Artists Among Us

Story by Jane Gordon | Photo by Julie Bidwell

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. Jim Chapdelaine, who has won Emmy awards for his work on the History Channel and for PBS, has played with and produced for musicians including Jon Pousette-Dart and Phoebe Snow, is also known for his mixing and mastering talents, and has been quietly working out of his West Hartford studio for years. “I happen to like it here,” he says. Robert Benson, one of a small, select group of the nation’s top photographers for architecture and design, feels much the same way. Once he had established himself in the business and attracted clients from throughout the country, he asked himself a question. “I said to myself, ‘Why uproot and start somewhere else?’ ” He couldn’t find a good reason, and West Hartford remains his creative home. Jewelry designer and goldsmith Judith Kaufman, who lives in West Hartford with her family and maintains a studio in West Hartford Center, grew up in Newington and began her career repairing jewelry at shops including Hartford’s Lux Bond & Green. Long since on her own, her designs have taken her to some of the country’s most prestigious juried craft shows. “I love doing the work,” Kaufman says, “and the next piece is always the challenge.”

Jim Chapdelaine
Songwriter, guitarist, music producer

I was raised in West Suffield, and I have pictures of me when I was 2 holding a ukulele and I don’t know that I ever put one down. I have 70 or 80 guitars and every imaginable stringed instrument you can think of, so I have had the advantage of knowing what I wanted to do since I was 2 or 3.

My dad had always been musical, though I didn’t realize that until toward the end of his life. He played the chromonica, a harmonica with a chromatic button, and he was also a big-band kind of singer, but he never did anything with it. He was a typical World War II kind of guy, a product of the Depression who wanted to move out of the city and get a house in the suburbs and have kids, work, mow his lawn and follow the Red Sox. I do remember him sitting gleefully one time when I was playing at the Bushnell – somebody had written a symphony in which I played electric guitar with the Hartford Symphony – and my Dad did get to go to that and I know he was very proud.

In West Suffield, there was no path for a guitar player other than one you would carve yourself. I became elected chairman of the student council so I could book my band for all the dances. I was in band starting in sixth grade, and then started my own band.

After high school, I took a mistaken route to Central Connecticut State where I was the only person to major in classical guitar. I was much more of a jazz guitar player, a country guitar player. When I was halfway through, I was recruited by these 40-year-old country guys to play in their band. I played, I quit college. I found my footing and went to Berklee College of Music in Boston for a couple of years, and took a year off to study with a guitar player, Pat Metheny. During that year, I got cancer. That sort of steeled my will with regards to doing exactly what I wanted to do.

Three days after chemotherapy ended, I got a phone call to go on the road with a band. I had been studying with Pat for a long time, and I just had to go out and do it. I went on the road six nights a week and that was it, I haven’t looked back.

I played in a cover band — you’re playing other people’s material, popular hits — named Dancing With Henry. We actually were a very successful band. I was able to buy a house and more importantly, my plan was to move over to original music, and I did that. I built a little recording studio and started doing local jingles and stuff like that, and that eventually led into national jingles like one for the Army National Guard.

When I was a kid my favorite band was the Wild Weeds, a local band featuring a guitar player named Big Al Anderson, who joined NRBQ. He moved to Nashville – he’s a songwriter and guitar player and great guy – and I’m actually in Al’s band now and that’s kind of a dream come true. I’ve produced Phoebe Snow and the Pousette-Dart Band.

I teach – very part-time – recording and production techniques, but I still sort of see myself as a guitar player/writer.

I also just wrote legislation for the state of Connecticut that passed the House and Senate, and got vetoed by the governor. It would have been very similar to film tax credits, except much broader and specific to music recording and production. This would have created fertile soil for this industry to grow, kept young people in the state, and created all kinds of peripheral industry.

I love what I do, and I guess the other part of it is to continually develop new skills. I do a lot of mastering of records and mixing records. I write music for documentaries for PBS quite a bit as well as for the History Channel, and right now I’m doing three one-hour documentaries for them. I have four Emmy awards for that stuff and two more nominations this year. In fact, last year Jon Pousette-Dart had a couple of Grammy nominations for the last album I produced for him.

When I do good work, the satisfaction can come in any number of ways. It can come from playing a great gig, or a cool solo during that gig, or finding a new instrument. It can come with peer recognition, and having the people who employ me telling me I’m doing a great job. Or I could be sitting in a room with a guitar and have a great moment. That’s still part of it, even though that used to be the whole thing.

I was a little older when I got married, because I had been sick and didn’t want to saddle anyone with this. I was as surprised as anyone when I got married, but boy, am I happy I did. I have a wonderful 9-year-old daughter; my daughter is the coolest kid ever and knows every Beatles song and Alison Krauss song and I wish I had her talent.

Last year I had a great offer to move to Nashville and make more money than I’ve ever made here, but I happen to like it here. But because of that, I’ve had to develop new skills so I’ve had to wear a lot of hats. I think of it as all coming under one umbrella, and that’s being a musician. I had to adapt to the economy and the nature of being in this business in a small market. I had to do a lot of things to survive. Fortunately, I like to learn.

Judith Kaufman
Studio goldsmith

I was born and raised in Newington. A friend of my mother’s was a jewelry maker and she wanted to start teaching on her own in her basement. She asked my mother if she could borrow me and I took a six-week class with her. I was 16. I was kind of shy and that was good, because I could work by myself all the time. I started doing craft shows every weekend and any money I’d make, I would put back into tools.

I went to Newington High, and I was a silversmith then; everybody was wearing lots of silver. I used to make jewelry for a lot of Newington and Wethersfield High School friends. Every day, I would come home from school and fill out the orders.

