by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

October 23, 2008

Joanie Schwarz has a knowing look as she witnesses other people’s reactions to her artwork. With so many people — herself among them — feeling stressed these days, she says she delights in the “oohs” and “aahs” her work elicits.

She describes her solo show opening in Simply, a gallery and shop in Cranford, on Oct. 24 as art “that promises to make you smile,” and she makes good on that promise. Her images are of brand-new life —babies still scrunched up from the womb and closed-eyed puppies with velvet muzzles.

Schwarz and her husband, Don Rosenthal, live in Westfield with their two sons. He is treasurer of the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey; she is a board member and serves on the Women’s Campaign’s executive committee and as its education and outreach chair. This past May she received the Rhoda Rosenbach Young Leadership Award. In her art, as in her community activism, she identifies spiritual values as a key motivation.

The family belongs to the Conservative synagogue Congregation Beth Israel in Scotch Plains, whose rabbi is George Nudell.

“Our rabbi says it’s important to tell our stories,” Schwarz said. “This is my way of doing that.”

The pictures of babies in the exhibit, “Pictures To Make You Smile,” are part of a book she is compiling. After photographing their infants, she has been inviting the mothers to write a response to the statement: “With motherhood comes faith.” She said, “Becoming a parent is such a life-changing event. I’m fascinated by what strength you can learn from other mothers.”

Some of her landscape paintings will be on display too, but they are soft-focus and dreamy enough to blend with the newborns. In some cases the two subjects are combined, in what she calls “digital painting,” couching the babies or the dogs among fields and trees, always with a hint of a path to somewhere.

In the gallery, what makes the viewers’ responses even more audible is the size of her pictures. Instead of limiting them to the small format usually used for such endearing subject matter, she makes them big — larger than life size. Organizing the framing with gallery owner Gary Fletcher, she asked, “Why wouldn’t you want to be able to look up and see that image on your wall?”

Fletcher has been a framer and art and design consultant for 17 years, working with private clients and also with show business clients like MTV, VH1, ABC, and the Viacom network. He lives in Plainfield, and opened the Simply gallery and frame store in Cranford in May.

In addition to artwork and frame samples, it is stocked with gift items: jewelry and glass and pottery. He isn’t a parent himself, but from serving as birth coach with two very close friends, he knew how awe-inspiring the sight of new life can be.

“Joanie’s work makes people happy, and with the way things are these days, I’m really happy to be able to offer them that,” he said.

Schwarz is the daughter of photographer and author Adele Aron Greenspun. She grew up around pictures, learning to develop them in her mother’s dark room. But unlike a lot of photographers, she could also draw and paint. In completing an art degree at Syracuse University, she had to build bridges of her own between the two forms of creativity, showing that they didn’t have to be mutually exclusive.

She went on to become an illustrator, using computer collage techniques to mix her media and worked with her mother on a number of children’s books. For a while she turned to traditional basics, with oil paint landscapes, but then plunged back into the possibilities offered by new technology.

This past summer Schwarz studied with a photographer she reveres, Joyce Tenneson, and completed the studies inspired to start on her book about newborn babies.

She put out word, inviting people to arrange individual sessions with her, either in their own homes or in hers. She waived the sitting fee she normally charges for family or pet portraits in return for being able to pursue her own artistic vision rather than the clients’ requests. The results — so far — are these pictures that bring out the doting parent in everyone.

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