Eighty-seven year-old Irma Neubauer recounts with glee the trip she made recently to the wine country. In the picturesque town of Calistoga, she and three friends from San Francisco’s Jewish Home attended a fancy art-show opening.
The works on view were their own.
“I was a little bit nervous; I didn’t know what to expect,” said Neubauer, who started painting two years ago. “But everyone was friendly and relaxed, and I learned a lot about art.”
“Artistry Blossoms: Paintings of Self-Discovery, ages 70-100,” took place this spring at the Lee Youngman gallery in Calistoga. A labor of love, the show was the result of several months’ interaction between residents at the home and Sylvia Scott, a Jewish senior who lives in the Napa Valley town.
The exhibit drew sales along with praise for its senior artists. Priced below $100, many of the 25 works were snapped up at the opening. But sales weren’t the show’s main focus.
“It was just very inspiring for everyone involved,” said Scott.
Herself 82, Scott first noticed the seniors’ artwork two years ago in the pages of the Jewish Bulletin, where it is displayed regularly in advertisements for Goldman Insurance Services.
“Richard Goldman was doing a wonderful thing,” she said. “It really struck me that he wasn’t just selling insurance, he was giving people an opportunity to see that life doesn’t stop when you’re 70.” Over the weeks, “I began looking out for the art.”
Soon, she started clipping art from the ads and reprinting it in the Calistoga Senior Citizens’ Association’s newsletter, “Prime Time.”
“People here talked about it all the time,” she said. “They said how beautiful the work was, and how nice it was that someone of 79 or 80 could have made it.”
After a while, Scott found that she wasn’t satisfied with black-and-white reproductions. She wanted to see the work “in living color.”
Her daughter-in-law, Antoinette Mailliard, took her to the Jewish Home. There, the two women visited the home’s art studio and met resident artists. On her way home, said Scott, “a light bulb went off in my head; I decided to plan a show.”
Mailliard, whose grandfather served as secretary of Britain’s Royal Academy of the Arts, said she was impressed with the quality of the seniors’ work. Although most of them had never picked up a paintbrush before moving to the home, she said, “the work was very credible.”
“A lot of seniors here have found that they’re very creative, now that they have the chance to spend time on art,” said Gary Tanner, who directs the Home’s art studio. A prime example is Cima Goldina, a 79-year-old Soviet emigre whose ceramic seder plates and menorot have been hugely popular.
Scott, who owns a Goldina seder plate made in the form of a flower, said, “It’s a lovely piece. Each leaf holds an item for the seder table, and they’re all different, in beautiful shades of green.”
For Neubauer, who recently had a knee and a hip replacement, making art has provided an opportunity to “be busy, and do something with my hands.
“They had me in this wheelchair, on medication, and I looked at myself and said, ‘That’s not me,'” said the Viennese-born former aerobics instructor.
Included in the Calistoga show was her painting “Rachel’s Tomb,” one of a series she has done on Israel. “People used to go to the tomb for healing. It’s a wonderful place,” she said.
“It’s one thing to put a picture in a newsletter, another thing to see real art,” said Scott.
Now that the art show is over, Scott is busy organizing protests against freeway and chain-store development in Calistoga. In the past she ran a summer camp in the town, and she has also worked as a radio host, labor unionist and as director of the American Jewish Congress Northern region office.
Given the show’s success, she said, “I’d like to see this kind of exhibition happen in other communities.” But she added, “I’m a little tired. I think I’ll let someone else organize that.”