When Kim Weissenborn’s art students arrive for class, their senses are immediately engaged. The fireplace glows, jazz is softly playing and the aroma of coffee wafts in.
Weissenborn gets ready for her students without ever leaving her home. They come to her every Monday morning for a two-and-a-half hour watercolor lesson, welcomed with a rich dollop of camaraderie.
To hear Weissenborn talk, you’d think the pleasure was all hers.
“I learn more from them than they learn from me. I get so much inspiration from the things they do,” she says.
Six women students soon enter without knocking, lugging tote bags laden with art supplies. A couple of them bring mouthwatering treats to share. Soon they gather around the folding tables grouped into one big work surface in the dining room, where a large painting of a cow with wings presides over the assembly.
This group got started about three years ago, says Weissenborn, who also teaches a number of classes at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, including beginning and intermediate watercolor, portraiture in watercolor and art classes for home-schooled children. She also teaches in the DATA (Drug Abuse Treatment Association) program at the museum, where teens recovering from addiction create art with senior mentors.
Weissenborn began teaching from her home because she saw a need for an ongoing class for year-round residents. Four of her private students, Carol Bennett, Gini Espeland, Carla Gridley and Jill Klein, came to the group through Weissenborn’s museum classes, while Deanie Skaggs and Nancy Reichardt met Weissenborn at church.
There is a difference between Weissenborn’s museum classes and the instruction she presents in her dining room.
“This is more personal,” Weissenborn says, noting that her home class, which accommodates fewer people than the average museum offering, has perks beyond the complementary coffee and danish.
At the museum, she has a lesson plan that everyone follows during class. Her private group “is a little more laid back,” she says.
She does supply still-life arrangements of fruits and flowers and photocopies of other tempting subjects to get her students’ creative juices flowing, but students can bring their own inspiration as well. “The members all want to do their own thing, and they have the freedom to do that,” she says.
Comprised of strong women of a certain age, the group is a force to be reckoned with. Klein is a retired IRS law librarian. For more than 30 years, Reichardt worked in information technology for the City of Vero Beach. Gridley taught art at Highland Elementary School, and Skaggs taught elementary and special education in Dade County while her husband was in medical school.
The secret to gaining admittance to the exclusive club is simple, says Reichardt. “You don’t have to be good, but you have to be nice.” She means, of course, that you don’t have to be an “A” student to join, but you absolutely must be able to play well with others.
Gazing at the assembled group of women, each bending over her work while chatting happily with her neighbors, Weissenborn agrees.
“The comfort that the students feel with each other comes with time,” she says. As a teacher with nearly three decades of experience working with artistic people, she says that she never takes group harmony for granted.
“There’s definitely a dynamic in a class. If it doesn’t work …,” she says, then hesitates. “But it’s always worked,” she admits.
Of the present company she says, “They’re very different, and yet they all love each other.”
Weissenborn strolls over to the work table and glances at her students’ progress.
“I like it ladies! You’re experimenting. Just don’t do the usual. Do something outside the box!”
Weissenborn’s student days were spent at Parson’s School of Design in Manhattan. There she earned a BFA majoring in illustration. She is known here in Vero Beach for the delightful illustrations she did for island author Cynthia Bardes’s first children’s book, “Pansy at the Palace,” in which a plucky poodle investigates a jewelry theft at a posh Beverly Hills hotel.
Weissenborn says that she did not jump right into an illustration career fresh out of college.
“I was such a late bloomer. I moved back home with mom and dad in Chatham, NJ, worked with a little gallery, painted portraits of all the people in town,” she says.
She taught adults in night classes at the local high school and gave classes at home, too.
She married at age 29 and moved to Scottsdale, AZ, where her husband, Ney Lopez, was getting an undergraduate degree in anthropology at Arizona State University. The couple then moved to Lopez’s home country of Bolivia for a couple years, where they lived near his family.
Their next landing place was Vero Beach, where they arrived 19 years ago. At that time, Kim’s parents, Alex and Shirley Weissenborn, were already settled here. Lopez became the owner of the Pak-Mail franchise west of town (he closed the business a couple years ago.) He and Kim settled in mainland Vero to raise their three sons: Gideon, 24, Gabriel, 22 and Elijah, 12.
“My life is here. I’ve got my friends and I’ve got my work. I really love being near my family,” says Weissenborn.
Striding to the worktable, she commands the students to group their work on the floor for a brief critique.
“Oh, these are gorgeous, wow! Fast little paintings!” she exclaims to the group, and proceeds to tease out comments about which of their watercolors looks most finished, and why.
Back at the table, the women compare notes about the reasons they are there.
“If it weren’t for Kim, I wouldn’t have done this,” says Jill Klein, as she flashes examples of her watercolor flower studies on her iPad. “She’s just very inspirational.”
“There aren’t that many things in life that are like that, where you get lost in the process,” says Skaggs. “It’s not the product but the process.”
“I’ve been piddling around (with art) since I was a child,” says Bennett. She decided to get serious about her painting after she and her husband retired in Vero. Her study with Weissenborn awakened her to her potential, she says.
“It was dramatic to realize what I could do.”
Bennett is a regular exhibitor at Lighthouse Art & Framing. She, as well as Espeland, Klein and Reichardt, have shown at other venues around town, including the Indian River County library and court house. Klein won third place in watercolor at the Art Club’s Art by the Sea exhibition in 2012.
“I tell them, ‘You don’t need me anymore,’” says Weissenborn. “I don’t know why they keep coming here. But as long as they’re willing to come, they’re welcome.”
