Goga Groups - Fay Shutzer

Art has always been part of my life. I was born in Massachusetts and grew up on a dairy farm. My parents had a strong interest in art, my mother as a lecturer at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and my father as an avid collector of emerging art. As a small child, I requested art lessons and my parents found a local art teacher to work with my younger siblings and me. Although those early lessons seemed more like a family babysitting activity, I longed to be able to express myself through art. In high school my art teacher encouraged me to save a portrait I had drawn in pastel for my permanent portfolio. In college, though captivated by studio art classes, I majored in psychology. I saw myself as “artistic” but not as an artist. Looking back, I wonder how I made the distinction. After college, I moved to New York City, married and had four children. Demands of marriage, family and career in psychology took precedence. Yet, the desire to paint grew as I spent summers on Cape Cod beginning in the mid-1980s. I wanted to attempt to capture the beauty of the light as well as the evocative aspects of the New England landscape that had been so much a part of my youth. Artist Ann Packard became my teacher in the early 1990s, taking away my brushes and handing me a palette knife, encouraging me to take risks with paint that drawing had not allowed. Although it may sound cliché, she changed my life. Ann saw the artist in me that I had failed to take seriously and she challenged me to go further. Currently I have taken a sabbatical from my psychology practice to pursue painting full time. Prioritizing my art has brought a freedom from constraints and a sense of renewed energy and excitement. I am finally freeing the artist within.