A show of works in the center room at Gallery14 features a recent transplant from Connecticut.
Painter and printmaker Valerie Cecire moved to Vero 18 months ago from her Westport home of 24 years. She joins another recent arrival from Ohio, Shelly Weltman, in a show called “Texture, Mystery and Emotion: Dramatic Paintings.”
The show pairs the hazily luminous paintings and monotypes of guest artist Cecire with the explosively vivid paintings of Weltman, a partner in Gallery 14.
Cecire’s decision to come to Florida from the region in which she had spent most of her adult life was two or three years in the making, she says.
An exploratory visit to the Sunshine State took her first down Florida’s west coast. Cecire “loved” Naples, but found summertime too hot. Switching coasts and traveling northward, she happened upon Vero Beach. It reminded her of Westport, she says, because both have limited high-rise development.
“There’s natural beauty, and you don’t have these big giant hotels on the beach, 25 stories high,” she says.
“I love the fact that (Vero has) a great art community, music, and theater,” she says. “Westport does not have a museum; it has an art guild and an art center.”
Then again, Westport “had New York City right there.”
Both nature and the big city have had comparable influences on Cecire’s art. Born in New Jersey, Cecire moved to New York City as her father was a Merchant Marine captain who came ashore to manage his own shipping business, operating a cargo terminal in Brooklyn.
After attending Endicott College in Beverly, MA, Cecire entered Finch College in New York City, earning a degree in art and English. A women’s college, Finch closed forever in 1976 – but not before garnering its share of celebrity alumnae including Tricia Nixon, Suzanne Pleshette, Isabella Rossellini, and Grace Slick. (Vero Beach landscape and portrait painter Isabelle Beuttell Dayton also attended Finch.)
“Finch College was two blocks from the Met,” says Cecire, who notes that her art history classes convened at the museum to see in the flesh the artworks they were learning about in class.
“Everything you wanted was right at your fingertips. Plus, the school had a very good collection of its own. In the dining room were Old Masters hanging around you while you had your morning coffee.”
After graduation Cecire continued to paint on her own “just to be in the zone.” She made her living working for a publishing company as director of marketing and sales. Over the course of 20 years, her job required that she travel frequently, and to keep up with her art, she carried a sketchbook with her. Sometimes she would prime the paper in the book, so that she could make thumbnail sketches in oil or other painting mediums.
She would select some of the sketches to render as larger oils on canvas in her spare time, during vacations and on weekends.
Cecire continues the practice of creating intimate studies today. Using roughly four-by-six inch sheets of paper, she makes monotypes with which she experiments with color and composition. Several of these are in the current exhibition: “Beginning Light,” a misty landscape with an expanse of cloudy sky; “Deep Horizon,” a study in crepuscular shades of blue, and “Reflections,” a stratified abstract composed of cerulean, orange, lilac, and magenta.
Cecire moved to Westport shortly after the 1988 birth of her son, Dylan Goldberg. With her career in publishing behind her, she began to devote more time to create and to show her art.
She focused on nature, taking as her personal inspiration the paintings of the 19th century English landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, whose art Cecire learned about from a teacher at the famed Silvermine Art Center in New Canaan.
The ethereal paint application and incandescent palette of Turner’s late works – some of which were left unfinished at his death – was hailed in the early 20th century as the beginning of an abstract approach to representational subject matter.
For Cecire, the gossamer mood of Turner’s landscapes was something she wanted to emulate in her own paintings.
She developed the technique she currently uses in her landscapes through informal discussions about Turner with fellow artists at Silvermine, and by looking at Turner’s works in the Metropolitan Museum.
“If you like the effect, you want to learn a little about it and then make it your own,” she says.
And, while Cecire prides herself on executing her paintings out-of-doors, the atmosphere in them is lit more by the softy flickering light of her imagination, rather than the objective reality of sunlight on solid surfaces.
“This is the manipulation of light and dark, emotion,” she says of “Sunset on the River,” a ferric red painting touched with gray in the sky and the reflections at river’s edge.
Cecire also has some abstract works in the show, including three large monotypes in which vigorous, broomstraw-thin black lines are set atop atmospheric mixtures of blue, rose and orange.
Life in Florida has influenced her most recent work, including an aqua seascape and the abstract painting “Blue Metallic Motion.” The latter features a tropical palette of cerulean, indigo, beige, yellow and green; it is executed in a variety of palette knife and squeegee techniques on a framed rectangle of aluminum.
Her time in Vero, Cecire says, has been focused on meeting people in the community and learning about the offerings of the Vero Beach Art Club and the Museum of Art.
“In Connecticut I did shows wherever I could,” she says, ticking off a list of venues that included furniture stores, art galleries, schools, and libraries.
In Vero, Cecire is looking for a gallery to call home.
“Now it’s time to get some work out and show it,” she says.
The exhibition continues through Oct. 30.