In Her Own Words,
an Interview with the Artist
By Maria Cocchiarelli

MC: Is that why you chose to depict Dr. Anne Paolucci surrounded by many views that suggest different aspects of her career?

CM: Since I now wanted to do the American Women Series, what better woman to ask to be represented than Dr. Anne Paolucci, founder of the Columbus Countdown, who has pages and pages of all that she has accomplished in her lifetime and is still going strong. And what better way to represent those accomplishments than in the manner of the Legend around the subject? It seemed a natural. I had Anne sit for me in her home, in her surroundings?where she would be most comfortable. I made preliminary sketches of her, took many photographs in various poses. I also asked her for her bio, so that I could choose from that other objects of interest that would be surrounding her for the Legend. After I put all the information before me, I chose those things that would make an interesting composition around the figure of Anne. When I started the sketch of Anne, I really liked the pose that caught her essence immediately. That was her, hands clasped and talking to me as I sketched. She was looking slightly to the left, where she had the copies of the series that I did for the Discoverers on her wall. She was explaining to me how her mother, who was living with her at the time, would come into the room and examine each one with such interest, and always finding something else she had not noticed before. I liked that particular pose although I felt that I should somehow explain what it was she was looking at. I decided to make a second picture of Anne (front view), in the small oval frame within the canvas and have her looking at herself as though explaining her own accomplishments to the viewer. She would be saying, “Here I am and all that I have done!” I also enjoyed doing the TWO poses of Anne since it gave the viewer the opportunity to see the full Dr. Anne Paolucci. I first did a pencil sketch to create the composition. Then did a slightly altered version in pastel so as to include the color. There were so many things to include in the Legend that I had to pick those things that I thought were more important than others. I also included her husband at her elbow in the finished version, because Professor Henry Paolucci and Anne worked so closely together that it was like “hand in glove”. (After her husband passed away, Anne commissioned me to create?a similar type of painting of Professor Paolucci. She has them both hanging in her living room, side by side.) Anne has always been a great supporter and mentor to me, and in fact she refers to herself as being my Godmother. She certainly is.

MC: Are you interested at all in upholding any type of academic system in your work? Would you consider yourself a realist, a hyperrealist, do you categorize yourself as anything?

CM: No, that’s a good question, because people have asked me the same question and I come back with only that same quip which is I think I’m in the cracks. Somebody once said that about piano playing, were you interested in the white keys or the black keys. And he said I’m more interested in the cracks, and it was a joke of course. I’m somewhere in between, which is the meeting of all of that. I pick up a little of one side because I did graduate from Parsons and I was good at anatomy and I did all the traditional drawing, the classical drawing, and I admire it and I like to utilize it. But, then I like to bring it one step beyond and I enjoy the Impressionist attitude, the freeness, and the color. And so I try to incorporate all the things that I like into what I do. And what I do, I like to think, is a little different than most people?I don’t like to be put into a slot.

MC: I’ve noticed that your interest in light is very apparent in your work. Your paintings seem to be about light?perhaps a metaphor? Rather than a descriptive narrative of your subjects. Does light suggest something other than a fundamental element of art?

CM: How the light affects the shadows.

MC: Yes, then there’s the question of subject matter, the people as subject matter.

CM: Right, they’re a reason for everything. I can see that, I never examined that idea but it’s true I like to? I think its dramatic when you can bring the sun in and how it affects the various different colors from the cool to the warm.

MC: Your color sense also is pretty striking, in the sense that you are able to paint realistically, you achieve the feel of the place and then you allow the viewer to get into the picture plane. Once in, they begin to experience something similar to the people depicted. There’s a relationship, a conversation that you set up, a narrative. Would you consider yourself to be a narrative painter? Are you interested in telling stories about these people?

CM: Well maybe that has something to do with my illustration background and the fact that I was an illustrator before I was a portrait painter. And a lot of the children’s textbooks, working with children and the little things that they do, the animals that are involved with them, and how they react to one another so you see different facial expressions. One of the project designers, whom I worked for at Harcourt Brace, would criticize the fact that one eyebrow may be higher than the other or something, but I would explain that’s the method for visually describing actual surprise.

MC: One eyebrow is higher than the other?

CM: Right, you have to show that expression. You know, you’re not going to see the same area of white in one eye as you do in the other. She was very exact and very precise. But you know when you’re a commercial illustrator and if you’re working for someone, they’re paying the bills and you have to compromise.

MC: Adhere to their requirements.

CM: Yeah.
MC: And in your professional work as an illustrator, in those early years of your career did you also work as a court reporter? Do I remember that correctly?

CM: I did several sketches that way, but I did not work as a court illustrator, per se. I did it for an annual report of a company that had some of that aspect as part of their company and they wanted visuals to depict what a court illustrator does.

MC: Oh, I see. I thought I remembered something like that.

CM: A friend of mine, a member of the Society of Illustrators, as I am, and she is also a court illustrator. She is very good at it and grabbing the action quickly, so?

MC: Ah ha?that’s exactly what you do, you’re very quick when you paint. You get it down quickly and then you work into it. And during those years that you did work as a professional illustrator, what was your experience?you recounted one to me about using your initials not to be known as a woman.