When I finished school, I worked at a job shop doing repairs on Asylum Street with a plethora of very diverse people. It was all men — and me — at the bench. I was the gopher and the charm solderer and the trash bin emptier and the doughnut getter, lowest on the totem pole. It wasn’t fun. I was gluing a lot of pearls, and that was the most excitement I had there. But by then I had some bench experience, and I ended up getting a job at Lux Bond & Green in Hartford.

I had always gone out to a really cool place in Avon, the Farmington Valley Arts Center. I met a man named Jim Gagnon, a jeweler, and he had a studio, and I said to him, ‘If you ever leave, tell me, I want to be here.’ I just knew it was so right. A few years later, he called. I stayed at the Farmington Valley Arts Center for 17 years. My studio was open to the public seven days a week. On the weekends, people would come and sit around and watch me work, and talk. I was in the woods and it was very comfortable.

I moved to West Hartford, and moved my studio to West Hartford Center, soon after my kids came along. I work all the time. I like the quote, ‘Practice beats talent when talent doesn’t practice.’ I love doing the work, and the next piece is always the challenge. There’s joy in getting more and more beautiful materials to work with, using gold more freely and using it in a painterly fashion, and trying to get as loose with the material as possible and not be constricted by the intrinsic value of it.

I’ve been going out to Tucson to a stone show – it is immense, the whole city fills up with tens of thousands of stones, from suppliers all over the world, and they cut very special pieces too – and that’s what really brings in even more intrigue for me. The quality, too, comes from that.

I also love the process and I love to surprise myself with things I thought I couldn’t make. When it takes me a couple of hours to set up my booth at these shows, because it’s like going on stage, there are opening nights and galas and people come and it’s nice to see people wearing the work, that’s the reward.

Now I apply to juried exhibitions all over the country. About 2,000 people apply, and museum curators, gallery owners and artists who jury the work pick about 150 people for the exhibition. I do about eight shows a year now. I’ll do a show at the Smithsonian, I’ll do a Philadelphia Museum show, a Chicago exhibition, I go to New York and Palm Beach. It’s very hard to get into these, and I am always happy to be able to get in. I have a show in Westchester in October, run by a woman who does beautiful shows, Crafts America.

The work I do now is all one-of-a-kind high-carat gold. I don’t like 14 carat; it doesn’t look like gold to me. I use 18-carat yellow gold, sometimes I’ll use green and rose gold. I like to use 22-carat yellow gold a lot because it looks really good with stone; 24 carat is pure gold, 22 carat has a small amount of alloys but a beautiful, intense, rich hue. I’m very interested in having my work be visually appealing, balanced, even balanced in its asymmetry. It is like a collage in the way I approach it.

I wouldn’t want to work for anyone else. Three years ago I wasn’t so sure about all this, but I kept trusting it was going to be OK and that I would be able to make what I want. I’ve been putting one foot in front of the other for so long that it’s natural. I don’t want anyone else to tell me what to make, that’s for sure.

Robert Benson
Architectural and design photographer

I came into photography at Boston College, when I got a job in the TV studio there while I was a student, and became enamored of that much more than what I was studying in the labs in biology classrooms. I fell in love with the independence of still photography and where I could go with that.

After school, I needed to put some equipment together, so I went to Florida. I researched the most influential photographers around and found guys whose vision was in line with mine and did what I could to meet them and study with them. I also went to the Rhode Island School of Design for a summer and the Parsons School of Design in a night class. The photographer most influential to me was Ernst Haas — he did a lot of color abstractions. I studied with him in several workshops and pushed myself as hard as I possibly could.

I came back and wanted to take some time off. My grandmother had bought a summer place in Old Lyme and I thought I could sneak a couple of weeks in before the season started and we had to rent it out. I went to collect unemployment in New London, and I told them I was a photographer, figuring they’d never find me a job. But an envelope appeared in the mail a few days later. They had found a job for me as an artist-in-residence at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. For the next year, I worked there. We would go out and teach in the schools part of the time and develop our portfolios the rest of the time. The people there were amazing and creative.

At the end of that year I took off and went with a sculptor who was part of the program. Together we bought motorcycles and toured Europe for three months on hardly any money at all. I came back and decided at that point I would be a ski bum. I went up to Aspen and got a job driving a bus and met the people who were developing the Aspen Art Museum. They hooked me up with the Colorado Council on the Arts, and I became a photographer-in-residence there. It was sort of amazing; I was stumbling into these things everywhere I went.

When I was in Colorado, they put me in Eagle County, which is Vail, one of the more glorious places on the planet. But when I had a day free, I would drive three-and-a-half hours to Denver. I didn’t want to shoot the mountains. I wanted to shoot manmade forms. I worked really hard learning how to light things and that separated me right away.

I stayed in Aspen a few years. One of my roommates was an architect and asked me to photograph a building. I went to shoot it, not having any idea how to shoot architecture. It ended up on the cover of a magazine.

When I came back from Colorado, I didn’t have any money so I started in Plainville, which is where I grew up. I thought I’d be in New York or Boston, but I made some good friends in the art community here and the business was going great guns. I worked for [The Hartford Courant’s] Northeast magazine quite a bit, then Connecticut magazine and then New England Monthly. I worked my way up to shooting for Smithsonian magazine.

I’m now working on a book about Italy. As the years went on and I worked, my knowledge of architecture grew immensely.

The thing about architectural photography is that you have to think on your feet all the time. How else do you get to go shoot Grand Central Station and go to the attic and be locked inside at 2 in the morning? Or shooting Radio City Music Hall, being locked in there and lighting it up and doing what I want to do with it. Light changing through the windows, people, cars, the environment. You’re finished at the end of the day and you’re tired and satisfied. I can’t think of a better job than that.

Jane Gordon is a frequent contributor to Seasons.