Artists Among Us

Story by Jane Gordon | Photo by Mihaly Portrait Design

Connecticut may not be seen as a magnet for artists,yet award-winning musicians, nationally known painters, and prominent poets whose names are household words in cities such as New York and Los Angeles are living and flourishing here.

The reasoning behind their geographic choices may vary, but they share a passionate commitment to craft. Jay Lichtmann of Avon stitches together his living playing principal trumpet for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, teaching at the Hartt School of Music and performing at the Talcott Mountain Music Festival at the Performing Arts Center at Simsbury Meadows during the summers, among other musical jobs. Pit Pinegar of Plainville writes, teaches writing, conducts poetry workshops and directs the Urban Outreach Program for the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival at Farmington’s Hill-Stead Museum, where she has also given poetry readings. She has other jobs, too. Elisa Tenenbaum of Farmington paints and illustrates for a number of clients, along with teaching at Northwest Community College. Each of these individuals is committed to living as an artist, however they possibly can.

Jay Lichtmann
Principal trumpet, Hartford Symphony Orchestra, music teacher, solo artist

I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, and at that time the San Fernando Valley had very strong instrumental music departments at the junior high and high-school levels. My older brother played the baritone horn and I liked the idea of playing a brass instrument, and the trumpet seemed easy.

My junior high-school music teacher was special. His name was Tommy Johnson, and he was one of L.A.’s premier tuba players and had this junior high-school job, too. He was on the “Jaws” soundtrack, and in the ’60s and the ’70s, whenever there was a soundtrack with a tuba, it was him. He was a great teacher, had a crackerjack band and was always an inspiration to me.

I was in the band in high school, took private lessons and played in a youth orchestra outside of school. By the time I was a senior in high school, I knew that I wanted to be a professional musician. My parents were always encouraging me in whatever I decided to do. They never discouraged me, either.

I did my undergraduate work at the California Institute of the Arts, a small arts school outside of L.A., and went to do graduate work at Yale in performance. I was there for one semester, then won an audition for a job overseas. I knew someone who was playing with the Israeli Philharmonic, and he told me to contact Zubin Mehta because they needed a trumpet player. I auditioned for Zubin Mehta at Avery Fisher Hall. This isn’t the way people usually get their jobs, but it was an instance of networking that helped.

It was great playing with a great orchestra and living in a foreign country. I was 22 and it was the first time I had been out of this country. But I got tired of living in Israel, and I wanted to play in an American orchestra. I moved in with a friend in New York City, read the union paper, International Musician, that comes out every month – if you are an out-of-work musician, you are scouring the union paper every month for auditions — and the Hartford job was advertised.

It’s an amazingly competitive field, especially being an orchestral trumpet player. Maybe one or two positions a month come open, sometimes none, and there are hundreds of players competing for those jobs.

I took the audition and won the job, and I’ve been doing it for 25 years.

Playing in the symphony is not 100 percent of my income, because we don’t get paid a lot. I teach quite a bit, private lessons and at the Hartt School (of Music at the University of Hartford), and I do a lot of freelance work playing shows – I do a lot of weddings – and I play in a brass quintet and as a solo trumpet. You have to do this if you are going to play. There’s no way to survive playing in Hartford strictly as a musician in an orchestra. The reward is obviously not money; there are an awful lot of easier ways to make money than to be a musician. But the satisfaction of making music and communicating, the satisfaction I get from playing and teaching the instrument, give my life meaning. It’s not about the money. There’s nothing better than the feeling of sitting down in the orchestra and getting to play a part that is really juicy, with a tremendous amount of solos in it such as a Mahler symphony, and then doing a great job with it, really playing it. The feeling of accomplishment — there’s nothing that can beat that.

I think it can be very exciting to go hear an orchestra, because there is nothing like the sound of all those musicians up there as one. The great thing about listening to a Beethoven symphony, even if you’ve listened to Beethoven’s Fifth a hundred times, is that it still holds surprises. It’s true, you have to acquaint yourself with it beforehand to get the most out of it. You have to do your homework. But great classical music is always interesting to listen to.

