Painting Affiliates of the Art Center of Northern New Jersey

 Snejana Videlova   

After moving to NJ became involved in many art associations in the tri-state East-coast area. Member of Pascack Art Association, American Artists Professional League, Salute to Women in the Arts, Studio Montclair, Painting Affiliates of Art Center of NNJ.
Some of most recent awards are the ones in Bergen County Diversity Show at Art Center of Northern New Jersey, PAA annual shows at Hackensack and Hawthorne, NJ, annual shows of Painting Affiliates of Art Center of NNJ. Keeping in touch with roots - had a recent show at the Bulgarian Consulate in NYC. Currently exhibiting at the Piermont Fine Art gallery.

Joan Strier  

Painting has been an exciting adventure. Acrylic is my main painting source, but I love mixing different things. It’s a thrill to see how watercolor and powders interact, and inks, plaster and sometimes stencils.

Being an abstract artist allows my creativity and emotions to soar. Painting certainly helped me through the time we spent indoors, during the pandemic!

David Zomick   

My objective is to portray “reality” in a way that will make the painting more interesting to the viewer than the reference reality.  I may try to make it more beautiful by varying color or form, more mysterious by exaggerating the lights and the darks, more interesting optically by creating a balanced (or disconcerting) composition.


Harriet Sobie Goldstein  

My painting journey during this time of the Covid-19  pandemic, evolved over time. This collection  of abstract paintings and landscapes of wetlands, express my anxiety and search for a way of coping with  all the terrible news about this awful pandemic. 

I usually produce a collection of paintings in the warm months when I paint in my garden studio. Last summer, my paintings reflected my delight in being in my garden and painting during  beautiful weather. This time I could not shake my feelings of dread, anxietyand sadness for the lives lost. I used color,  line, shape, and space to create abstract works that are very personal paintings.  Each reflects my gradual acceptance of the situation that we are all facing and my hope for the future. Finally, I chose to concentrate on the beauty of nature in this area of New Jersey. I began painting landscapes of the wetlands and parks, views of nature particular to this area. At First, I abstracted and then my work became increasingly realistic. My favorite place is a park. When walking there, I can enjoy thebeauty of the natural world.  I am hopeful. 

Paula Schiller    

 My painting process is largely intuitive and exploratory.  My work can lean toward complete abstraction,  or toward an abstract interpretation of the landscape.  It reflects the strong connection I had to nature growing up, especially time spent at my family’s summer lake house.
When I create I subtract as much as I add to the piece I am working on. I start with some marks and continue on adding more marks or I start to immediately subtract with erasure or canceling out with paint.  This struggle continues until I am satisfied with the work.  At times I have a vision, and this can be helpful.  My attempt is not so much to reproduce a scene,  but rather a sense of place. Sometimes I go back years later to finish a piece.


Adele Grodstein   

 While aiming to convey a sense of place and playfulness in my work, I’m always on the lookout for the visual excitement that surrounds me. I paint interiors, portraits, landscape and everyday life. 

My paintings fuse instinct, observation and an element of surprise. Having an eye for my subject’s spirit drives me more than any need to faithfully reproduce its image. 

After earning a fine arts degree from Syracuse University, I worked in art direction, graphic design, and publication design. All the while I’ve been painting and, more recently, sculpting in stone and clay.

Alice Stoler  

Bands of color comprise the forms which make up my paintings.  I experiment with methods of applying paint using brushes, sponges and pallet knives.

I recreate images from an accumulation of memories.  I paint intuitively and rarely have a preconceived idea.  The viewers become active participants in the work before them.

Thus I do not dictate the work of art.  It is instead interpreted by the eye of the viewers from the juxtaposition of color and design set before them.

Mirra Oliker   

I have been painting in watercolor, acrylic, in addition to mixed media and collages.

My paintings include a variety of subjects from the scene of life of religious Jews, where theme paintings are connected to symbolism and Jewish traditions, landscapes, and still life. I have also painted a series of portraits on sheets of sandpaper that provide a texture base. 

I like to express the freedom of motion in my paintings, paint in а bold and loose brushstrokes, and capture the vibrancy of the subjects. 


Joan Knauer    

I’ve been an abstract artist since I first picked up a brush. I work intuitively, without reference to objective reality. My paintings develop through multiple layers of acrylic paint and other media such as charcoal, pastel, and water soluble crayons. I arrange and shift areas of color, texture and line, responding to what occurs on the surface. Themes, ideas, and colors might come to mind as I work. It is my joy to let the painting flow from within, and when it is completed, to invite the viewer to shape their own personal response to my work. 

Betty DeMarco   

My work reflects my life as a woman who has lived half in one century and two decades in another, in visual form. I am witness to my time.  Some paintings reflect love, birth, family, death, loss, women’s issues, aging, passion, the angst of living in a world that is coming apart in ways I do not understand. 

Some paintings reflect the pure joy of putting brushes loaded with color on canvas.  The large scale of my work is an important element.

Music plays an elemental role in how I create the energy on canvas.  It reflects my mood and provokes deeper and more powerful work.

Abstraction uses the basic elements of art; line, color, shape, form, space, value, rhythm, the mark, depiction and dissolution, so this form expresses far more than I am able to express in words or in realistic depictions.

Unconsciously a series develops as I work in my studio or in a workshop/residency.  The visual surprises I discover, by losing myself in a world without words, are filled with meaning and depth that I often don’t see.  Until I do.

 Abstraction is my jazz, my poetry.