Please join UUCP on Wednesday, April 11th at 7:00 PM for our “Artists On Their Art” Series. We are pleased to have two very accomplished artists for our series: Jim Norman and Ginger Gordon. There will be time after for questions, discussion and some refreshments. We look forward to seeing you!

Jim Norman:

Jim Norman is an award-winning watercolorist whose work has appeared in shows in New Jersey and Maine. Jim regards himself as a representational painter, although some of his work inspired by photographs sent back to earth from the Hubble Space Telescope have been described as abstracts.

Jim, a long-time Teaneck resident, came to artistic expression late in his life, having worked previously as a writer, reporter, photojournalist, lawyer, furniture repairman, carpenter, boatbuilder, and manufacturer of full-size replicas of classic sports cars.

Now retired from his career as a journalist with the New York Post, the New York Times and the Bergen Record, Jim has the chance to dedicate more of his time to his artistic pursuits, exploring new techniques and pigment combinations but still sticking to his roots in representational painting.

At the same time, he is in the process of building a river shanty styled houseboat loosely modeled after the “Studio Boat” used by Monet to paint on the Seine in the 1870s, allowing him to get away from land and closer to the watery subjects he loved to explore.

Jim studies painting with Christine Friedman and has studied with Carol Sebold and Tony Van Hasselt in Maine and with Elise Morenon in New Jersey.

Ginger Gordon:

Ginger Gordon, a Suzuki-certified piano teacher with a studio in her home in Teaneck, has been playing the instrument since she first started picking out melodies on the keyboard at the age of about four. “We always had a piano in our home,” she recalls, “and my father, who immigrated from Russia in 1920, would sing Eastern European songs with haunting melodies, and accompany himself with one hand.”

When her older brother went off to college and took a music appreciation course, he introduced the family to the radio station WQXR, and the whole family was hooked on classical music. When Ginger was seven, her mother determined that she should start taking piano lessons, as a strategy to get her enrolled at New York’s High School of Music and Art when she was old enough, instead of taking a chance with a regular city high school.

At 13, she auditioned and was admitted to the prestigious school as a pianist, but decided to concentrate instead on vocal studies while she was there. Later, after college at CCNY, Ginger got married and moved with her husband to Mineral Wells, Texas, where oppressive heat and local cultural influences motivated her to stay indoors as much as she could, and she threw herself back into piano studies with a passion.

When she returned to the East Coast and settled in Teaneck, she continued with the piano, studying with LaVerne Gallob in Closter and Constance Keene in Manhattan before completing her course work for a master’s degree at Montclair State, becoming a certified teacher in the Suzuki method and opening her home studio.

After seven years of teaching children piano in her home, she became an elementary school teacher in Washington Heights, in Manhattan, and continued to incorporate music and the piano into her classroom experience.

At the same time, at the age of 40, when one of her sons took up cello at the Thurnauer School at the JCC in Tenafly, she started studying cello with Barbara Stein Mallow in Leonia. She continues to study and play the cello to this day.

When she retired after 20 years as a classroom teacher, Ginger returned to teaching piano in her home studio, where children from Teaneck and beyond come for weekly lessons.

Poster by: Liandra Pires