Jeff Clapp - Artist | Donna Clapp

About the Artist:

Graziella Smith - Painter

Excerpted from the Suburban News

Monroe woman's art coming into full bloom
Works of Clearbrook resident on display at library this month
BY SETH MANDEL
Staff Writer JEFF GRANIT

MONROE — Youth may be wasted on the young, but 74-year-old Graziella Smith is enjoying it just fine.

Smith, a resident of the Clearbrook community, enrolled in an art class at Mercer County College about seven years ago, thinking she would be joining other retired women looking for a hobby.

"I just needed to do something," she said. "Well, it turned out it's a regular college class, and here's all my friends with their knees out of their blue jeans and funky hair, all kinds of stuff. I made best friends there."

Before taking the class, Smith had never really considered taking up painting, though she has never been far from artists or their work. Her brother was a musician; her late husband was an architect; her brother-in-law was a sculptor and painter; and her son and daughter are both artists.

"I really have been an audience," Smith said. "So I have been surrounded, and I have learned to appreciate good stuff."

Smith has now put her own work on display at the Monroe Township Public Library, where an exhibit of her work will run through the end of September.

Smith recently had exhibits at the Princeton Care Center, in Princeton, and at Fiddleheads, in Jamesburg, as well.

"I got a tremendous kick out of being able to hang my paintings at the Princeton Care Center, because it has a very beautiful, very peace-giving lobby, and that's where they put up the paintings," Smith said, adding that she regularly received compliments on her work at the care center.

"It's very nice to be able to impart a little joy of living, so that's really what I like," she said.

Smith moved to the township from Rumson, Monmouth County, where she and her husband had made a home out of an auxiliary storage house on a 1920s luxury estate.

The couple raised four children there, all of whom, Smith said, have made her proud.

"They couldn't be more beautiful to me," she said. "They're just beautiful people."

In Monroe, Smith's acrylic paintings from a wide range of subjects will be on display.

She said she just tries to keep up with the class, and paints whatever the class is learning to paint. "If there's a model, I paint the model. And if [the instructor] suggests something, I try to follow like a student," she said. "I've been learning a lot." She does, however, have a preference.

"I like flowers, because they are so unique and so expressive of the creator's imagination," Smith said. " A flower is like we are Ñ we are here for a time, and hopefully we come to full bloom. Each one, when you start to look at it individually, you see how beautiful it is."

Smith paints whatever the moment calls for, and will display her work wherever it is requested, but she does have one goal for her art.

"I'd like to show at the Ellarslie [Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie Mansion] the beautiful, beautiful museum in Trenton," Smith said. "But I have to grow into my pants."

Smith said she has a studio full of her work at home, from which she selected 24 paintings for the show.

Although her love of painting was unexpected, Smith said she has no plans to stop.

"It's so exciting to see how life really takes hold of us," she said. "We can embrace life with a smile, and it really laughs with us. It's terrific."

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