, not only showing the expertise she’s gained in the filmmaking world through her own work, but her personal desire to help others.
Wendy Freund is a psychotherapist who lived in Manhattan for 51 years before moving to Broadview. She’s been studying and practicing painting and drawing for the last thirty years, but her love of art began in childhood. Freund didn’t come from a particularly artistically inclined household, but that did not stop her interest.
“I always wanted and did make art all my life, but I didn’t get serious about studying it until 30 years ago. But in the last 30 years, I’ve made it a point to go to as many professional art schools and task as many classes as I can.”
Freund’s artistic life has been full and rewarding; she was close with acclaimed artists like Emma Amos and studied her craft rigorously at institutions like School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan and Cooper Union, resulting in an artistic voice that is disciplined and confident.
Freund’s dedication to art despite her career as a psychotherapist makes her a stellar role model for Purchase artists. In her free time, she visited museums, rubbed elbows with artists at NYC galleries, and attended all the foundational classes she could. For those of us who won’t be able to pursue art as our primary career, Freund reminds us that it does not mean we should commit ourselves to it any less; in fact, like Freund, we can find space for art in tandem with our careers.
“I think when you’re a therapist, you’re always looking to understand a person’s point of view and where they’re coming from,” Wendy explains, “in art, it’s very much the same, except it’s a little different—I’m telling my point of view and my observations, but it’s still about being awake.”
Lee Schlesinger is a professor emeritus of literature at Purchase College and a poet. The life of a scholar of any discipline will inevitably involve writing, but Schlesinger’s decision to write poetry is what makes him an artist. Schlesinger’s writing journey began in high school; in the move to Broadview, he stumbled across a folder of his work from that time.
“I looked over my stuff from high school, [and] I didn’t write one decent line—and I wrote a lot of lines—not one decent one.”
I was struck by this reflection; by his humble, relatable beginnings. Despite our differences, in academic accomplishments, in age, in life experience, I was sure anyone could relate to the sort of “amused shame” that comes over us when reading or looking over our art from the past. In the future, even what we are creating now may elicit this reaction; but that does not erase the accomplishment of producing anything at all.
“You don't stop because you’re not doing well yet,” says Schlesinger, “almost any art or any intellectual or imaginative pursuit changes over a lifetime and grows.”
In his college years, Schlesinger had formal training in poetry with big names like Howard Nemerov and J. V. Cummings. Now he teaches poetry workshops and even headed the Purchase Poetry Review for a period. Schlesinger’s poetry has seen the success of being published in magazines as well as the desolation of artist’s block. After a divorce in his forties, Schlesinger believed he would have never written again.
“I didn’t try to force myself to write. I just thought, ‘it’s happened before to people, we’ll see!'” he explained. “And then the words started showing up again, you know—there they were, and I said to them, ‘where the hell have you been?!’”
Whether we have experienced divorce or not, there has been a point in every artist’s life where external circumstances have deeply affected our will to create. Schlesinger is an example of how important it is for us to allow our minds to heal without bashing ourselves for unproductiveness.
Judy Zweig, Watercolor (Photo via Judy Zweig)
Judy Zweig is a retired chemist who chose watercolor as her artistic medium over twenty years ago. Zweig’s artistic journey began with a decision: “I didn’t want all of that structure anymore.”
Her career as a chemist, she says, focused all her attention on the right side of her brain. In retirement, she was looking for something freer and more expressive—art. She took her first class at an adult evening class for drawing at Mamaroneck High School, saying of her mindset at the time, “Let’s see if I can draw, or there’d be no point in even pursuing this thing.”
Rather than a direct “passion” to create, Zweig carefully cultivated her interest in art and built it around what she wanted from life. Her favorite things to paint are mostly found in nature: landscapes and flowers for the most part. But there are a few that deviate from this interest: in a tour of her Broadview suite, I saw this picture of a man and woman with gray hair holding hands and walking into a light.
“Years ago, I wouldn’t have thought about that,” Zweig explains, “as you get older, you view the world a little differently.” This painting is a perfect example of how what we create changes as we age and gain life experience. Though Zweig never practiced much art in her childhood, she still experienced the evolutionary growth of her artistic voice over the two decades she’s spent practicing—because it’s not about where you start, or how good you are when you do. It’s about sticking with art over a lifetime and allowing it to tell our story at any point in time.
Art speaks for us always, whether it was the crappy poetry we produced in our high school years or the thoughtful, romantic paintings we make in our old age; and everything it has to say is important, because it reflects the life we have lived up to the creation of the piece.
In these portraits of Broadview artists, it is important to draw attention to the journey their relationship with art has taken over a lifetime. Whether one pursues an artistic career or not is no indication of their dedication. As the cost of living continues to rise and the arts are being commodified for marketing and propaganda purposes, it is important to remember that what we do to support ourselves and survive can coexist with our love for art. These residents teach us how to remain dedicated to what we love through a lifetime, the importance of training, practicing, and the capacity to decenter perfection and material production. Learning from them creates a mutually beneficial relationship in which we are all learning from and teaching one another can make us more well-rounded artists ourselves. It’s a relief to see older artists as a vision of ourselves. They are confirmation that this is not a phase or a worthless degree, but a lifestyle exercised in many different ways. Despite our differences, we will always have this bridge to bring us together.
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