NEWSLETTER #1: Where did this project come from?
Valerie Schurman
The photograph was taken at Valerie's BFA show upon graduation from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Valerie and her daughter Cassandra are standing in front of a large oil painting of her son and daughter in their home.
When I was in my senior year at Isidore Newman School in 1966-1967, I was amazed at the number of serious artists in our class. I wanted to understand what had led to so many of them to pursue painting. So I wrote an article for the school magazine, The Pioneer, entitled, “The Newman Artists.” I Interviewed four of my artist classmates, Valerie Schurman, Jan Aronson, Jann Terral (of blessed memory), and Evan Soulé. I asked them about their art, their dreams, and what role they thought Newman had played in developing their interests and talents. I wanted to understand whether the traditions or instruction at Newman, especially the manual training philosophy, had nurtured their creativity.
At our 35th class reunion I was seated at Mosca’s Restaurant next to Charles Wickstrom. I was meeting him for the first time because he had left Newman in the ninth grade. I learned that Charles was also a painter and was actively exhibiting his work. “Another one,” I thought, “another Newman artist!” Around that time I began to look at creativity in our Newman class more broadly than just the field of painting. I thought of my friend John Menszer, who had photographed and interviewed Holocaust survivors in New Orleans and created an exhibit and a website.
I interviewed my friend Robert Greenberg, who with his wife JoAnn had owned and operated a bakery in Marin County, California, and would later create a very interesting series of radio shows called “Jazz Kitchen” and “The Blue Shadow,” featuring New Orleans recipes and music. I became aware that David Haspel had produced “A Campaign to Remember with Ted Koppel,” the film that was used to raise the funding for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Our classmate Evangeline Morphos, a professor in the Theater Program at Columbia University, had premiered works by David Mamet, David Rabe, and Sam Shepard. Just as in 1967, I felt a sense of awe at how many creative individuals were in the Newman Class of ’67.
So I decided to follow up on the four "Newman artists" I had interviewed during our senior year and to interview other creative classmates as well. This newsletter focuses on Valerie Schurman, who entered Newman in the ninth grade. Back in 1967, Valerie told me that she had been interested in art since middle school and that she had attended McCrady’s Art School in the French Quarter during the summers. She said that art is “the only way she can express herself.” When I asked her about Newman as a stimulus to creativity, she said that Newman is as stimulating as any other school but that “there is more interest in art at Newman than at most schools.” Valerie was planning on a career in art and attending art school after college.
From Newman Valerie attended Smith College but did not go straight to art school after college. She went to law school at George Washington University, where she met her husband, Bill Wallace. They have two children, a daughter Cassandra, who lives in Australia and teaches middle school, and a son David, a poet, who works on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.
Valerie spent most of her career in the law department of The Boeing Company on the west coast. She retired early, in 2004, and then fulfilled her lifetime goal of attending art school after college. She earned a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. She has a studio in an old timber warehouse and owns a printmaking press. You can see samples of Valerie’s work at www.valerieschurman.com.
I spoke with Valerie recently, and she described going back to college to study art at Cornish. Because she already had a college degree, she took only art classes and "loved it." She found it stimulating to be around her fellow students, most of whom were young, and described it as a "really enjoyable time." She was also exposed to new fields, such as printmaking, which she discovered to her surprise that she loved.
She works in various media, including printmaking, monotypes, oils, and watercolors, and examples of each are included here. Valerie likes to work with her local habitats, where she takes many photographs and then turns them into prints. To create a print, she uses a method called chine-collé, a process of putting paper on the print when it goes through the press.
The scene of the chess players is a print from her Seattle series, where her goal was to portray homeless persons living in Seattle. The next print of a house surrounded by night stars is from her Cle Elum and Roslyn series, which reflects the environment around her cabin in eastern Washington, where Valerie and her husband go to retreat. You can view each series at Valerie's website.
The very colorful print is a monotype of the Seattle Space Needle. I had to ask Valerie, "What is a monotype?" She explained that a monotype is a type of print but "it's somewhat like a painting." A monotype is created by "painting on some type of surface and then pressing paper onto the surface. So only one is created, unlike other prints."
A full view of the large oil painting of a family scene that was exhibited at her BFA show follows. In discussing watercolor, Valerie explained that watercolors, unlike printmaking, are fairly portable, and she could take them with her to their cabin in eastern Washington and continue creating. She has a series of watercolors, including flowers, foods, like the tomatillos, and kitchen objects, such as the spoons.
I had a deep feeling of awe upon talking with Valerie, seeing her work, and sensing the fulfillment of her lifelong goals.