Category : Articles

Burgeoning arts scene Veteran artist sees future in Torrington’s arts community
By Alec Johnson Republican-American 
Photos byBob Falcetti Republican-AmericanTorrington, CT

This article appeared in The Fredricksburg, Virginia:Freelance-Star  under the byline of Judith Jones.  Photography by Robert Martin

IN THE AFTERNOON  LIGHT of his studio, Ed Jaffe paints a girl he saw years ago. He was strolling along an Ecuadorian when he  spied her. Now the work is newly drawn and still colorless. Jaffe dabs white across the girl’s shoulders.

Screwing the lid back on a paint jar, he puts his brushes aside and changes into an old shirt. He passes through a hallway into another studio, this one with tall white walls and a floor coated with marble dust

He eyes his nemesis of three months, a chunk of green Vermont marble. It’s the hardest stone he’s ever carved, he says, pulling a protective shield over his face as he picks up a diamond coated cutting tool.

Ed Jaffe of Orange County is a versatile artist who has collectors across the country.

The painting of the Ecuadorian girl and the marble sculpture will complete a body of work that has consumed Jaffe for decades, but as one artistic period ends, the vigorous 71-year-old gears up for a trip and a dose of fresh inspiration. Next week, he leaves for a 10-day tour of Spain and Portugal, to visit the lands of the brigands and explorers of the late 15th century known as the Conquistadors.

This isn’t the first time Jaffe has looked to the past for content in his art. He’s hiked through Mayan and Incan ruins in South and Central America during the past 30 years or so.

Jaffe prepares for his trip–and runs his studio–from a gray-toned office behind the art showroom. Airline tickets and Spanish-language tapes are pushed aside as he settles in to talk dreamily about his travels but he grows impatient with a reporter’s questions about his photography career in the competitive New York advertising world of the 1960s and ’70s,  and his later emergence as a sculptor and painter.

“That’s an old story,” he says. “This is about now.”

Jaffe draws, paints and sculpts–often, all in the same day. His work is abstract, but his paintings reveal the observant eye of the professional photographer he was for 22 years.

A native New Englander, he worked for major advertisers such as AT&T, IBM and Smith & Wesson and maintained a studio in Manhattan. A 1970 photo shoot in Vermont was the beginning of the end of that lucrative career. “I fell in love with the place and bought a piece of land,” he says.

Then he began to sculpt full time.

First it was in exotic hardwoods. (Jaffe didn’t switch to stone until the hardwoods were no longer available) He collected bits of broken shells and brought them home for subject matter. “I would place a shell fragment under a sharp light and draw the highlights and shadows, not the shell,” he says. Based on the drawing, he then made a sculpture that was abstract, but still aquatic-looking.

He was deeply immersed in sculpture, but “the camera still paid the bills,” he says. “I’d done everything with a camera I could, in the toughest  market in the world.” As Jaffe moved from picture-maker to stone-carver–and later on, painter–the central concept of his work began to take shape

“I like cultures that are not my own,”

Jaffe heads to the hills and ocean fringes on his expeditions. In Ixtapa, Mexico, in the mid-1960s, he collected perfect shells for tourist ladies staying in his hotel and kept the broken shards for himself. In Guatemala in the mid-1980s, skirmishes in the mountains forced him back down to a village, and ultimately home. The same was true in Ecuador in the mid-1990s, when his sojourn was cut off by an attack by Peruvian forces two days into the trip.

He relies on research and travel to absorb the history that infuses his art and he relies on people who now inhabit these ancient lands for a lush sense of place. “I’m a Latin at heart, I guess,” he says .

His forays fed his sculpting talent and later his painting. The paintings have rich earth colors with geometric patterns that lie like lace over female subjects. He carries the Latin-culture themes and feel into sculpting Portuguese and Italian marble.

Collectors say his art is recognizable throughout the phases of his  career.

I have one called ‘The Warrior,'” says Augie Brown of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who has known Jaffe for almost 40 years  “It’s a rugged face. There’s a strength to his sculpture.” Brown worked on photo shoots with Jaffe in New York in the 1960s and was one of the first male models in Eileen Ford’s agency. He has collected more than a dozen of Jaffe’s sculptures over the years. “I bought one of his first sculptures. It was leaning against  his fireplace,” Brown says. He thought he had no talent.”

Jaffe says he got serious about painting 10 years ago, partially to indulge his love of drawing and form and he paints with a vengeance, starting with a tempered masonite board that gets rough treatment. “I use everything–scrapers, razors,” he says. An idea simmers for a while before Jaffe begins working. “When I paint, I have to think about what I’m doing,” he says. “It’s very intellectual. You have your arguments with it. You run into walls and you’ve got to get to a solution.”

