On her website (stefanienewman.com) painter Stefanie Hope Newman writes about growing up in Chicago “where she fell under the spell of the Cubs and the Art Institute. If the generally abysmal performance of the former brought yearly heartache, Chicago’s amazing art museum never disappointed.”
We meet in Newman’s studio in her Craftsman bungalow in Baldwin Park and she elucidates further on her Chicago childhood. “My parents divorced when I was seven and so my dad would pick us up on Sundays in the suburbs and drive us into the city. He did not grow up with art, and I think when we were kids he was really trying to educate himself. He got those Time Life books that came out once a month about artists. It was about forty minutes to drive to his house, so I learned about Michelangelo and Leonardo, and I realize he was learning about art at the same time as I was.”
More than the books, it was really a pushy and abrasive “frenemy” who was responsible for her lifelong love affair with painting. This girlfriend/enemy “came to all my parties and vice versa, and for my ninth birthday she brought me a nightgown from Marshall Fields. It was the worse gift. Worse than socks. And she said, ‘I wanted to get you an oil paint set but my mother wouldn’t let me.’ Marshall Fields had a great return policy and a great art department in those days.” So Newman made the return and started painting with oils in her mom’s laundry room.
She went on to study painting and sculpture at Bennington College, Vermont with a wonderful year abroad at St. Martin’s College of Art in London, and after graduation worked in New York as an assistant editor. In a roomy apartment on West 98th she set up a studio and painted every day after work preparing a portfolio for graduate school. Newman earned an MFA in Painting & Sculpture from the University of Wisconsin, before attaining a tenure-track position “as the token abstract painter” at the University of Virginia.
While Newman sadly did not get tenure, she says she did meet her husband, painter William Lapham, at one of her art shows in Charlottesville (“he sent me a fan letter”). At the time, she was showing large-scale abstracts and three-dimensional pieces constructed out of heavyweight Bristol board and inspired by the Impressionist’s urban renderings of Paris. The couple went on to have a decorative arts business in Albemarle County, “where we did art restoration, and a lot of making new wood look old. I’ve restored everything from murals to a church ceiling that had to be cleaned with little Pink Pearl erasers.”
Newman and her husband moved from rural Virginia to Savannah in 2021: “We really wanted to be in the South. We liked the southern landscape.” Despite not intending to paint here (she had given away all her art supplies), she immersed herself in sketching and painting the city and fills her days with plein air painting sessions of street scenes, squares, and houses, and teaching pop-up plein aire classes for $10 via Venmo. “The architecture here is so intertwined with nature and the live oaks, it really is an orchestrated space.” She reads me the poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, a poem she saw on a poster every day in grade school:
‘so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens’
“To me, that’s about noticing relationships, and the small things in life. How the ordinary can be transcendent.” She goes on, “I’m interested in the casual, the arrested moment. That still informs me.”
Newman describes her watercolor works as mixed media: she first blocks in her painting with pencil, “then I work with very big areas of paint, but there’s also stuff like opaque marker and sometimes ink applied afterwards.” Her style seems very ‘loose’, open and suggestive, revealing a lot of the underlying white of the paper. “What I’m responding to, of course, is color and how it changes according to the light. So it seems very abstract and loose at first, but then I add in more lines and more details.” She says she must be careful that the ink detail does not detract from the atmosphere she is creating. She loves sketching, but “I never use perspective. It’s more a matter of getting into your muscle memory what it is to make expressive lines.”
Commissions have come through posting of images on neighborhood websites and on the Facebook group “Savannah Connection” and, of course, through people approaching her as she paints on her folding chair in the squares accompanied by her dog, Ava. “I posted a painting of River Street on “Savannah Connection” and a woman got in touch with me to buy it because she works for the shipping company of the ship I’d included. And then one day I was painting off Troup Square and a woman came out of her car in front of the house I was painting, and she bought it before the paint was dry.”
She talks about going outside with the intention of painting every day: “Mostly what that means is that I’m not wearing nice clothes!” We laugh as she tells me that once, in Scottsville, VA she was wearing pants with holes and “a woman stopped me to ask me my size – she thought I must be homeless.”
Newman has set up her studio in a small room in the bungalow, and across the hall, husband Bill has done the same. Bill Lapham has been working on a series of drawings and paintings based on ikebana, or Japanese flower arranging. Huge piles of work lie on the floor, some pieces are tacked on walls, and some are framed. His style could not be more different from that of his wife…
Lapham draws impressionistic renderings of ikebana in charcoal, but it is his strong, well-constructed, and beautiful abstract paintings on newsprint that I am particularly drawn to. He says, “I’m very influenced by eastern art, calligraphy, Chinese painting. I always start with a charcoal line, and then as I work I may dissolve it with water and paint back into it with acrylic. It’s a process of building up and washing and scraping down and building up again.” He says that it’s all about the calligraphy on top: he draws zero inspiration from the underlying newsprint. “Sometimes I’ll obscure the underlying pictures, sometimes I’ll use them.”
Actively seeking representation, he will have some pieces in an Art Fair in Madrid and is meeting with art consultants. Lapham has extensively researched his unique materials and technique: “The newspaper itself is all de-acidified so it won’t turn brown and fragile. Then it’s coated with an acrylic medium which protects it and makes it scrubbable and durable.” Finally, the newspaper is adhered to TYVEK housewrap, “which is a very neutral substance. It’s tough and it’s light and it doesn’t wrinkle.” For me, the paintings where he includes understated areas of smooshed-out color are particularly strong.
What a treat to meet not only one new Savannah artist, but two! Follow Newman on Instagram @newmanstefanie and sign up for her newsletter and pop-up plein aire classes at stefanienewman.com. Follow her husband Bill Lapham’s work on Instagram @lapham.w
This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2023.
