Carmen Vila feature article Women In The Arts - Norwalk artist captures details

It is only a few petals of a flower, with a bug on the bottom edge, yet this colorful, large painting by Carmen Vila, now showing at "Picture This Gallery" in Westport, has a soft, sensuous movement.

VILA's current paintings, including flowers, flowers and a jacket, an ear of corn, a draped figure, and a young woman with a backpack, all pulsing with flowing energy.

Asked if that is how life seems to her - no sharp edges, with endless color and movement, she replies, "Yes. I see no still life! Life is dynamic. I expect life to move and change."

That is how this artist who uses her maiden name professionally lives her own life. VILA, a teacher of art for more than 40 years and chair of the art department at Eastchester Middle School in New York, has a running list of exhibits, awards and lectures stemming back to 1964, plus a masters and a doctorate from Columbia University.

Not one to miss an opportunity, she used each of her precious summer vacations creatively. Widening her path as she grew and adding experiences in Mexico, Venezuela and Spain to her palette.

Norwalk artist
captures details

"Flora and Fauna" watercolor and mixed media by VILA on display at the Picture This Gallery in Westport until the end of December.

December 1998

Her father and mother opened a restaurant in New York during the roaring twenties. "My father died when I was ten and my mother went on to open two more restaurants. She became the first woman to get a wine and beer license in New York State! "It was her indomitable spirit that she passed on to me."

"No one ever told me I couldn't do everything. In the early 80's, I developed the VILA Program (Visual Instructional Library Art) for media centers. The program is used throughout the United States and in American schools as far away as Indonesia, Hong Kong, China, Belgium and Kuwait."

The VILA Program is motivated by my concern that most art teachers might only be able to take their students to a museum once a year, or never, if they taught in a remote area. The VILA Program has 20 large prints of famous paintings, offering a different collection for elementary, middle and high school-adult levels. Each print illustrates a step in the development of Western Art. An audio tape, for use by the class or by an individual student, accompanies the art and is available in Spanish and English.

VILA's resume shows courses at the University of Mexico and the University of Madrid, Spain. But it does not show that she made sure she was not the only one getting an education.

"I would take my two boys along and enroll them in the local schools. It seemed cheaper than summer camp," she says. "In Madrid I put them in a scouting camp while I did in depth studies on Spanish art history. Both boys became Eagle Scouts! My husband would join us at summer's end and we'd explore the country."

VILA and her husband divide the year between two waterfront condos, one in Norwalk, CT and one in Daytona Beach, FL. In her "retirement" she has taught art history at the Stamford, CT branch of Sacred Heart University and lectured at Bridgeport's Discovery Museum, at Daytona's MOAS, Stetson University and the Daytona State College. Her work is in private and corporate collections at home and abroad. My advice to seniors is: "use it or lose it."

"What has most surprised me in life," she says, "is the wonder of learning and expanding. My parents felt education was the true passport to life."

I must constantly bring back something new to my painting and my students." VILA has just returned from Spain where she visited Madrid's Prado Museum and Bilbao's new Guggenheim Museum, whose controversial architecture is causing the same stir as the Guggenheim Museum once did in New York.

One of the biggest influences from her travels came from a stint in Mexico when she studied the work of the Mexican muralists of the 30's and 40's with the last of the muralists, Raul Anguiano.

"Mexico was a turning point in my art from a New York born and bred life. For the first time in Mexican history, the muralists discarded European influence to record peasant life and the people making pottery or tortillas. They gave the Mexican people a sense of identity and pride in their own culture. Their work ignited my wish to paint my personal joy in everyday life." "Maguey" and "Madre" are from this period.

Asked which comments about her paintings please her most, she says:

"People tell me my art gives them a sense of life, vigor, movement and joy. I cannot ask for more."

"Art is another way of speaking... the artist, whether poet, dancer, musician or painter, needs a separate set of tools to reveal her innermost thoughts or conflicts... Someone once said that words were often inadequate, like a net cast into the sea which leaves so very much behind. To me, art is that net, picking up some of what the words have missed." —CARMEN VILA

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