Howard Friedland is a Montana resident, but the two-person show featuring his paintings and those of his wife, Susan Blackwood, at the Highlands Art Gallery in Chester will include New Jersey landscapes, he assured NJ Jewish News in a phone interview.

Both painters travel a great deal; a trip to the Garden State last year yielded a trove of photos — nature scenes, historic sites, and even Cooper Mill in Morristown — "reference material," he said.

Less than two months before the show's opening, "we're still scrambling to get another six or seven paintings completed so we can ship them before we leave in August for France," where they both teach painting, he said.

Friedland described his own oils as "naturalistic, colorful, heavy on the brushstrokes. My style is impressionistic — my wife's too — but she is on the more realistic side. My style is looser," he said. Together they will present a range of subjects — not only the landscapes of the West, "which are spectacular," but still-lifes, European scenes, river and garden views, and flowers.

Born in 1945, Friedland, who grew up in the Bronx, has not always had the luxury to devote himself full time to painting. He attended New York's High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where he studied art but also learned to play drums, and The Cooper Union, where he majored in graphic design. After college, he worked as an art director for several Madison Avenue ad agencies.

On weekends, however, he hooked up with guitarist Jonathan Sachs, and both did backup for Arba'a Kolot (The Four Voices), a quartet of rabbinical and cantorial students at the Jewish Theological Seminary. "We were booked at synagogues and Jewish centers. I was not doing much painting in those days," Friedland said. The ensemble's numbers were based on Torah passages, "really putting liturgy to music — mostly rock." It was the '70s, after all, he said.

Not until the latter part of that decade did Friedland feel he could take up painting full time. "This is a tough market to make a living at," he said.

Moving to New Mexico, he studied and painted and sold his canvases — largely Western-themed — in galleries in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado.

He and Blackwood met and married 10 years ago and "our careers just took off. Our friends are thinking about retirement but we have so many opportunities," he said, his voice trailing off as he thought of the new house they bought in Montana with a studio for each of them, the NJ show — one of many museum and gallery exhibits planned in the near future — the tour they will lead in France, and their workshops. Business is good.

---