The Newsmagazine of Long Beach Island and Southern Ocean County
By Victoria Ford | on August 18, 2022
Artists participating in last weekend’s LBI Artists Open Studio and Gallery Tour talked about how perspective shifts over time and how their life experiences, choices and memories have informed their work.
Barnegat Light’s Chris Pfeil doesn’t consider himself a “nature photographer,” per se.
“It’s more my environment,” he said. “If I were somewhere else, if I lived in the city, it would be something else. It’s just something that’s there and I love to see, and it’s an escape, in a sense.”
Pfeil was hanging out in a back room at m.t. burton gallery in Surf City, representing his dramatic images, displayed in large prints. Known as a bit of a “lone wolf,” he does enjoy the odd public appearance to answer questions about his images, he said, because it gives him food for thought about his art form. The more he talks about it, the better he understands his own process, which makes the process better and improves how he talks about his work.
Pfeil studied photography at Stockton College (now University), where he learned the basics of creating a balanced image; he practiced street photography and surf photography. His style has changed and refined itself dramatically over the years to what he’s recognized for today – striking, often stark, moody, black-and-white wide shots of waves, marshlands, birds – but he’s still using the same principles to keep a viewer looking “around” the frame.
Even when the subject is simple, he said, more is going on. Eyes can roam the open space and keep coming back to the focal point.
He pointed to a rare color image in the grouping – foxes at play. They’re just cute, he said, with each one doing a different thing.
“I’m trying to get more into representing color in my own way,” he said.
His secret to getting the perfect shot is patience plus experience – that is, knowing when a setup is just too good to pass up.
“A lot of it’s just luck,” he continued. “But the eye becomes more keen. I’ll be driving and I’ll see something different in my peripheral and just look.” Or he’ll be on his boat or walking on the beach at the times of year when certain hawks start coming through.
He paused to greet a woman he knows – a friend of his mother’s – who pulled out her phone to show him a photo of his artwork hanging in her living room.
That’s a great feeling, he agreed, like when friends of his who work in construction on Island homes see his stuff hanging up and let him know about it. When he was a kid growing up in Cranford, the cool kids came back from the shore wearing shirts from Freedom Surf Shop. Now he sees kids wearing his images on shirts, and he’s psyched and humbled.
“It’s kinda cool to think that people buy my shirts,” he said.
He calculated he’s been shooting for about 30 years and then took a moment to let that sink in.
“I’m that river that’s sort of slowed down,” he said. Certain perfect circumstances he can’t chase. Instead, he has trained himself to recognize the perfect circumstances when they appear.
“Getting (an egret) landing like that, it just doesn’t always happen,” he said.
He never gets overly excited about a shot until he gets it on his computer screen to see it up close. The editing process is where the celebrating happens. And after a day of shooting surf, for example, he’s happy to share his best work.
“They (surfers) are happy to get good shots, and I’m happy to give them to them, because it’s exciting. It’s a present for both of us.”
And if he gets a great new wave shot to add to the gallery, all the better.
He paints houses for a living and shoots and sells his work when he can.
Outside under a tent, Matt Burton was getting acquainted with his new-to-him antique pottery wheel, which was dropped off by someone who had found it in a garage; its origin is unknown. He often gets secondhand offers and doesn’t have room to take them all, but he loved the lightweight, portable aspect of the mystery wheel. Given it’s “very manageable, compared to the other wheels,” he said, he figured it would be handy for outdoor shows and demonstrations.
Burton and his team tried to research its history but didn’t get far.
Powered by a little Dayton motor, the wheel had come to him in working condition but in need of serious TLC, so Burton and his shop assistant Henrik Tolrey set about refurbishing it – sans YouTube tutorial or instruction manual, as no clues to a manufacturer could be found online. They cleaned it up, painted it, replaced the belts and hardware.
The simplicity of its construction, plus the clever design of the foot pedal (a stick-and-rope accelerator) leads them to believe, after consulting a Facebook group of learned potters, it was a homemade engineering job. When it arrived, they had to puzzle out the assembly and operation.
“Today is the first day I’ve used it,” he said.
Burton was one of the main organizers of the Open Studio Tour prior to 2022. Originally it was run by Mary Tantillo of SwellColors Glass Studio “for the longest time,” Burton recalled. The Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences handled it for a while; then Burton formed the LBI Arts Council, which is when “we took it over and really put a lot of money into it” to make posters, maps and other printed materials.
During the pandemic he directed more energy into his studio work and saw an increase in demand, so last year he decided it was time to hand over the reins.
Saturday at his spot on the corner of 19th Street and the Boulevard, Burton had a couple of perennial tour participants, painters John Meehan and Alice McEnerney Cook, working at their easels in front of the gallery. Meanwhile inside, first-timer James Crispo, an oil painter in the realism/hyperrealism style, and Chris Pfeil were meeting and chatting with art lovers.
Crispo lives in Raritan and Beach Haven West, newly retired from pharmaceutical advertising. He had attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City with a plan to paint and illustrate. But “the money wasn’t there” and he had a family early, so he went into commercial art, where he prospered. He picked his paintbrushes back up about five years ago, transitioning from acrylics to oils.
“Once I switched over, I threw the acrylics away,” he said.
