Carol Staub’s art career is only 15 years old, but the abstract painter’s work displays the sophistication of someone who has devoted several decades to her art.
From the moment she began painting, Staub considered herself a professional artist, and acted accordingly. She was still learning her craft and developing a style when she placed third in her very first art competition, in 2000. A couple hundred shows and some 80 awards later, Staub boasts a resume that would make any artist proud.
A year-round Port St Lucie resident, Staub is also in the enviable position of being represented by five galleries in four states. In Florida, her work is currently on display at Gallery 14 in downtown Vero Beach.
At the turn of this century Staub was recently retired from a 26-year career in ground support with Delta airlines, and was using her newfound leisure time to redo her Somerset, NJ, home. When she couldn’t find the right decoration for one of the walls, she decided to create a sculptural something herself.
Staub headed to a local building supply store to find inspiration; she still loves to browse hardware and home supply outlets for materials. Plastic plumbing pipe filled the need on that occasion. Staub cut the pipe into a variety of lengths, enclosing each in a fabric sleeve that she whipped up on her sewing machine.
“I made a sculpture by tying them all together with ribbons and chains,” she says. “The idea just came to me.”
Staub insists that “ever since day one,” she has considered herself a professional artist. That certitude, along with a talent for making do learned in childhood and organizational skills honed during her time with Delta, is the great secret of her success.
“I don’t start anything without finishing it, or studying about it, or following through,” she says.
Today, Staub’s mixed-media works currently at the downtown Vero gallery combine her interest in two very different mediums: metals and water color.
That first work for her living room decor prompted her to want to explore her creative side, and she signed up for classes in metalsmithing.
“I started designing one-of-a-kind jewelry which I sold and thought that was my passion.”
At a friend’s urging, Staub enrolled in a watercolor class, even though she protested at the time that she couldn’t “even draw a stick.”
“The minute I saw the watercolor move on the paper, I was hooked. It’s like magic in itself,” she says.
She has been painting ever since.
Staub insists she feels grateful that she learned to work metal before taking up the brush because it encouraged her to incorporate scraps of metal and later, other materials into her paintings.
Her interest in mixed media eventually led her to create sculptural assemblage and artist’s books that are ornamented inside and out with found-object collage.
For Staub, part of the joy of creating is in collecting the stuff of which her art is made.
“I’m not really a hoarder, but I do have a lot of things. But they are all in their place,” she says.
Those very precise places are in various rooms of her studio, which takes up an entire house in the same Port St. Lucie neighborhood as the home she shares with her husband Bill.
The studio is a miracle of organization. In her painting room, a gleaming Formica-topped table provides ample workspace for more than one in-progress painting.
Close by, an impressive assortment of specialty papers are clipped to hangers on a metal clothes rack.
On a counter behind the table, bottles of acrylic paint stand color-coded on stepped shelves; in front of them, canisters bristle with brushes, scissors, pliers and other hand tools.
The studio also boasts an arsenal of power saws, glue guns, mat cutters, a book press and other equipment. A bank of flat files holds her collection of objects for assemblage. Trays within the drawers organize everything from cork stoppers to skeleton keys, watch faces to washers, wooden spindles to seashells.
Staub’s talent for organization also helps with the business end of fine art: entering competitions, shipping work and keeping track of inventory.
That’s no mean feat. Since 2000 she has completed 1,086 artworks and shown in hundreds of exhibitions, both in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to Gallery 14, Staub is represented by galleries in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Delaware. Between sales through those outlets and her own efforts, a fair number of Staub’s paintings have entered museum, corporate and private collections.
On display at Gallery 14, Carol Staub’s abstract mixed-media paintings on paper and canvas are “totally different from what any of the partners do,” says the gallery’s president, Lila Blakeslee.
“Her work is what I envisioned would bring Gallery 14 to the next level.”
Blakeslee first saw Staub’s work – and the prizes she was consistently awarded for it – at Art by the Sea, the popular annual Vero Beach Art Club exhibition held at the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
Gallery 14 was looking to expand its horizons by featuring work by guest artists in addition to that of its nine artist partners, Blakeslee says. After Staub’s initial guest show at Gallery 14 proved successful in terms of sales, she was accepted as one of the seven artists that the gallery represents.
That was four or five years ago, says Blakeslee. Staub’s work has been on continuous display at the gallery ever since.
Staub’s brand of sophisticated abstraction draws inspiration from the work of the late Catalan artist, Antoni Tàpies, who died three years ago at age 88; he last showed at New York’s Pace Wildenstein Gallery in 2007.
Staub learned of the artist about seven years ago when she saw a catalog of Tàpies’ paintings in a mixed media workshop.
“That’s how I got hooked. I looked at the book and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a guy after my own heart,” she says.
Staub was already working in a non-objective style, but the example of Tàpies’ work, with its muted colors, bold calligraphic marks, grainy textures and an assortment of smears, blotches and fingerprints, struck a chord.
Tàpies was one of the first European artists to incorporate such non-art substances as marble dust, waste paper, string and rags into his abstract paintings.
Staub appreciates the earthy palette and tactile quality of Tàpies’ work, as well as his re-purposing of cast-off materials.
Her paintings relate to the rural Delaware landscape in which she spent her childhood. The subtle hues and tactile qualities of the country are found in her works: the rutted, dun-colored roads, the scaly russet of steel long exposed to the weather, the umber corrugation of freshly plowed fields.
The viewer will look in vain, however, for literal representations of the country; Staub wants her paintings to elicit not a visual recognition of familiar themes in landscape paintings, but a visceral response to color, texture and shape.
Even more, perhaps, Staub wants to represent to her audience the rustic values of self-reliance and thrift that were instilled in her as a child; her father was a plumber by trade and her mother was a professional seamstress.
“This piece is called ‘Waste Not, Want Not’,” Staub says, gesturing to a large canvas that hangs high on one of her spacious studio’s walls.
The black, white and umber painting features a surface arrangement of tubular white forms that, in a previous incarnation, were the cardboard cores of toilet tissue and paper towel rolls.
The group show continues through the month of July but during the gallery’s summer hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. There is a reception during the Friday art stroll from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.