Pit Menousek Pinegar
Poet, writer, teacher

I was born in New Britain, grew up in Plainville. I started out as a dancer. And then when I was 12, my dad who was a doctor, discovered that I had a bone tumor on my right leg and that effectively ended my life as a dancer.

I started writing in high school — I had a weekly column in the local newspaper. I worked at The Hartford Courant for a couple of summers and school vacations when I was in college, wrote some book reviews and published some poems. After college I worked for a woman named Helen Loy who was a true mentor, before women were and had such things. She had a public relations firm in Hartford at the time with an interesting variety of clients. She would teach me how to do something (or send me to someone she thought might be better) and then she simply turned me loose. She never doubted that I could do anything, so it never occurred to me to doubt that I could do whatever it was I’d been turned loose to do.

On my first day on the job she sent me over to the city editor at The Courant so that he could teach me how to write a press release that he wouldn’t cut. I learned by doing, whether it was writing radio and TV copy, feature stories, lobbying, event planning, editing, broadcasting. I was in my early twenties, and it was heady stuff.

There came a moment when the long hours were going to get longer. I knew exactly what I wanted to do and a six or seven long-day-a-week job wasn’t going to get me there. Helen had given me a briefcase because she thought a briefcase carried the weight of authority, especially for someone as young as I. What I carried in it was stories and fragments of stories. And that’s been the story of my professional and creative lives. Whatever the work, there had to be a place for the writing, too.

Meantime, my mother had a friend, Doris Miles Disney, who earned her living as a mystery novelist. Her daughter and I were her child consultants. Her editor at Doubleday, Isabelle Taylor, would come to Plainville from time to time, and I remember eavesdropping on the conversations between author and editor and thinking, ‘Important things are being decided.’ During the many months of my recuperation, boxes would arrive from Isabelle filled with books she thought I might like to read.

I came to writing through that series of events — an illness that seemed downright tragic at the time, a friend of the family whose job it was to write stories, and an editor whose generosity kept me turning pages when I might otherwise have preferred to sulk.

Eventually, when work and kids and the undeniable fact that there were only 24 hours in every day caught up with me,I packed away my dance shoes and guitar and sheet music, and what I was left with was my pen, or more accurately my Smith Corona portable typewriter. I signed up for a class with the poet Brendan Galvin at Central Connecticut State University and never looked back.

I started writing poetry because my ‘life plan’ to write novels while my babies napped turned out to be fantasy and delusion. It’s still an advantage that poems are small things, mostly. But writing poems is a way of being in the world — observing it and being of it, at the same time — that is both endlessly challenging and satisfying.
I write because I must. If I go more than a day or two without putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, my mind and body are not fully engaged with each other or with the world. I’d swear my eyesight blurs, that I stop paying attention to details.

The kinds of teaching I do require that, too. Four afternoons a week I teach writing to high-school kids at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, a magnet school in Hartford. Every student I have walks through the door with stories, observations, ideas that are uniquely his or hers.

I also direct the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival’s Urban Outreach Program, conduct poetry workshops for Litchfield Performing Arts Poetry Live program, and I teach short fiction at the Center for Creative Youth, a residential summer program for artistically gifted high-school students at Wesleyan University. I teach or facilitate programs for adults in a variety of venues. I read at libraries, colleges and universities, bookstores; I publish (to date, three books of poetry, hundreds of poems in individual journals, an occasional newspaper article). I participated in a festival of one-woman shows in New York a few years ago, and that changed how I think about presenting work. I read in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in its first season and again in its 10th anniversary season a few years ago. To read in the Garden is, perhaps, the best of all possible places to read, and I never miss going to others’ readings unless I have to be out of town.

When my kids were 11, 12, and 2, our family moved to Saudi Arabia for five years. One of the ways in which I think about my life — both personally and as a writer — is to think about the moments and experiences that left me different. For reasons that remain a mystery, I felt more at home there than I have ever felt anywhere else. One of my current projects, more than 20 years after coming ‘home,’ is a book of short poems about Saudi Arabia. It’s taken me that long to figure out how I wanted to say what I wanted to say.

