And so, when she pared back her writing ways, Paula decided it time to bite the bullet and join the workshops available to her on the East End of Long Island, now that her second home was fast becoming her first in Montauk. "It wasn't the easy segue that I had imagined. I thought I simply could spill over all those millions of words I had been writing into painted images, and in a somewhat respectable fashion," she adds. After all, art had always been easy for her to render.
So much so, that at the age of eight she earned a scholarship for talented and gifted children at the Carnegie Institute of Art in Pittsburgh. "I never doubted then that it was what I should be doing every Saturday morning, going across town - two streetcars and a bus, to the Tam O'Shanter class taught by JC Fitzpatrick, an instructor to generations of Eastern Pennsylvanian artists including Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein."
She would move on to the Palettes painting classes as a teenager, and eventually to the more advanced life drawing courses, hosted by Carnegie Tech University. In the summers she assisted a commercial silkscreen artist. But that's where any formal art education ended, and she became a beginner all over again with rusty brush and all. "You know, as a journalist they told me I had to contain my spirit, now they say I need to release it. I'm confused."
Paula views her work as challenging puzzles, as she did much of her life's experiences; while struggling to catch up with time lost in color and technique. She is inspired by the vitality and vibrancy of the world around her. She paints with spontaneity and dances around the page, taking you with her, here, there and back again. Her paintings are works of motion, rendered loosely with a sense of bravado in line and color, and convey the dynamics of the experience to you, the viewer. She always invites you to join her in her imaginative flight.
Paula was Gallery Director for the Art Depot in Montauk , N.Y. on Eastern Long Island, her summer home, for 25 years.
