Art and Style, Artists and Makers / 16 May 2017

Ceramicist Paula Shalan

When Paula Shalan was working on her master’s degree at the Art Institute of Chicago, she found herself preferring to spend time not in the museum of art, but in the museum of natural history. She filled her notebooks with sketches of

Art and Style, Artists and Makers / 20 Apr 2017

Textile Artist Rosemary Hallgarten

Rosemary Hallgarten always wanted to earn her living making beautiful things. “I knew that as long as I could keep doing that, I’d be happy,” she says. The British-born textile artist, who lives in Westport and has a showroom in Fairfield, is well known in the design world and among lovers of contemporary crafts for her deliciously textured rugs, fabrics, and accessories. They’re all quite beautiful—and she, quite happy. The story of Hallgarten’s success is as organic as the fleece that’s shorn, sorted, spun, and carded into fibers that are woven into her unique, functional works of art. Since starting her cottage industry in 2001, Hallgarten has relied on an acute tactile sensibility and her intuition to grow her company apace with her life—slowly and deliberately. Although she was first drawn to jewelry design, it’s no surprise she found herself on a path laid by her mother, the renowned fiber artist Gloria Finn. In time, Hallgarten found she couldn’t resist the feel of alpaca, Tibetan wool, and natural plant fibers, including hemp, jute, and sisal. She loved that they were all sustainable. And once she discovered that she could help support artisans in under-developed parts of the world, there was no turning back. Most of her products are handmade in Peru, Nepal, and Brazil, where craftspeople do the intricate work of dyeing, knotting, and weaving in their own homes. “For the first couple of years, we made just one kind of rug,” the artist says, but as she sourced new materials, new products emerged. “While I was in Peru doing rugs, I fell in love with alpaca fabric, but didn’t know what to make with it,” she remembers, until she experimented with luxurious throws. And once she fell for bouclé, she added pillows to the line. While rugs still make…

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Art and Style, Artists and Makers / 18 Apr 2017

Artist Rick Shaefer

Bent over a waist-high, eight-foot-square table in his airy, light-filled studio, Fairfield-based artist Rick Shaefer seems lost in thought as he feverishly draws with charcoal on a massive sheet of white vellum. He works quickly but precisely, scratching out crisp black lines. Pausing and standing back to inspect his progress, he explains why he prefers to create works in charcoal rather than paint, pencil, or some other medium. “It’s so primitive,” he says. “Our Paleolithic ancestors were scratching with burnt wood on the walls of caves, and I like to think—at the risk of sounding too romantic—that using charcoal somehow links me to what artists have been doing for thousands of years. I also like the tonality, the rich, crisp blacks on white that I get with charcoal.” A former editorial and fashion photographer, he left photography in 1994 and began painting and experimenting with mixed media during what he terms his “everything goes” period. Five years ago he decided to concentrate on drawing. “I’d always loved the power and preciseness of line and enjoyed making etchings, so I decided to try to create drawings that looked like huge etchings,” he says. To prepare himself, he spent months peering through a magnifying glass at drawings by Rembrandt and others, as well as woodcuts by Dürer. “Rembrandt’s drawings fascinated me,” says Shaefer. “I studied how he laid down each line and marveled at his fussy and finished lines as well as his moments of spontaneity. I suppose I was trying to find out where the genius is.” Shaefer’s work has been widely exhibited in both group and solo exhibitions, and is included in private and corporate collections such as Microsoft, American Express, and Prudential. For the last five years or so he has focused largely on nature, depicting everything from animals…

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