Tucked away in a 100-year-old log cabin on Vero’s west side, Cabin Fever Art Studios is home base to four professional women who have chosen art as a second career. Elise Geary, physician; Margaret Goembel, retired intelligence community project director; and Andrea Lazar, professional chef, all of whom live beachside, connected with cabin owner and retired research psychologist and professor Catherine Musham. Together, they became an artistic force to be reckoned with.
“It started kind of half-heartedly four years ago, when my husband and I bought the cabin,” says Musham. “But it really came into fruition when Margaret and Andrea and Elise joined me.”
Although all have distinct styles, the artists have one thing in common: they met through classes at the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
Elise Geary, a semi-retired dermatologist who has been a permanent resident of Vero since 2010, cites the VBMA’s “high caliber classes for advanced students” as one of the reasons Vero is a “fabulous” place to be a painter.
“Without the museum, the four of us wouldn’t have gotten together as a group,” she says.
VMBA teachers who have inspired the women include Kathy Staiger, “a wonderful mentor,” says Musham; Elise Carter who taught Lazar “how to do eyes,” she says; and sculptor Baxter Raines.
“I took every class he ever gave,” says Goembel.
And Geary, Lazar and Musham, all painters, have all taken studio classes at the museum with Deborah Gooch, a painter who combines both abstract and representational elements in her work.
“We’ve taken classes with Deb, repeatedly,” says Musham. “We wanted to call ourselves the Goochettes, but Deb didn’t think that was a good idea.”
General laughter at the remark conveys the group’s ready sense of fun.
Goembel, who works in assemblage using shells, driftwood and interesting debris that she finds on the beach, is the most recent addition to the group.
“Elise Geary is a very dear friend and neighbor,” says Goembel. “I had been looking all over the county, really, for a very low-key place where I could come in and do whatever I needed to.”
Then Geary sent her an email declaring, “Oh, Margaret, I think I’ve found the place for you!”
And Goembel was brought into the fold.
Until she moved in, her space in the cabin was a bedroom used for storage. Now, thanks to Goembel’s organization skills, the room looks like a seashell collector’s dream. Her shells are sorted by type and size, some filling clear vases and arrayed on shelves like specimens rather than art materials.
Goembel’s assemblages hang on the walls of the room, each displaying a bounty of natural textures and shapes.
“I’ve always loved the coast,” Goembel says. “I love the tactile sensation of picking things up. The shells don’t have to be perfect; in fact, it’s when they are sort of damaged that they have a personality that speaks to me.”
As a Cabin Fever studio member, Goembel has found the laid-back atmosphere she was searching for.
“We each have a key, we don’t have any set hours, and we just come when we can. I refer to it as ‘Hair and make-up not required,’ ” she says.
Having grown up on a dairy farm in New Jersey, Goembel also appreciates “the aesthetics of having a screen door that slams.”
Lazar is another former farm girl. In the 1940s her father and California-born mother returned to her paternal grandparents’ Ohio farm “to help out temporarily for 40 years,” she says.
“I loved living on a farm. It was a great way to be raised.”
Lazar’s current subject matter is farm animals: pigs, cows and chickens. The studio displays a selection of her paintings, including one that she based on a vintage photo snapped by her mother. It shows some fuzzy chicks in a long-ago brooding pen.
Lazar also works from her own photos to create her acrylic paintings. Among these are the portraits of a contented pig, “Clarence,” and a pointy-beaked Leghorn hen titled, “Don’t Make Me Come Over There.”
She mines the Internet for imagery, too. She gestures toward the likeness of a proud cockerel. “On that rooster, I couldn’t figure out how the tail feathers should lie, so just for fun I Googled ‘chicken butts.’”
Amid guffaws from her colleagues, Lazar coyly adds, “I had a million pictures to choose from.”
Catherine Musham also enjoys using animals in her paintings, both watercolors and oil and acrylic on canvas. Sometimes her subject matter is very specific – she did a series on llamas a while back. She works in an abstract style too, as the mood suits her. Lately she has been working on nonrepresentational compositions.
Musham cites American abstract painters Cy Twombly, Arshile Gorky and Ida Kohlmeyer as inspirations. “Kandinsky is probably my favorite,” she says of the Russian proto-abstractionist.
She also loves the paintings of the eccentric American visionary artist, Walter Anderson. Musham cites George Elliott: “There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.”
“‘The unmapped countries within us’: that’s my kind of approach to art, I think,” Musham says. “All artists are expressive. I like there to be a direct link to the unconscious.”
Musham admits that her “Envelope” series of watercolors connects strongly with her own unconscious. Each composition bears the image of a white envelope from which emerge emblematic places, people, and things.
“Envelopes explore the inside and the outside. It a very powerful symbol which is soon to become archaic,” she says.
To the relief, no doubt, of her studio mates, the retired psychologist adds, “I don’t analyze my own work. I don’t analyze other peoples’ work. But an art therapist would read these like Rorschach’s.”
Elise Geary graduated to pure abstraction after painting watercolor florals and landscapes. As a child in Michigan, she took art classes at Cranbrook Academy, but opted for a liberal arts education when it came time to go to college. From there she gravitated toward science and a pre-med degree. After completing a residency at Duke University, Geary went on to a nearly 30-year career in private practice in Durham, NC.
Geary took her first watercolor class in 1993, and continued to paint in that medium for 20 years before switching to acrylic on canvas.
Abstracts, she says, are harder to paint than representational works because “they don’t let you have an easy out.”
Geary explains that if a representational painting merely looks like what it is supposed to represent, it can be considered successful. Without a recognizable subject, an abstract painting must depend on the strength of the composition, the choice of palette, and the paint quality to get its point across.
“If it’s not 100% right, it isn’t good,” she says with conviction.
Time spent this summer in the Blue Ridge Mountains has inspired her very latest work. She says most of her abstracts start off as “a picture of something organic or in a landscape.”
Geary admires the work of local abstract painters Deborah Gooch and Tim Sanchez, who have had encouraging words for her. She is also inspired by American abstract artists Joan Mitchell, Wolf Kahn and Brian Rutenberg, but Geary stresses that inspiration should only go so far.
“You can like something, or appreciate something another artist is doing, without working like them,” she says.
That doesn’t mean that the Cabin Fever artists don’t influence one another. There’s a plus to having a group of simpatico associates in one place. “I can ask for an instant critique and get it,” says Geary.
“Working as a group, you feel like you’re showing stuff all the time,” says Musham. “Particularly if you’re showing it to someone you know will appreciate it.”