Artist Tarol Samuelson—

Taking Disparate Elements And Making Them Look Like

 They Belong Together Is This Painter’s Idea Of Fun

By Shannon Hicks

Tarol Samuelson has loved art all of her life.

“My mom says she never had enough wall space for me,” the Newtown resident and very eclectic artist laughed while enjoying some early spring weather at her home at Sticks & Stones Farm last week. She was also getting ready for the opening of her first show, “Tarol Samuelson: Recent Works,” an exhibition of nearly 45 new pieces that was hung last week and is on view at Bethel Arts Junction until June 12.

Ms Samuelson’s primary form of expression is through paintings, mainly oils. To create her scenes, the artist collects elements — illustrative clippings from magazines, photographs, drawings… anything that catches her eye. Then she puts any number of these elements together, composing an original scene.

The elements are scanned into her computer, and converted into black and white images.

“I used to do a lot of enlarging and reducing on copier machines to make a collage,” she said. “Then I got smart and began working with a computer.”

Ms Samuelson can then add to each beginning element — a person’s face and/or body, a car, building, or even a window hanging that catches her fancy — working in a Photoshop program. She composes her new scenes on the computer — adding, enlarging, reducing, changing any way that she wants to — and then paints what she has put together. That is when the color comes back into her work.

“I love color,” she says, and it really shows. Ms Samuelson’s paintings are bright, bold, fun exclamations of scenes both realistic and very fantastical. The show in Bethel offers scenes of a human form standing in a corn field, an antique fire truck in a barn, two women in a boudoir, a church, leaves floating in water, and so much more.

“This show is extremely eclectic,” said Adele Moros, one of the directors of Bethel Arts Junction. “It has everything from realistic portraits to flights of absolute fantasy.

“She has a wonderful imagination, an ability to render everything from infinite details to the absolute sublime. This is such a range, such a talent. She does it all. She has an imagination that just doesn’t stop.”

In addition to the paintings, there are also a few lampshades and some jewelry, also done by Ms Samuelson. Even the lampshades show Ms Samuelson’s attention to detail, with accents flowing easily from the outer shade under the rims and into the inner shade. Feathers and beads play a large part in her lampshade oeuvre; beads are also an important element of the necklaces she has put into the show.

A graphic artist for the past 17 years, Tarol Samuelson has always enjoyed dabbling in one form or another of art. She began painting, and continued when she began working for a frame shop in Danbury. Today the house she lives in, where she is surrounded by natural beauty outdoors and joined by two birds, Toulouse and Lautrec, and one kitten, Spike, is a very comfortable reprieve from the outside world.

An easel is set up right next to the dining table, and opposite the easel is a red leather chair that appears in many of Ms Samuelson’s paintings. Affectionately called Vinny’s Chair, it was rescued by Ms Samuelson just as a friend was preparing to dispose of it.

Vinny’s Chair is seen in at least two of the paintings in “Tarol Samuelson: Recent Works” — one is a portrait and the second is one of Ms Samuelson’s classic “conceptualized element paintings,” as she sometimes calls them.

That second painting, called “The Performers,” features an elderly lady who was part of an advertisement in a magazine, a prostitute from a Third World country who was part of a photograph in Ms Samuelson’s collection, and a curtain that was also found in a magazine and just captured Ms Samuelson’s eye.

The original photo showed the prostitute facing the right. In Ms Samuelson’s painting she’s now facing left ­– that is one of the ways she can not only add an element to her work, but also change it to fit the mental picture she sees when she begins creating scenes.

This is not Ms Samuelson’s first art show, but it is the first after taking a break for a few years. After raising her kids she went to work as a full-time graphic artist, first for The News-Times in Danbury and then for Guide Communications in Brewster, N.Y., where she is currently the art director.

She was part of group shows at The Mark Twain Library in Redding and Boone Dog Coffee House in Brewster. She did one show, “The Realm of Chaos,” at Swan Tina Mona Gallery in West Hartford, where her paintings were coupled with the poetry of her friend Keith Bailey.

Her first solo show was eight years ago at Art Tenders, a former art space on Greenwood Avenue in Bethel, and it was while she was exhibiting at Art Tenders that Ms Samuelson met Adele Moros, who would later be one of the founding artists of Bethel Arts Junction.

It has been about two years since Ms Samuelson has been able to concentrate on painting, however, and she needed a jumpstart. During the past year she’s received two.

Last June she moved into Newtown, where she rents a house at Sticks & Stones Farm.

“I knew I had to be somewhere that would kick-start me,” she said. “I heard about this place by chance, and it’s been perfect.”

She lives in one of a few cabins on the property inhabited by artists. One of her neighbors is the singer Scarlett Lee Moore (who performed during Ms Samuelson’s opening reception last weekend), and the family of Ethan Currier, who makes whimsical stone sculptures, owns the property.

Passersby make have noticed a ten-foot tall dinosaur, The T-Rock, as they have driven past the Huntingtown Road property over the past year. That is Mr Currier’s work.

“I’m surrounded by inspiration here,” Ms Samuelson said.

The second point to set things in motion was the recent opening at Bethel Arts Junction for an exhibition of paintings by the artist Kevin Conklin. Ms Samuelson ran into Adele Moros that evening.

“I remember telling her [during Kevin’s opening] that she’s a wonderful painter, and that she needed to get back to work,” Mrs Moros said this week. “I told her she’s a great painter, and then challenged her by saying ‘If someone were to offer you a show today would you be able to fill the space?’

“I knew she’d been busy with life, children, work — we all are,” Mrs Moros continued. “But now that the children have grown and she has a little more flexibility with her work schedule, it’s time for her again.”

All of the works that are currently on view at Bethel Arts Junction are the result of that talk, which took place in October.

“She’s very inspiring. I think her work is thought-provoking, with a sense of humor and an underlying sense of spirituality,” says fellow painter and friend Kevin Conklin.

“Her work is very honest,” he continued. “It’s just like her.”

“She’s taken enough a lot of daring to show so much of herself,” Adele Moros said this week. “I think for many artists it takes a lot of guts just to show one side, and here’s this lady who offers so much more.

“There is a wonderful follow-through with each of her paintings,” Mrs Moros said. “You’re encapsulated by each piece that you look at.

“It’s our job,” added Mrs Moros, who is also a painter, “to make a viewer want to look at a piece and then not want to leave it.

“This is a fun show,” she added. “There’s so much to look at.”

“Tarol Samuelson: Recent Works” is on view until June 12 at Bethel Arts Junction, 5 Depot Place in Bethel — the former Bethel train station.

Gallery hours are Thursday through Saturday from noon to 9 pm and Sunday from 11 am to 4 pm. The gallery is also open Wednesday evenings beginning at 7:30 for poetry readings. Call 798-2193 for details.