The Freemans Journal - Cooperstowns Newspaper Since 1808: A Marriage Of 2 Muses: Meeting Of True Minds Simply Happenstance

The Freeman's Journal - Cooperstown's Newspaper Snce 1808

Friday, October 9, 2009

By JIM KEVLIN

COOPERSTOWN

Bob Schneider’s parents were businesspeople. Mom worked for IBM; dad had his own auto- and aircraft-upholstery business. They worked a lot, and outside of the house.
Susan Goetz’s family were artists. Dad’s studio was at home, and he had to clog the keyholes with Crayons to keep the neighborhood kids from peeking at the nude models.
So there was a bit of culture shock when she was hired in 1978 as a bartender at Bistro 22 in Beacon, where he was already a waiter, and she brought him home for the first time.
“There were all these people at the Goetzes’ house, always,” said Bob. “It was like being at a continuous cocktail party.”
From different starting points, Bob and Susan Goetz Schneider ended up in the same place, and have been together since that fateful day when they “immediately” discovered their common interest. (It was Bob’s birthday; hold that thought.)
They recently moved their studios and Cooperstown Art School back into the Key Bank building – the former Studio 54 building across the street had been sold – and continue, into a third decade, to pursue their joint vocation from the high-ceilinged and spacious offices that formerly housed the Leatherstocking Insurance Co. (now in Hartwick Seminary).
The difference is dramatic: Paintings now line the walls from floor to ceiling.
In Susan’s studio, one wall is paintings of artists who had a major influence on her. There’s
a portrait Lajos Markos, one teacher, did of her when she was 15. There’s a painting by her father, a delicate still life that, she remembers, took months to complete.
In his studio is on the building’s bright northeast corner – the daylight factory windows from its days the Arthur H. Crist Publishing Co.’s plant let in the north light artists’ covet – landscapes range from small oil sketches set on the top of the door frame to a large canvas on an easel.
At the time they met, Bob had enrolled at the Portland (Me.) School of Art and planned to attend that fall.
Susie was studying under Frank Mason at the venerable Art Students League in New York City – once-future greats from George Bellows to Georgia O’Keeffe studied there – and she talked Bob into joining her.
Bob was raised in what he describes as a “normal” family – although his father took up flying, and brother John became Bo Duke on “The Dukes of Hazzard” – in Katonah, Westchester County.
Growing up, he was always “the kid who could draw,” but art “didn’t look like a career path in my business-minded family.”
He visited the Rhode Island School of Design and Pratt, nonethelss, but was turned off by the exclusive focus on abstract painting. Instead, he got a SUNY Delhi hospitality degree, then spent a year in Atlanta with Hilton before refocusing on his first interest.
Susie’s father Robert was from Oklahoma. In New York City before World War II, he flirted with the coat-girl at the Arts Student League. She introduced him to a girlfriend. They soon began a four-year engagement as he went off to war, then married and six children followed.
Susie’s mother chafed in Oklahoma, and part of the deal was that the family spend the three summer months back in her hometown of Bedford. The father taught at the League in New York City and founded the Old Chatham Art School in Columbia County.
By 8, the daughter was attending her parents’ art classes, along with her brothers and sisters, four of whom grew into artists. The other two became scientists, but found artistic expression in music.
In the late ‘70s, Robert Goetz had students helping him renovate a barn into studio space, in exchange for art lessons, when Susie brought Bob home. Soon, father, daughter and future son-in-law were spending evenings painting views around the seven-acre property.
That fall, the couple studied painting together.
Bob calls teachers like Frank Mason “powerful personalities.” (The teacher once drew a streak of white paint across his student’s canvas to prove a point.) Susan calls them “titans.”
Unschooled, Bob learned “you have to work down from big pieces, rather than build from a lot of little pieces.”
Under the influence of the Hudson River School (and later American Impressionists), he turned to landscapes, attending Mason’s summer program in Stowe, Vt. Susan turned to portraits. Both remain on those tracks, although not exclusively, until today.
In 1983, their mentor painted “The Betrothed,” with the couple as models. In 1984, they married indeed, buying a big house in Beacon and – like her father before them – opening an art school, which they operated for a dozen years, and still maintain ties there with their students’ self-proclaimed High School School, after the school’s location.
For instance, Bob’s “Autumn Sunset: A View of the Hudson from Olana,” is on display in “An Enduring Influence: Eight Painters Inspired by the Hudson River School” at the A.S.K. Gallery, Kingston, through Oct. 31.
Susan’s longtime com-mission to do portraits of people awarded the West Point Class of 1931’s Sylvanus Thayer Award – the paintings hang in the Academy’s Lee Hall – extended to 2006, long after the Schneiders made Cooperstown their home. (Most of those portraits had to be done from photos, but Sandra Day O’Connor was among those who agreed to a sitting.)
As son Philip entered school, his parents – looking at private-school tuition and the cost of maintaining a big house in pricey Westchester County – began a place for our son to grow up.”
After a year in San Antonio, the couple moved to Stamford. That Valentine’s Day – Feb. 14 is Susie’s birthday – Bob bought tickets for the Susquehanna Ball, held at The Otesaga in the 1990s as part of the Cooperstown Winter Carnival.
He’d been to Cooperstown once as a boy; she, never. And since they knew no one, they were seated at the table with everybody else who knew no one. They met Sam Roth, who invited them back to visit him at Mohegan Lodge, and he showed them the sights.
They were entranced by everything Cooperstown had to offer, and moved up as soon as they could. (Son Philip graduated from CCS in 2008, and is studying fashion design – and, more recently, painting – at the Fashion Institute of Technology; he has gone painting a few times with his parents.)
As any couple in business together, the experience has ranged, no doubt, from high romance to high tension.
“I’m much more sales driven,” said Bob. “She’s much more aesthetics driven.”
She paints 8-12 hours a day; he much less. But he completes 60 canvasses a year; she’s been known to work on the same picture for three years, and has a half-dozen portraits in progress right now.
“It’s a good thing Bob’s in my life,” said Susie, “or I would starve to death.”

Labels: 10-16-09, The City of the Hills

Labels: 10-16-09, Glimmerglass

posted by The Freeman's Journal @ 12:00 AM

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