Although Edmund (Ed) Cortez didn’t fully engage his artistic abilities until later in life, his talents began percolating at an early age. Cortez, who is the guest artist at the Main Street Vero Beach Gallery through the month of December, will exhibit a selection of his pencil portrait drawings and bird paintings, and will also have a couple of the smaller ship models he has built.
Cortez was born in Brooklyn, where he lived throughout his childhood, except for a brief period as a young child in Puerto Rico, where both parents were born. His father was a cook’s helper at the Garden Cafeteria, a landmark deli in Manhattan, where famed Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel and other Jewish intellects would gather for long philosophical conversations.
“Ironically, my dad was part of the D-Day Invasion and Battle of the Bulge, and he was one of the guys who helped liberate the camps where Eli Wiesel was a prisoner,” says Cortez, noting that the two men never knew the parts they had played in each other’s lives.
Although his parents were not artistically inclined, all four children were, especially his late brother Richard, who was five years older. He recalls wanting to copy Richard, but adds, “I never ever took it seriously as a career, even as a child. I was more into science and math.”
Those interests propelled him to study psychology and liberal arts at Wesleyan University, after which he taught sixth-graders in Baltimore. He obtained a master’s degree specializing in teaching children with hearing impairments and authored his thesis on why hearing-impaired Hispanic children didn’t fare as well as those of other nationalities.
He was eventually recruited to run a five-year project in New York State to look into that same issue, and by age 40 was New York State’s assistant commissioner of education, in charge of special education policy. He next served as president of the National Center for Disability Services.
“I stayed in that job for 18 years and retired from that position,” says Cortez, adding with a laugh, “So there’s my career. You haven’t heard about much art in there, have you?”
He did, however, continue to draw all through his working career and, as time permitted, began working on model ships.
“My godfather used to say, ‘If you find a corner of a piece of paper that’s blank, you’re going to fill it with a picture.’ And that was basically true. I was always doodling but never taking it seriously.”
After retirement, however, he began to actively explore his creative side, particularly after moving to Vero Beach in 2014 with wife Karen Loeffler.
Once here, he met Mackie Duch, a volunteer at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, who put him in touch with instructor Dawn Miller, and he began taking her art classes. He initially painted birds, “because people like birds,” donating them to nonprofits to sell at their fundraisers. He also created a series of ‘Birds of the Treasure Coast’ notecards, and white pelican-inspired holiday cards, such as a flying pelican wearing a Santa hat.
Although he has painted in oils and acrylics in the past, his current medium of choice is colored pencil. He wanted his colored pencil work to “have a more painterly effect” and, through research, discovered colored pencil artists who use mineral spirits to do just that.
“Some of their work is so good that it’s now competing with acrylics and oils as a medium of choice for some artists,” says Cortez. “I decided that’s what I wanted to pursue. So all of my colored pencil paintings, I hope, give you the impression that they could be oil paintings or acrylic paintings.”
Cortez, who now teaches at the museum, chuckles and says, “The first courses I taught was kind of like an oxymoron; it was called painting with colored pencils.”
In addition to people portraits and bird paintings, he says, “I’m now having a lot of fun doing pet portraits. Animals have different personalities that show up in their expressions, and I’ve tried to capture those expressions.”
Once in Vero, Cortez gave into his musical side as well, joining the band Riptide, known for playing music of the 1960s and ’70s. While he enjoyed it, he says he found that the music wasn’t his style. He eventually formed the band Night and Day, playing music from the American Songbook and Broadway shows at events and venues around town until the pandemic ground things to a halt.
“I haven’t really performed since then, although I practice every day. I was self-taught on the guitar, but I was a trained singer from when I was a child and that stayed with me,” says Cortez.
He began singing in the choir of the Church of the Transfiguration in Manhattan – fondly known by New Yorkers as the Little Church Around the Corner. A parishioner took notice of him and offered to pay his tuition at the Church of the Cathedral Choir School, a private school with a highly acclaimed choir, associated with the Church of Saint John the Divine.
It was there that he got his classical music training, as well as his interest in all things nautical.
His choir director, an avid sailor, would take Cortez and his siblings sailing aboard his 42-foot sailboat.
“As I was growing up, he encouraged me to do scrimshaw, model ship building, all kinds of things related to art and the lure of the sail,” Cortez recalls, adding that it also piqued his interest in the history of the ships.
He began with model ship kits, but eventually realized that the details, and often the accuracy, of the ships’ designs were lacking.
His largest, a highly intricate, detailed model of the Continental Navy Sloop Providence, built for the Providence Tall Ship Foundation, was 9 feet long and 12 feet high.
“Obviously, that was not a kit. That was all from scratch,” says Cortez. “It’s now housed in Old Town Alexandria. I built it on a platform with wheels, so they can bring it out when they have parades and events.”
Another model built from scratch was for John Gray, who retired in 2018 as director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. His staff wanted to give him a unique gift, and asked Cortez to build a model of the Revolutionary War gunboat Philadelphia. The actual Philadelphia, raised from the depths of Lake Champlain where it had been sunk, was one of Gray’s favorite exhibits at the Smithsonian.
He also built a schooner as a birthday present for “MacArthur Park” composer Jimmy Webb, whom he and Karen had met in California. He presented it to Webb when he was in Vero Beach to perform at the Emerson Center.
“So much of what I do as an artist is inspired or created or the result of so many people in my life. The most important one is Karen,” says Cortez. He credits her with calling on her enormous circle of friends and colleagues to pack the house at every one of his exhibits or performances.
“No one knew who I was, but they all knew who Karen was. I’m telling you she’s incredible. She’s my muse, and my inspiration and a great agent.”
Photos by Kaila Jones
