Print this storyThe center has attracted students from disparate backgrounds. After decades typing and taking shorthand, senior citizen Betty Bennett uses her fingers these days to paint, polish, carve and sand plywood until it reveals its true nature, a process that she said “puts me into a different world.” Frank Swann, who now works in the lobby after earning his M.F.A. last year, combines fabric and acrylic paint to create work that has hung in the Grand Central gallery.
Richard Littlefield buys cheap plastic soldiers, “tarts them up' with pink paint and gaudy material, and presses them into collages that pose “questions of sexuality, sarcasm and confrontation.” Suguru Hiraide of Japanese fabricates robotic sculptures out of metal and found objects.
Susan King left a marriage, her ownership in a Newport Beach sailing club and a home cooled by sea breezes before pursuing the passion for painting that would eventually lead her to Grand Central. While she once dined in the finest eateries, now she feasts on toasted peanut butter sandwiches… and says she couldn't be happier. As she stood at her easel stirring her brush in a jar of turpentine one Saturday, King muses, “I've gone as far out on a limb as you can get. I intend to make my living this way.” She has two modes of expression: watercolors of game fish and intensively expressive portraits in oils. For the portraits, she asks models to sit two or three times so that she can fathom “the layers of personality.”
Kellie Delaney, who remembers when her friend wore jaunty beach attire instead of torn, paint-dappled jeans, says, “Susan inspires me because she takes risks.”
This center is rife with similar risk-takers who look for guidance from the international role models who live amidst them for as long as three months. From Europe, Asia, South America and North America, women and men — chosen by McGee and site director Andrea Harris — have come to Grand Central as artists-in-residence.
“We're looking for artists who want to come here to this supportive environment to take their art into new territory,” says Harris, a figurative painter herself.
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