Willow Glen artist and retired San Jose City College art professor Eve Page Mathias got her inspiration for a series of portraits from an overstuffed red chair in her living room that her dog Luna enjoyed sitting on while she looked out the window.
When Luna passed away and the chair got old, Mathias moved it into her art studio as a reminder of friends she cherished.
The red chair eventually became a symbol, she says, of where she was during the pandemic. COVID gave her time to reflect on herself and to look forward to seeing absent friends and colleagues.
“Now, when I ask someone to sit in the red chair,” says Mathias, “it connects the dots between those missing moments when I was separated from my friends and loved ones.”
The resulting 19 portraits will be exhibited as “The Big Red Chair Project” May 6-Aug. 13 at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara. Each acrylic painting is done in bold colors on a 5-foot-by-4-foot canvas.
“What (Mathias) offers are vibrant, painterly portraits of her sitters’ psychologies, their inner characters, and the emotional and intellectual depths she perceives in each of them,” says Preston Metcalf, executive director of the Triton Museum of Art.
Born in Long Island in 1953, Mathias says she had been an artist for as long as she could remember.
“I always found a place to scribble, draw, push my crayons around,” she says. “Turned out I was actually pretty good at making images that looked like the things I intended.”
Mathias is the youngest of five girls. Her father worked for Trans World Airlines and was often away from home, and her mother dabbled in fashion and art. They divorced in 1958, and Mathias went to live with her father.
“Because of his travels throughout the world, he respected fine art and recognized I was an exceptionally good artist,” says Mathias. “He set me up with supplies and a place to work at an early age.”
Mathias earned a bachelor’s degree in history and social studies at Boston University, and also a K-12 teaching credential. She moved to the West Coast with her first husband, a resident at Stanford Hospital. She has lived in Willow Glen since 1978.
“It’s a lovely part of the greater city that has its own unique character,” says Mathias. “I doubt I will ever move away.”
Mathias studied visual arts at San Jose State University, graduating with an master’s in 1992 and an MFA in pictorial art in 1994.
“I believe it is important to study anything that is your passion,” she says. “Even as a very young kid, I snuck off to galleries and museums without my parents knowing.”
Before landing at San Jose City College, she taught as an adjunct at Cupertino’s De Anza College for two years, and was also a graduate assistant teaching drawing and illustration classes at SJSU.
Mathias was hired fulltime by San Jose City College in 1992 to teach painting, drawing and design in the art department, and she retired in 2022.
“I love the construct that was used to create the California community college system and wanted to be a part of it,” she says. “I loved the work; I still love my students, I love San Jose City College.”
Two of the portraits in “The Big Red Chair Project” are of SJCC students she met in the fall of 1992 and with whom Mathias keeps in touch.
“They are, in their collective gathering, a community of women, all connected through the artist,” says Metcalf, “and what we are actually given is an insight into the minds and souls that connect them, and by extension we are connected as well.”
Mathias also served three years on the San Jose Art Commission and two years on the city’s Public Art Committee.
Currently, the contemporary artwork that excites Mathias the most is art in the public sphere.
“Artwork is the visual vocabulary that civilizes, that creates respect among ‘others,’” she says. “Through all the arts we come together using creativity as a common verb, as how we aspire beyond the drudgery and boredom of everyday life to delight in the extraordinary. It enriches our lives.”
The Triton Museum of Art is located at 1505 Warburton Ave. in Santa Clara. For museum hours and more information, visit https://www.tritonmuseum.org.
Source: www.mercurynews.com