Assembling a life as an artist

SHARON, Conn. — For most of the artists in the Second Act exhibition at Noble Horizons (which will open Sept. 23, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m.), art was not something that entered their lives unexpectedly.

Most of the dozen or so painters and sculptors were engaged in creating work throughout most of their lives — but they all had “day jobs” and were not full-time artists.

Kate Stiassni, who is now in her early 60s, spent two decades in New York City working in television news on programs such as “60 Minutes” and “Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood.”

She overlapped her retirement from that phase of her life (in 1998) with the beginning of a new phase (in 1996) when she launched Imagine Design and Construction, which she describes as a “real estate development design business.” While that work continues (she is renovating a house now in Salisbury), she has also devoted an increasing amount of time to creating art quilts, large and small, colorful or muted. Two of her larger pieces will be in the show at Noble.

A beautiful whole

Stiassni is very much a “hand” person. Her fingers and palms flit and weave about like small, hungry birds as she talks. Quilting and textile art attracted her more than painting, she said, because, “It’s very tactile. It’s the touch, the feel. That’s why I love working with fabrics.”

She does paint, however, but her small watercolors on paper are mainly a starting point for her fabric designs. The finished product is usually quite different from the original sketch. For Stiassni, the freedom of designing a quilt seems to hold a special appeal. Once a painting is done, it’s pretty much done. When she constructs a quilt, Stiassni takes fabric that she has dyed herself and that she has cut into blocks or shapes. She has quilt batting stretched out on her wall; the cotton fabrics that she uses cling to the batting so she can move them around without having to lock herself into a design until she’s ready.

Pacing herself

These fabric compositions seem well suited to Stiassni’s temperament. Like her work, her life appears to be an amalgam of many apparently disparate things combined to make a beautiful whole. She doesn’t like to stand still. She finds that the nature of quilting also suits her personality.

“I like to work for about 20 minutes at a time,” she said. “I get up. I walk around.”

Stiassni was a graduate of the Kent School and returned to the Northwest Corner with her husband, Edward Nunes, and their daughter, Francesca, who attended The Hotchkiss School. They visited the area frequently and then bought a home in the Northwest Corner in 2004; they originally settled in Lakeville and now live in Sharon, where Stiassni built an addition to their home that includes a large art studio.

She began quilting about 10 years ago, she said, after finding a pattern that appealed to her during a trip to Florida. 

After perfecting that pattern, in a variety of color combinations, she graduated to more abstract work of her own design. 

Those works have a Matisse cut-out quality to them, a free and swooping quality that transcends the traditional craft of quilting. Her work has been featured in a number of shows at museums and galleries, including two shows at The White Gallery in Lakeville (one in 2012 and one in 2014). 

From July to October 2015, her work was featured in a one-woman show at the Visions Art Museum in San Diego, Calif., called Shaping Space.

In addition to Second Act at Noble, her work will be included in a show called “Distaff in Sharon” at the Sharon Historical Society, that opens Sept. 10 and runs through Oct. 28. The show is a tribute to the late Melva Bucksbaum of Sharon.