Sculpting stone requires even more forethought but, “I do all of my thinking before I start”, he says. “never while I’m working. The stone is emotional and intuitive.”. When he fires up the pneumatic tools and drills, Jaffe is in his own world, perhaps an entire continent away.

Drew Jackson May 13, 2011 Orange County Review

When 82-year-old artist Ed Jaffe stands up from a chair, he does so slowly and with a pronounced grimace, but it would be reasonable to assume the act is merely for show — a performance so as not to confuse a younger person’s expectations of an old man. Jaffe is and is not a lot of things.

He is a sculptor, but sits in an office surrounded by new paintings; he is a resident of Orange in that he lives within its town limits; and he is that expected old man only in that his stories are better than most and he is all too willing to tell them.

One of the most eye-catching pieces in Jaffe’s main street gallery in Orange is the large sign announcing the building’s for sale. For years the artist has been trying to sell his gallery and studio and make his return to his native North.

“That’s the reason I’m leaving,” said Jaffe, as he nods towards a wall in his studio covered with faces of smiling grandchildren. “The older you get, the closer you want to be to family.”

A stronger real estate market likely would have ushered Jaffe out of the area much earlier, but as he waited and waited for his building to sell, pieces of his work began accumulating around him, eventually convincing him to hold one last scheduled show in Virginia.

“As I waited for my building to sell, I continued to work on pieces for a show for when I got up North,” said Jaffe. “But after a few contracts fell through and my paintings began to overtake my office, I thought, ‘I might as well have one here.’ ”

In his building, Jaffe’s life is neatly compartmentalized: a large, sprawling gallery of finished paintings and sculptures out front; a painting studio with floors and tables spattered with different mixes of color; a stark-white sculpting studio; and then an ordinary office with a computer and printer, but with a floor lined with finished paintings awaiting display.

It is a world separated from any other and intentionally built that way. Traffic barely can be heard outside, and the only windows are ceiling skylights, providing light by which to see, but offering a view of nothing but possibly the time and weather.|

“When you’re in here, you’re not in Orange; you’re not even in Virginia,” said Jaffe. “You’re in my space.”

Seventeen years ago, Jaffe came to that space by happenstance and stayed on a whim. His life has moved in roughly 20-year cycles, and while traveling to Winston-Salem, N.C., to look at a property, Jaffe stopped in Orange and saw the vacant building then owned by the late H.B. Sedwick.
Jaffe never made it to North Carolina on that trip.

“It was big and empty,” said Jaffe. “I spoke with H.B. Sedwick on a Tuesday and closed on the building on Thursday. I drove back to Vermont thinking, ‘Now what am I going to do with this building I just bought?’ But by the time I got back, I had it planned out. I love this building; it’s built to suit my very individual needs, but now it’s time to do something else.”

The gallery is, perhaps unintentionally, set up chronologically, both in terms of years and artistic progression. Jaffe can connect various pieces and trace them back to a particular breakthrough in his work, sculptures influencing paintings and vice versa, a constant movement toward the abstract and a continuing battle with two-dimensionality. What it all boils down to is a small phrase pinned up in Jaffe’s painting studio: “I’m not done yet.”

“With this one,” said Jaffe, pointing to the painting studio’s current work in progress, “I’m learning how to paint. I’m still figuring it out.”

In the past two years Jaffe has moved from primarily marble sculpture back to painting.
“I had these flaming red joints on my hand that hurt like hell,” he said.

Two doctors couldn’t figure out the cause of Jaffe’s pain, and it wasn’t until lunch with a vascular surgeon that he learned the possible cause.

“He asked me if I had ever worked with power tools,” said Jaffe. “I said, ‘Yes, I’ve worked with power tools for the last 40 years.’ He said that was my problem and that I just had to stop using power tools. That meant stopping working with stone. You pay the price to have this much fun.”

Jaffe’s final scheduled show in Virginia will be somewhat of a retrospective of his work, including never-before-seen pieces from as far back as 1957. Viewers won’t find many elements of Orange County in Jaffe’s work, as he said he is mostly influenced foreign and distant cultures that are not his own, but he said that Orange has been an enjoyable place to live and work.

“I enjoy small-town living,” said Jaffe. “Twenty-two years in Manhattan will kick you out of big cities.”

