Frank
J. Keegan, Editor, Connecticut Post
November 16, 2003
It's easy around here. A local arts prophet, the late Burt Chernow,
showed the way. You can see his vision at Housatonic Community College
in Bridgeport.His
incredible collection of more than 4,000 works now needs some
help. Many need to be restored and preserved. We can help by adopting.
This area is so nutrient rich in fine arts that the landscape is a
veritable rain forest of creative force.
We shall prosper if we nurture it, wither if we neglect it.
For one thing, art is the foundation of all that we are. Whether you
believe we derive from fathomless Divinity or incomprehensible randomness,
you must agree our expression of abstract thought is the one thing
definitively separating us from all other creatures.
Archeologists cannot tell us which came first, us or art. We may be
more art's creation than art is our creation.
All of science, mathematics and technology derive from it.
Artistic expression is woven so tightly into the fabric of worship
that rending one from the other would destroy the whole cloth.
For more than 30 years, until his death in 1997, Chernow wove fine
art into the fabric of education.
An ever-changing array is on display throughout the college.
Chernow wrote that he wanted to positively influence the "effect
of the total physical environment of a college on student attitudes,
emotions and learning."
Visit Housatonic sometime. You will see that it works. I've been
in eight community colleges. Housatonic probably has the toughest
demographics
of any.
It also has the best general deportment. Chernow's astounding collection
lifts everyone who enters.
In your home, art can lift you every day. It is an investment that
pays continuous dividends no matter what the market value.
Art can lift entire communities, economically as well as spiritually.
Look at what is happening in downtown Bridgeport with development
of the old Read's building into apartments and galleries for artists.
Maybe the arts never can replace Connecticut's lost manufacturing
industries, but the arts certainly can be a major economic force.
Just one of Vincent van Gogh's sunflowers has
if you add all the posters, prints, frames, mouse pads, coffee
mugs to the multi-million-dollar sales of the original
generated more than a billion dollars in economic activity over
a century from a few dollars in paint and canvas.
That is the power of genius expressed.
Our current information age was founded not by a scientist but
by an artist. Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph
and Morse
code,
was by profession a landscape painter.
A physicist's recent computer analysis of painter Jackson Pollock's
later works reveals the tortured artist was 25 years ahead
of science in showing
us a fundamental truth about the nature of reality.
Ironically, for the arts to lift us we must support the arts.
That means going to area shows and galleries and buying something.
Pay
no attention
to the snobs and experts.
Buy what you like. If it seems expensive, just amortize the
cost over 30 or 40 years of pleasure, and the cost can be pennies
a day.
Westport painter Ann Chernow, Burt's widow, said they were
broke when they started collecting for themselves, one
time taking
out a mortgage
to buy a work. "I came home and threw up."
Yet, she never has had any regrets. "Every day I see something
I've never seen before, and it's been here for 40 years."
She said, "If people only knew how much it means to an artist to
have support," especially the incredibly talented
unknowns who may or may not someday be famous.
Burt and Ann Chernow assembled a personal art collection on
teacher's pay. They believed anybody could do it. Everybody
can.
He applied his excellent eye and incredible drive to creating
a legacy for Housatonic out of almost nothing.
"Other schools can do it," Ann said in a
recent interview. "This
area is so rich with artists."
Unfortunately Chernow's legacy, this treasure in the heart
of downtown Bridgeport, needs some help.
Donations to
the Adopt-A-Painting program will help maintain a community asset
that lifts our entire region.
And everyone who visits a gallery
or art show in this area and buys a painting or sculpture not only
makes a personal
investment
that
will pay them daily dividends for decades, they make
an investment in our
region's future.
