Painter and collage artist Cree Scudder relocated to Vero Beach in 2017, after a 38-year sojourn in La Jolla, Calif., by way of Princeton, N.J., where she met her husband, Ned Scudder.
Raised in Coconut Grove, Fla., Cree attended prep school through 12th grade at Miami’s Ransom Everglades School where, as an engaging girl with a wide smile and a creative bent, her high school artistic endeavors involved, as she puts it, “poster making, things like that.”
When it came time to go to college, Cree was set to attend her father’s alma mater, the University of Florida, in Gainesville.
Smiling, she recalls her father’s decree: “I think it will be a fine spot for you, Cree.”
However, when Cree suggested that she wanted to study art at UF, her father put his foot down.
“Dad said, absolutely not! You are going into business.”
Cree has a strong streak of pragmatism; to please herself and her father, she settled on a B.S. in journalism. The outgoing Scudder decided that with her tendency to “get involved with things,” her journalism degree would give her access to the interesting people, places and events that awaited her.
By the time she graduated in 1974, her mother had remarried and was living in Princeton. She invited her daughter to come up and “look around,” says Cree.
Cree soon got a job in the press office of the McCarter Theatre on the campus of Princeton University, where she met Ned Scudder, who knew a thing or two about journalism, himself.
Ned’s paternal great-grandfather founded the Newark Evening News in 1883, and his father and uncle operated the paper until its sale in 1970.
At the time Cree fell in love with him, Ned was founding a brand-new magazine, New Jersey Monthly, with three other Princeton graduates.
That was in 1976; the couple married two years later. Four years into the marriage, Cree had the opportunity to own and manage Optima Typesetting Inc., a typesetting and graphic design firm in nearby Kingston, N.J., that she says was the real beginning of her art training.
“Ours was a studio that had keyboard operators. That was before you had opportunities to just run something through a computer. You had to do keyboard and proofreading, graphic design and paste-up, and then send the galleys to the client,” says Cree.
Her clients were businesses that published annual reports, advertising brochures and catalogs.
“I didn’t paint, but creatively I did learn that there is a certain amount of artistic knowledge to typesetting,” she says. “It was good training for when I began painting, years later.”
After 14 years in the business, the Scudders moved lock, stock and barrel to La Jolla, where the next phase of Cree’s art education commenced. She took a few art classes at the University of California in nearby San Diego, and also studied with professional artists in other venues.
“I did everything I could to get just as much exposure as possible to find out about art,” she says.
Cree and Ned became involved members with the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and the Stuart Collection – an outdoor collection of contemporary sculpture on the campus of UC San Diego, attending as many programs, lectures and exhibitions as possible.
They also began collecting art by the California-based artists they met, including Manny Farber (1917-2008), Philip Petrie and Reed Cardwell (1955-2013). The latter, who had studied under Nathan Oliveira, became a mentor to Cree.
“Reed inspired me. He said, ‘Cree you have to keep going. You know you can do this.’ He would talk to me, and instructors don’t really talk to their students, in my experience.”
Paintings by Cardwell are prominently displayed in the couple’s living room, among many other beloved artworks that the Scudders collected in unison. “We are pretty careful about what we want to purchase. It has to be something that we really feel we need to have,” she says.
There is a lot of art to see in their house. Although the paintings and three-dimensional artworks live in close proximity to one another, it is a harmonious family. A visiting art lover feels entirely at home and would be content to visit the collection for hours, with Cree as the enthusiastic docent for each piece.
Surrounded by the works of others, Cree is continuously inspired to up her own art game.
“You think, well, I could try doing that. It’s not going to be just the same, but I can do it the way I want to do it.”
After 38 years in California, the Scudders returned home to Vero Beach, considered by Cree as her second childhood home.
“Both of my grandparents, my father’s McDougal side and my mother’s Dodge side, had homes here in Vero Beach. My mother and father each came home from college to Vero and happened to meet one another here. That was our lives,” she says, adding that she and her siblings spent many holidays here.
Ned, however, had no such memories of life in Florida, and relied on Cree to have the right intuition about moving here. “I just assumed it would all be OK. It’s been wonderful. My sister is here, too,” she says.
“Our next-door neighbor from Coconut Grove lives on the water; she and my sister are best friends. We have this little enclave going here.”
Vero has welcomed Cree back with open arms. As an artist she has exhibited in group and solo shows with the Vero Beach Art Club. As this article was being written she was preparing to deliver her entry to the VBAC’s “Art by the Sea” exhibition at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, and two other works were at the framer for display the VBAC Annex and Gallery on 14th Street.
Cree has exhibited at Raw Space and at the Environmental Learning Center, and the clubhouse gallery at Orchid Island Golf and Beach Club has also been a venue for her work. In 2020 Cree cast her net further; that year her work was accepted for the 34th Annual All Florida Juried Exhibition in Fort Myers.
In part to dodge Florida’s hurricane season, the couple escapes to upstate New York every summer. This summer Cree’s work will be part of a three-person show at the Blu Seed Gallery in Saranac Lake, which has carried her work for several years.
At present Cree is working in collage, a mode and medium informed by her ability to compose on rectangle and square from back in the days at her typesetting company. The quality of her craft, the cleanly glued bits of paper on substrates of paper, canvas or board, pays homage to the hours she spent doing paste-up long ago.
Instead of blocks of type, however, there are arrangements of cut paper quadrilaterals in a myriad of color and pattern, textures and layered thicknesses galore. In her geometric abstractions, Cree is mindful to leave negative space between her cut shapes to give the eye plenty of room to wander through them. Some of her compositions are complex; others, especially the small square ones, are more restrained.
“I don’t want any one element to take over the collage. I need to be sensitive about that. I love to put strange things in my compositions, like a paint swatch from the paint store. I just keep exploring.”
Referencing two freshly framed 12-inch square collages on cradled hardboard that are destined for display at a brand-new gallery in Lake Placid, she says, “These are my favorites. They are what I want to be: to be colorful and alive and thoughtful.”
Photos by Kaila Jones
