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Carolyn Newberger at Galatea Fine Arts

Drawing From Life:  The Nude as Mirror and Muse

By: - Sep 26, 2021

Carolyn Newberger
Drawing From Life:  The Nude as Mirror and Muse
October 1 to 31
Galatea Fine Arts
460 Harrison Ave
Unit B6
Boston, MA 02118

Artist’s statement 

Much as the ballerina maintains and refreshes her practice at the barre, I return again and again to the figure for freshness, inspiration, and challenge.  Typically working in broad strokes on paper with watercolor and charcoal or ink, in twenty minutes or less I seek to bring onto the page the ineffable personhood of the model, his or her thoughtfulness, mental state, humor and distinctiveness.

Accuracy and a conventional notion of beauty is not essentially at issue.  Of course, I want my drawings to be pleasing and admired, but it’s the personal connection with the human being before me that engages me most deeply.  This person poses nude before strangers, a state of vulnerability; unclothed in a society in which we hide our bodies with flattering garments and our feelings with banalities.

We are in a conversation, the model and I, with and without words.   I search in the curve of a hip or the tilt of the head a key to his or her essence and a reflection of mine, producing a deep recognition of why my feet are planted on this earth.

About Carolyn Newberger

Carolyn Newberger came to art after a long career in academic psychology at Harvard Medical School.  Watercolor painting, mixed media and collage, and a practice of drawing from life form the body of her work. 

Also a writer, many of her  drawings and paintings accompany music and dance reviews and essays in The Berkshire Edge, a publication of news, arts and ideas in Western Massachusetts.  

Over the past two years, her art and writing have focused on the life and beauty of  the forest, a place filled with unexpected insights and discoveries.  Most recently, as live performance return to the Berkshires, she can be found in the audience, pen and sketchbook in hand, capturing the rhythm, spirit and intensity of music and dance as it unfolds before her.