“…life and art both call for a balance of freedom and discipline. Both life and art take place in real time. Both build on what has gone before. Both demand an ability to be in the momentum of tradition toward the unprecedented. Both require creativity.”
—James Ogilvy

On the third floor of a 19th century building on Wall Street—the one in Kingston, not Manhattan—there is a couple wholly committed to the exploration of paint. Joe Concra and Denise Orzo, along with their three cats, live and work in this renovated space, sharing an existence that appears to be ideal. No commute, no time clock, no bosses, and best of all, few constraints on their creative impulses. Concra prefers working the morning hours, while Orzo can be found in her studio in the evening. They both cook and share household duties. He tidies; she cleans. He empties the cat boxes; she maintains their litter box. A shiny espresso machine occupying prime real estate in the kitchen is always on. The imaginative juices flow.

Naturally, there are challenges to working where you live and being in the presence of your partner twenty-four/seven. If one’s studio door is closed, the other must respect that signal for privacy. “The goal is to work every day,” says Orzo, admitting that it’s sometimes hard to keep the focus. Life and cats intervene. When she was pushing to complete paintings for a recent show, she put the kibosh on all socializing. “It was actually great to say, ‘Sorry, I can’t come over.’ It forced me to get all these pieces done.” For Concra, the hardest part of their arrangement is survival. “We’re not making things people need every day. We’re not baking bread; we’re making art. It’s a very old tradition and an old problem. If you don’t have a patron, you figure out ways to survive. You sell a painting and then think, ‘How long can we stay in the studio now? How long can we make this last?’” She’s waitressed part time. He taught at Marist for five years. They have dealers who show their work, but they are essentially their own promoters and administrators. “Clerical tasks, shipping, marketing—all the work you don’t see takes us out of the studio. It looks like things run smoothly, but it’s a lot of work.”

Concra has occupied the building since 1992. His studio takes up half of the second floor and includes a shop for building frames for his oversized paintings. The large room in which he paints is empty but for the six-by-seven foot canvases on each of the four walls, in various stages of completion. He makes between four and six of these large paintings a year, and recently showed in Miami at the Kelley Roy Gallery in the Wynwood Art District. His images are said to lean towards the somber and sad—solitary clowns, elephants with angel wings, an ostrich with its head in the sand, all against an empty blue-gray background. Yet there is delight expressed in the very execution of the paint on canvas, not to mention the whimsy of this quizzical imagery. “I just keep trying to move forward, and hopefully one idea will lead to the next. When I shipped four paintings to Miami, I noticed that there’s just a lot of blue—I’ve always relied on the sky for my content. I thought, man, I’ve got to keep the blue drawer closed for awhile, and I had all these browns and crimsons….” He points to an ostrich against aubergine, surrounded by flowers like a diva being showered at the end of a performance. “These flowers came from paintings I did years ago of bouquets from my grandmother’s funeral. The oddity of this one is not something I’d normally do, so this has got to be teaching me something. I’m learning from it—something technical, something emotional, something leading me to another idea. This is a whole new palette.”

Concra is continuously challenging himself, pulling away from the comfort zone, venturing into a new place. He shows me drawers full of paper sketches that serve to pique new images. He laughs, “I always find other artists’ sketches more interesting than their finished paintings because you can see the ideas germinating.” He started painting in college where he was studying journalism, and really immersed himself in art during post graduate work with Grace Hardigan. “It’s really important to have great teachers. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to grow up and get a job. And my parents gave me permission to try things and fail … or succeed.”

Orzo, a graduate of SUNY New Paltz, now works exclusively in encaustic paint—pigmented bee’s wax mixed with resin. She discovered the ancient medium when employed at R&F Handmade Paints in Kingston, and has become entirely engrossed in experimentation, initially working it in concert with watercolor, then layering it over various collaged objects, using stenciled photographs to shape images, and painting it directly onto canvas or rigid surfaces. On a tour of her studio crowded with work tables and shelves and a mini trampoline (for bouncing around ideas, perhaps?), she points to a heated palette that holds her pots of melted pigment and brushes, and explains how she takes a heat gun to a finished work so that the layers of paint fuse and brush marks disappear.