CM: Oh, the fact that I had? most? well that was many years ago, of course things have changed a little bit since then. Advertising agencies? they of course didn’t want anybody to know that but everybody knew it just the same. If you brought your portfolio and you were a woman into an advertising agency and wanted to see an art director, they would be polite and look through your portfolio. But it would be “don’t call me, I’ll,” you know, “call you.” Or if you were applying for a position, per se, rather than just looking on your own, they would use the excuse, “Well we work late, the men are all here, they curse, we don’t want ladies around to listen to this.” You know, it was always an excuse why as they didn’t want to have the woman at work. But at any rate, I had gone into one particular, I don’t know whether I should mention the name, he is deceased now, he was the art director for a large advertising agency, and he had the account for the US Marines, Phillips Petroleum, Thomas Electronics, and various different, very large accounts. He looked at my portfolio, and saw something that he liked. He made the comment to me, he said “I’d like for you to illustrate this for me but I would like for you to sign it C. Maltese, rather than Constance Maltese because this way they won’t know that you’re a woman.”

MC: Approximately what was that year?

CM: Um, let’s see, I’d have to go now and say that it had to be in the late 60s, early 70s.

MC: Wow, hard to believe.

CM: He had to retire as an art director from the agency but he kept up those accounts, doing work freelance wise. And I went to Jersey to his house and picked up work, and we continued to collaborate in that way. He was I think a little bit more before his time?he was interested in the art work more than he was in the fact that I happened to be a woman.

MC: When you look at other portrait artists today who might you consider to be an important portrait artist of renown? Is there anything that you are trying to portray in your work that you don’t find within the current trends?

CM: Well, the current trend is ultra-realism, and I think many times they get caught up in showing off how they can show this little knit fabric well or you can see every hair on their head, that that kind of thing can be overwhelming. You could look at it and say, “That’s magnificent how he did that.” But you forget that there’s a person there that you’re supposed to be looking at and not the paint. I’m more interested in getting the character. That’s why I’ve always admired Sargent, and I’m not even aware that those paintings looked like the subjects because it was before my time but they certainly were dynamic. He made everyone look like they were a million bucks, but at the same time he didn’t go nitpicking. If you ever get close enough to the canvas, you can, as I had probably mentioned to you, even on Madame X, you go there and you look at her profile and you see her ear, it’s almost a blob, it’s almost a red cauliflower ear. But when you bring yourself back, it elicits an image that is awe-inspiring. You had mentioned the one that he did where the girl is walking down the street and the little flip of her skirt as she’s walking and there’s a man standing on the side and he’s turning around and looking at her. And that too, the brushwork on it, you can see, is spontaneous. Now, he may have worked harder on it than it appears, but he gave it an air of spontaneity so you felt as though you were catching the moment.

MC: Ah, so you’re interested in getting a glimpse of your subjects while they are in their natural environment and catching their spirits but also catching the moment in terms of a relationship between you as the artist and them as the subject.

CM: It’s like a snapshot of their life.

MC: Right.

CM: Thank you for thinking of that. That’s good, I’ll remember that one.

MC: You are welcome. And now, this is the major jump that I’m very interested in. The most recent work that you’ve produced? that will be exhibited in the show at the Italian American Museum ?one is the triptych?Rebecca’s Retreat the one in a natural landscape and the other is more of a modernist, pop image of the subject with flat background? very contemporary looking. How did you jump from the historical portraits in the Discovery Series into the American Women Series??into the new paintings? Did the American Women Series have anything to do with your experience as an illustrator and an artist in a male-dominated art world where you wanted to depict strong women doing important jobs?

CM: Yes. One of the things that made me angry is the fact that when I was working on Columbus, I thought that these were ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and I went ahead, as you probably realized, finding people who resembled people of that time, to have them sit for me because I again wanted the spontaneity of seeing the person sit there. So I had people that I knew sit for example, Vasco de Gama, etc. and I surrounded them with a history, tried to research human interest things that would engage people, and that you don’t learn in school, and maybe they should start doing things that way because I was terrible in history and in geography and it was very dull. Just remembering names and dates is “blah”. So I started remembering these little stories by reading about their lives, such as Cortez loved his women although he was married, and he climbed up into a tree to look into his paramour’s window, fell down and broke his leg just before he was supposed to go with Columbus. And because he broke his leg he couldn’t go with Columbus and he had to put off his trip to the New World until the following year when he made that famous trip into Mexico to meet Montezuma. Those are the things that I found interesting, and those are the things I find that make the subjects in my paintings human. Human is what I wanted to relate to the kids who were growing up today and are in school now, and also to people who are living today, to look at these people in history and see that they are not fiction, they were real, and to get excited about where this all started. Instead, Columbus was accused of genocide, also not being a good man, in other words the idea of Columbus was boycotted. After I had the Discovery exhibition at the Intrepid Sea-Air-and Space Museum for 2 years, the museum held an “Age of Exploration” exhibition. Native American activists were outside picketing this exhibit every single day. So all the public interest in it was dropped because then (1992) Columbus was not “politically correct.” That was the catch phrase, “politically correct.” And that’s what made me angry because they accused Columbus of owning slaves?yes he did, but 500 years ago?many did, and it wasn’t against the law, it wasn’t anything that anybody at that time thought was so terrible. To judge somebody today for what they did 500 years ago, it was a different set of standards, you cannot do that. So that really bothered me, especially after I worked on the series for four years, and I got it all together, four years of work almost down the drain because he took in slaves seems a little bit unfair. So I began to think that the next series I do, would not allow anyone to find fault with, so I went into the American Women Series. I got just as enthused about that because there are a lot of women who do extraordinary things who aren’t even noticed. These include the woman who took care of the AIDS children, the fantastic nurse Yvonne Plummer and the women in the finance profession represented by Joyce Lim and there are women senators, astronauts, just to mention a few fields we excel in. Unfortunately, they are not really made a big fuss over; in fact, they seem to be glanced over.