The show opens from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Saturday and runs until the end of June, but Jaffe said he will be around and the gallery will be open until he sells the building.

“If I’m in the gallery, it will be open,” he said. “Just ring the bell and come in.”

Drew Jackson writes for the Orange County Review.

This article appeared in the Fredericksburg, Virginia Freelance –Star under the byline of Lisa Chinn. Photography by Scott Neville

Melding with marble

Images of another realm greet those who slip off the streets of Orange and into Jaffe’s world. Female figures and abstract forms made of marble mingle with African pots and masks. Textured paintings of Portuguese villages and Spanish alleyways hang on the walls. Jaffe’s art is inspired by his travels, including a hike through the Mayan and Incan ruins of Central and South America. “They say that an artist reflects the time in which they live, but I have always been attracted to another time, another place and a culture that is not my own,” his artist’s statement reads.

A New England native, Jaffe has carved African hardwood and Italian marble. He’s fashioned figures from fiberglass, acrylic and clay. But “I’m into stone,” Jaffe said. “I like the smell and taste of stone.” And marble–cold, hard, sensual marble–is his favorite material to carve. “Carving marble is better than going to a shrink,” he said. “When you’re really upset, you go in there and you start working on a fresh piece of stone and any frustration ends up on the floor.”

Jaffe often draws designs on paper, then uses charcoal to transfer them to the material he sculpts. He starts chiseling at the front of a stone and works “through” it, drilling away excess rock and hammering off unwanted hunks. The shavings become smaller and smaller, turning to flecks, then dust. Jaffe leaves a “road map” of the marble at each step in each piece to give viewers a sense of its journey.

As the structure takes shape, he “listens” to the marble, letting its quirks and qualities lead the way. “I never think when I’m working on stone,” he said. “I just let it happen.”

Jaffe was just 13 when he picked up a camera. Before long, he was using one to turn a profit. As a student at Syracuse University, he scared up local photography jobs. In his junior year, he left to study advertising photography at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. He bumped himself up to the big leagues in the 1950s, when he moved to Manhattan with enough money in his pockets to last six months. He stayed for 22 years, landing jobs with major companies, like duPont, Pfizer, AT&T and IBM. But it wasn’t always easy.

Ed Jaffe stands beside one of his sculptures, titled ‘Enclosed Figure No. 2, at his gallery in Orange. What was once a hobby has turned into a passion for Jaffe, a former New York photographer.

His first apartment was tiny, with a bathroom that doubled as a darkroom. He paid bills and purchased photo equipment with the money he made, then used the rest to buy groceries. “If my dad knew how many meals I skipped,” Jaffe said, “he would have killed me.”

A wood carving on the cover of a 1958 issue of “Life” magazine caught Jaffe’s eye, and changed his life. “I can do that” he said. He bought a slab of mahogany and a book, and taught himself to sculpt. He was smitten by his new hobby, invigorated by the three-dimensional quality that was sculpture..

The catalog work that began to dominate the photo industry left him less enamored with his career. Then, a 1970 photo shoot sent him to Vermont. “I had a love affair with the place.” said Jaffe, whose eyes twinkle when he speaks of the skiing he enjoyed and the state, where he bought land and built a house.

The camera still paid the bulk of the bills. But Jaffe was spending less time taking pictures, more time sculpting. His works sold from New England to Florida, from Georgia to California. But the money-driven, anything-goes attitude that emerged in the 1980s art market was more than he could take. He refused to tweak his style to meet the changing demands of the business

A knee injury that left him unable to ski-coupled with a need for change, spurred his desire to leave Vermont. That’s when he stumbled across the empty Orange County storefront. He bought it because it was there, he said, and because it was big enough to house the 15 tons of sculpture and equipment he was hauling. The 16,000-square-foot building became his studio, his exhibition space and his home.

Today, he sells his work to private collectors and to those who are willing to travel to Orange to see his sculpture and paintings. Smaller pieces sell better because they’re less expensive, easier to handle and more convenient to transport. But that doesn’t stop Jaffe from chiseling the massive works that make him happy, like the 4-foot, 1,500-pound piece he carved from Portuguese marble. “I don’t care if I never sell it,” he said about the figure–an abstract image of a man embracing a woman. “I enjoy every minute of it.”

As he nears the end of his current supply of marble, he’ll decide whether to buy more or return to sculpting other materials. One thing is for certain: Jaffe won’t be swayed by friends or foes or fortune. “Fame is always welcome”, he said. “but a really wealthy artist is an artist who can stay in the studio all day long. I’ve been doing that for a long time.”