“The medium allows me to explore various things, leaning toward the idea of sculpture. It pre-dates oil paint; in fact, it was used by the Egyptians for the funerary portraits that are hanging in the Met today. It’s durable. You can’t leave it in a car in direct sunlight or take a chisel to it, but it is an archival medium.” Orzo likes doing manageable-sized square surfaces, although she recently produced an intriguing canvas, seven-by-eleven feet, of six women, each wrapped in sections of an American flag. There are birds in her repertoire, a woman with a beak, female heads with antlers, mirrored images, a crown of thorns, more flags, and bird bones. Her images are muted and spare, yet provoking. Hard-put to describe the message behind the medium (and why should she? Does a poet translate her words directly into the visual?), Orzo delicately talks around what inspires her—a book she’s read, the contemplation of found objects, the female form, hints of emotion, perhaps even rage, at the very least wonder. Line, geometric pattern, and the subtlety of contrast rather than color signal the inclination of her thoughts. Background is absent, leaving the viewer to decipher a context based on his own.

Her initial enthusiasm to be an artist came when she had her first studio class, a three-hour block of time. “No one had ever given me a block of time where the goal was to draw or paint. It was pretty exciting. The time would fly. It was the discipline of slowing down and the elevation of its importance, like I didn’t have to feel guilty about sitting there and staring at a cow skull.” We talk about how any creative endeavor requires time during which you’re not expected or allowed to do anything else but think through that process, in order to tap into something. It speaks to the urgent need to keep studio art in the schools. If kids don’t get exposed to the possibility of thinking creatively, of indulging in right brain activity—it’s lost to them.

We climb through the roof door to an observatory to have tea and chat. Viewing the ridges of the southernmost Catskill Mountains—Peekamoose, the Vly—in the late afternoon chill, it’s easy to imagine that inspiration simply lands from the sky. Both artists deal in subject matter that is not exactly abstract, except in concept. A floating elephant, a graphic arrangement of leaves—these are not your average landscapes or portraits. Orzo remarks, “Everything that I personally think about, read about, look at, dream about—it’s a synthesis; I’m interested in the human experience, the earthling experience.” Art flows.

Concra adds, “The visual image is very hard to put into words; it’s a vehicle for handling paint, and it becomes its own seductive thing. We’re both completely seduced with the medium.” And they’re informed by everything around; so I ask what the last eight years have done to influence them. “I’ve made some tanks with clowns coming out of them, some threatening paper airplanes, a bunch of houses of cards falling down. I’m attuned to what’s happening around me, but that’s not to say what I do is based on politics. After the recent election, I didn’t write ‘hooray’ across a canvas; I don’t expect huge change.”

The traditional gallery system is changing, however. They’ve both had successful shows this past year, and report that the art industry, like the music industry, is responding to the lifestyle changes of consumers. Concra’s dealer in Manhattan, for instance, is also a mid-century furniture dealer. In Miami, they visited a shop that combined gallery art, perfume, high fashion and art books—it’s no longer the strict, rarified air of the traditional gallery. Concra also talks about how a Web presence is helping to promote their work. Orzo is not so into self-promotion, and wishes someone would just say, “I like this. Do you want to hang it on my wall?” To which Concra says, “That just doesn’t happen. There are a million people out there working just as hard [as we are]; we’re just fortunate when people respond to our work. Still, I can’t imagine doing anything else, and can’t imagine doing it with anyone else.”

James Ogilvy also wrote, “A strong identity is the tacit goal of those who turn away from society in order to ‘find themselves.’ But the model of artistic self-creation suggests that the self is no more found, like some preexisting thing, than a picture is found on a blank canvas.” Instead, the artful creation of a life in real time requires the courage to work without conventional goals and guarantees. Splash paint. Experiment. Honor the work. It’s a good life.

For further inquiry, see www.joeconra.com, www.donzella.com or www.deniseorzo.com.