After a 30-year career as a home nursing aide, Hedy Diossy is ready for a change. Her new business, an after-school art program for children, combines her life-long interest in art with her love of helping others.
Designed for children 8 to 12, the program offers the opportunity to experiment with paint, pencil and clay while learning about the art of masters from Michelangelo to Murillo, Monet to Matisse.
While instruction in art technique will be provided, Diossy doesn’t want children who’ve just left school to feel they have to get back to “work” when they arrive at the studio, a sunlit room fronting 20th Street, two blocks west of 14th Ave.
“I really would like to have this as a fun place to come,” Diossy says. “A place for the parents to know that their children are safe, and where they will have fun.”
Diossy believes the key to providing an enjoyable and productive experience depends on paying attention to each child’s creative needs.
“Maybe some of them don’t care about painting; they want to do sculpting. I have air-dry clay. Some children might just want to draw. So I would like to inspire them individually in whatever way they want to express themselves, to give them a creative outlet.”
Further inspiration will come via monthly visits by guest artists, who will show the children examples of their work and answer questions.
In addition to nurturing the inner artist of each child, there will be sustenance in the form of healthy snacks, too, says Diossy.
The cost of the program depends on how often a child attends, with prices ranging from two days a week for $60 to five days for $100. Class size is limited to 10 children. Diossy also plans to offer a morning program for home-schooled children.
Diossy got the idea to offer her service after speaking with working parents who complained about the lack of supervised activities their children could engage in once they leave school for the day.
While the Vero Beach Museum of Art offers extensive art classes for children in the summer, activities during the year are limited to one Saturday a month and are not formal classes. And the Mardy Fish Foundation includes art in its Kids in Motion after-school programs, but the focus is mostly on physical exercise.
“We were talking about how many children would like to have art, but they don’t have after-school classes for that— their schools have sports, and they do maybe music,” Diossy says.
“I said, ‘My goodness, this would be the perfect scenario for me to be productive and do something that the community needs.’”
Diossy’s qualifications for teaching art to children include raising two artists, Ambrus and Istvan – Andy and Steve to their friends and clients. Both brothers turned their childhood enthusiasm for art into bread-and-butter careers.
Steve Diossy is known for his 1999 design for Florida’s “Protect Wild Dolphins” specialty license plate. His business, Ofishulz Apparel Line, recently entered a partnership with a manufacturer in Miami to produce T-shirts featuring Steve’s anthropomorphized sea life – poker-playing groupers, cigar-chomping dolphins, swaggering swordfish and beer-chugging crabs.
Late last year Andy Diossy received a diploma in old master-style painting and drawing from the Angel Academy of Art in Florence, Italy. Andy often works with Steve on Ofishulz projects as well as his own line of graphics for clothing, decals and automotive accessories. His business, Ambrus Diossy Art and Design Works, keeps him traveling throughout the state.
Until recently, Steve and Andy shared the studio that is now the site of their mother’s after-school art program. Although framed examples of her sons’ art work remain on the walls of the studio (to inspire the children, says Hedy), the rest of the room has been given over to child-sized easels, a large work table, chairs and shelves brimming with art supplies: non-toxic acrylic paint sets, clay, sketchbooks, canvas board, brushes and clay modeling tools.
“I really want to take this to the level that the children feel they are little artists,” Diossy says.
Indeed, before her sons became big artists, they were tots who received not only praise and admiration from their mother but also art supplies, books about art and, perhaps best of all, a role model. Starting in infancy they watched their mother engage in her hobby of painting and sculpting in clay.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, Diossy began to draw and paint in childhood. Except for an after-school art program that she joyfully attended from age 8, she is self-taught. At 20, she married fellow Hungarian Ambrus Diossy and emigrated to the U.S., settling in Chicago. Son Andy was born there in 1973, followed by Steve, in 1975. (A daughter, Jonelle, or Joni, came along much later. Now 25 and enjoying life as an English teacher in China, Joni has affectionately advised her mother that there are already enough artists in the family.)
Marriage and the arrival of her children did not dampen Hedy Diossy’s love of art.
“Whenever I had a little time, I would make art. And actually the children – they were wonderful, because that’s how their interest came, by seeing how I do either the sculpture, or paint, or draw,” she says.
Diossy proudly adds that Andy was only one-and-a-half when he began making “little sketches that looked like little UFOs.”
As proof of her offsprings’ talent, a display of several juvenile masterpieces by Andy, Steve and Joni hang above a desk in the studio. Nearby a scrapbook bulges with other childish artworks – not only long-ago creations by her own brood, but also the more recent efforts of nieces and nephews and friends’ children. The lovingly compiled folio is proof of Diossy’s enduring interest in the human impulse to create.
Displaying some of the books that she will use to teach the children about art through the ages, Diossy marvels that at the dawn of human consciousness, prehistoric people were impelled to leave traces of their experience of the world through cave art.
“How important it is for us today to be able to express ourselves,” she says. “Art tells the story of our time. Who we were, what was important. Those are the things I think are very important.”
As for what’s important for Diossy, now that her children are grown, the studio may be the best representation.
“This is a wonderful time in my life. I am able to do what I am really passionate about,” Diossy says.
“It is important for children to learn about art, practice art, so they will grow up with an appreciation for culture.”