Crispo’s inspirations are wildlife and a mix of subject matter from tropical fish to custom pet portraits. His tendency is to tighten down on details, but in retirement he’s learning the art of letting go.
“I’m making a conscious effort to loosen up more,” he said.
Recent work is more expressive, stylized, his version of what he saw in real life and “what I feel it warrants, with what I want to pull through.
“A lot of it has to do with I love nature, being outside,” he said. He’ll paint en plein air (and/or shoot his own photos for reference and take them back in the studio) on panel or canvas, working in layers, with glazes. The more complex and detailed the paintings, the more layers they have.
About 15 of his works hang in Burton’s gallery.
Some may recognize Viking Village boats, other local scenery, or the simple relatability of a little boy staring out at the ocean.
“One’s Out” – a handsome, if defensive-looking crab – depicts that moment when everybody’s scrambling because one crab is out of the basket. “You don’t want to lose it, but you also don’t want to get pinched,” he said with a laugh.
Crispo said he enjoys getting feedback, both positive and negative. A byproduct of his profession was becoming very comfortable with critique.
THE GANG: (From left) Anita Pfeil, Joan Gantz, Carol Nussbaum and Elizabeth Ventura (Photo by Victoria Ford)
“You learn something every time you talk to somebody,” he said.
Pfeil’s mother, jewelry maker/knitter/fiber artist Anita Pfeil of Loveladies, was found hanging out in a breezeway under the home of abstract painter Joan Gantz in Harvey Cedars.
“I’ve been knitting since I was 5,” she said. Her love of sewing and textiles led her to make and design handbags, jackets and other garments over the years, but nowadays she focuses on knitting. Her wearable pieces are elegant, with lines moving in fluid, organic ways – a look she called a butterfly effect.
“It’s something I can take on a plane, on a beach, listen to a book on my AirPods and just do my thing,” she said.
Gantz was on the team of three, along with Carol Nussbaum and Fred Ballet, that took over the job of organizing the Open Studio and Gallery Tour. Nussbaum was also stationed at Gantz’s house, displaying her manipulated photo mandalas. And another abstract painter, Elizabeth Ventura of Loveladies, joined them for the first time this year.
(Photo by Victoria Ford, art by Joan Gantz)
“We have a good vibe here,” Gantz said.
Nussbaum took the lead on the organizing, and Gantz was her “first mate,” she explained.
Gantz’s story follows an arc similar to that of Crispo and others. Originally, she wanted to pursue fine art but realized, “Nobody’s gonna pay your way, girl. Better get a job.” She was a critical care nurse for 12 years and found her way back to art via various mediums. She took watercolor classes at night. She also helped mosaic the exterior of Firefly Gallery in Surf City.
“Art is art,” she said. “It’s all color, design. It’s proportion. It’s all those basic elements you just keep going back to.”
A 10-year span of work on display around her property shows her progression from representational studies to energetic abstracts.
“I do it as a discipline,” she explained. Some days go great, and others are like, “Why do I do this?”
It’s all a process of opening up, she said. “You’re also changing as you age and grow as an artist, the things you see.”
The urge to create always starts with an idea, Ventura interjected. (They had been discussing the same topic earlier.) The spark may come from a Bible verse, a closet reorganization project or, as in one example Ventura pointed out, crumbling infrastructure.
(Photo by Victoria Ford, art by Elizabeth Ventura)
Her “Ode to Cement in the Subway” was inspired by an “amazing crack” she observed, and she “could not get that image out of my head.” It had a beauty she wanted to recapture from her memory.
Ventura started as a plein air artist before she got into pastels, she said, then graduated to acrylic and oil paint.
“I do love plein air because I love being out in nature, and I love being in the moment, but you can’t always be out,” she said. When she brings images from outdoors in, abstraction and the use of line are how she re-creates the feeling she had. The goal is to put the viewer in the same space, visually and emotionally.
Line can be quite literal, she said. The eye will follow. A line is directional; it has movement, carrying with it human gesture and emotion. A line can be expressive. A line can be a lightning bolt or water.
For Nussbaum, the art she’s making now is a product of all her life experiences up to this point. When someone asks, “How long did it take you to do this?” her answer is her age: “I say it took me 65 years.”
As a little girl she loved kaleidoscopes, fascinated by their repetitive patterns. Later she attended Skidmore College in New York for photography, where she put her own spin on assignments. On a walk through the woods to photograph trees, she would look at the roots, the bark, the leaves. When she looks at buildings, she said, her eyes go to the trim work and other details.
She built a career as an art director in New York City, but she always circled back to photography. In the early ’90s she put her film camera down and picked up a digital point-and-shoot.
“I didn’t want to be a dinosaur,” she said. A learner-by-doing, her motto is throw yourself in and take a risk.
For her mandalas, she starts with an original image, maybe a pile of candy wrappers. Then she slices it up and plays with it in Photoshop, trusting herself to find the “x” factor.
“I’m confident the image has something, or I wouldn’t have taken it to begin with,” she said. Sometimes she strips away the color to see what emerges.
She started identifying her geometric artworks as mandalas around 2012, she recalled, in an early web bio, before it was really part of the mainstream and right around the time she started practicing yoga.
“All of my art led me to this,” she said. But she won’t give away all her secrets. “That’s movie magic,” she said.
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