One of the things I really love about being older is the ability to see a larger whole. A 16-year-old student said to me the other day, ‘Did you ever stop to think about the fact that sometimes an entire life hinges on something that doesn’t seem at all significant at the time?’ She was talking about her life and how it had hinged entirely on the fact that someone had gotten a haircut and a shave and showed up at court on time. I was stunned that at 16 she had a full awareness of that remarkable truth. Of course, sometimes it’s a large and catastrophic event that changes a whole life obviously and in a moment.

That student couldn’t possibly have known that I think about that all the time, that these days I am preoccupied with it. That phenomenon that she articulated so easily is also something I’d like to ‘get down on paper.’ It’s a process. I’m certain it will be finished at some point — at least as a writing project. If I’m lucky when I get to the end, I may have created something that’s useful beyond whatever its use has been to me in getting from here to there, from now until then.

Elisa Tenenbaum, Farmington
Painter, illustrator, adjunct professor at Northwest Connecticut Community College

The paintings I’ve been doing for most of my career are moody landscapes in oil, but I’m embarking on some new work: I’m painting on hubcaps. I’ve always liked the shapes, and some of the elaborate ones that have a frame around them. I just got a bunch of them and am going to do traditional images within them. I like the irony of the context, putting something traditional into contemporary, utilitarian objects. I have throughout my career of painting gone back and forth with botanicals, and even some photography. I can even see doing a landscape on some of these wheel covers, or even Medieval studies.

I was raised in Atlanta and attended public schools, and I was always drawing, I loved the activity of drawing and I loved escaping into that world and the privacy of it. I had the idea in my head as early as first grade that I was going to be an artist when I grew up.

Being an artist is a vocation more than a career choice — you don’t choose it, it chooses you. But you have to pursue it, you have to work at it.

I moved to Connecticut to get my master’s degree at the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford, and I just fell in love with New England. I’m a big advocate of this area. I like the beauty and the history and the emphasis on education, and I feel like I’m surrounded by people who think like me. Some of my first landscapes were done from the cornfields in Wethersfield, with the dirt road running through them. I’m a studio painter, so I really reinvent what I’ve seen, take the gist and the mood of it. These landscapes could almost be anywhere; they are a memory of a place.

The most influential thing in the way my work is composed is that I have an identical twin. A lot of my work has a sense of symmetry to it, and I think being born with a mirror image makes that happen. She’s in Atlanta, and she can’t even draw a stick figure. We are really the right hand and the left hand. I’m always aware of the other half and using it to be complete.

The actual process of visual problem-solving is very satisfying, going between the planned and the unplanned. It’s a thrill and a kind of high to create something that works, and it’s exciting when something surprising happens in the work that seems to come out of nowhere. It’s extremely satisfying and meaningful, too, when the viewer has a connection with the work. My work starts with a visual idea that I want to see expressed. There’s a strong desire to create the image that is in the mind. That image creates the next one, and that becomes obsessive.

When I finished with art school, I did a million different odd jobs for money, and always spent time on my art. I worked at The Hartford Courant for a while as the associate designer of Northeast magazine, where I learned a lot about the world of illustration.Tthen I left The Courant and was able to branch out and do freelance illustration. I was very focused on being able to paint full-time and just pounded the pavement. I hooked up with the Chase Gallery [a contemporary art gallery in Boston] and I was with them for 17 years. I was able to make a living because Boston is a big art market, and at one point I was with six or seven different galleries throughout the country. I was at the easel 35 hours a week, and I felt I accomplished much more than I ever thought I was going to. But I got sort of burned out.

I’m now teaching part-time at Northwest Community College and painting and doing some illustration. I did some textbook pages for Holt Rinehart for an English literature book, and Max’s Restaurant group is using one of my paintings for a wine label.

I live here but I have to say I haven’t had a lot of work here as far as sales and jobs. Now I work almost exclusively by commission. All the illustration jobs I’ve done were for the Boston Globe and The New York Times and 90 percent of my paintings that I’ve sold were sold out of state. However, Connecticut is such a lovely place to live and work, and as long as I’m able to sell my work other places, it will continue to work out.

Jane Gordon is a frequent contributor to Seasons