 |
| May 05, 2024 |
Welcome! Click here to Login
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Click to visit the
Official Town Site
|
|
|
|
|
|
General News: A Marriage Based in Art
|
| Thom & Jackie by their pixelated portraits that Thom created. |
|
| In her studio, Jackie looks to the masters for inspiration. |
|
| Jackie shows an sketch from her deer kill series. |
|
| Jackie says this painting is a metaphor for parenting. Her daughter, Anna, asleep near a carcass of an animal she might have just eaten. |
|
| Thom creates the drawing, then cuts the glass to fit the design. The seams will be filled with lead. |
|
| A window by Thom. |
|
| He also made this panel and inlaid it in a table. |
April 29, 2008
Thom Munterich and Jackie Skrzynski are in many ways a typical village of Cornwall-on-Hudson couple. You may have seen Thom in the morning as he walks their two children to the elementary school, big white dog in hand. Or you may have run into him answering a call with the Storm King Fire Engine Company No.2, where he is a probationary firefighter. Jackie heads off each morning to her job at Ramapo College in New Jersey, where she is an adjunct professor and counselor.
But when you step inside their tidy red house on Idlewild Avenue, you find something that sets them apart. In every room and hallway of their home, the couple’s art hangs, chronicling their development as artists in the world.
His Art Ranges from Lithographs to Mosaics
Thom’s drawings, paintings and mosaics are varied in their exploration of color, pattern and form. A painting in the living room is soothing in its repetition of squares connected by lines, with colors changing hues. One hallway is lined with individualized portraits of the four family members, their faces pixelated into a flurry of indistinguishable color squares up close, with faces emerging as you step back.
His drawings are classically executed, many with skillfully rendered human figures. One series that impresses yet surprises the viewer shows the figures in common settings with their heads covered by cloth sacks hiding their identities.
Anthropomorphic Figures Express Tensions of Life
Jackie’s art comes from classic skill used to create a composition that confronts the viewer by adding thought-provoking elements to a scene. Her series of anthropomorphic animals elicits parallels with the human experience, like motherhood, that she wanted to explore in her art. “It’s about the anxiety of considering childrearing and marriage and wondering it I would still have time for art,” Jackie said as she described the creative source for a sketch of a pregnant frog.
In oil paintings of her children, she explores the vulnerabilities she saw in them at a young age or their stark connection to her as a nursing mother, her breast their lifeline. Recently Jackie has been drawing deer road kill, the carcasses that appear on the roadside, and trying to capture the raw emotion she felt when finding a doe, for example, whose full udder spoke of fawns let motherless. “It is an exercise in confronting violence that is so far removed from your life,” she said. (See more of Jackie's work at phobos.ramapo.edu/~jskrzyns/.)
Jackie works in her studio at least on “sacred Saturdays” when she may hire a sitter so she can paint or draw. Other times, she may rise at 4 a.m. to get in an hour before leaving for work.
Thom's Stained Glass Studio
When Thom is not painting, drawing, or running the household, you will find him in his basement studio where he creates stained glass windows. He learned how to design and manufacture stained glass and leaded windows during a three-years apprenticeship job in New Jersey.
With an artist’s eye, Thom designs each piece individually in styles ranging from Victorian to Craftsman to contemporary.
Some of his work hangs in St. John’s Episcopal Church in Cornwall and others have been commissioned for private homes throughout the region. (Visit his website at www.artisticcustomglass.com.)
Making Each Other Whole
Sitting in the kitchen of their home, Jackie and Thom talk about their life together. From the days when they shared an art studio at SUNY Albany, through marriage and parenthood, Jackie and Thom have developed mutual support and understanding for the creative process, those moments when Thom said he feels like he has to “make art.”
Jackie explains their relationship simply. “We complement each other,” she said, “somehow we make a whole.”
Comments:
|
What a well-balanced, truly inspiring couple with a beautiful family! Chances are their creativity will be passed down to their wonderful children.
posted by K.A.Y. on 04/30/08 at 12:46 PM
|
Add a Comment:
Please signup or login to add a comment.
|
 |
|
|
|
