Sharon Woman’s Club welcomes local artist

SHARON — The Sharon Woman’s Club (SWC), now entering its 112th year, continues to bring about educational opportunity in the form of programs and scholarships, creative endeavors and top-quality social gatherings.

The club’s most recent meeting on Thursday, Feb. 16, held at the home of SWC member Theresa Kenny, featured a talk by acclaimed local artist Pieter Lefferts who spoke of his roundabout career as an artist and author of a new book for children, “What the Kek Kek Saw,” the title recalling his third-grade formative experience of floating alone face up in a canoe on a lake in the Adirondacks and hearing the distant call of frogs.

“Knowing who the animals are is a huge difference from knowing what they are,” said Jane Strong during her introduction of Lefferts, referring to the premise of his book. Strong is Executive Director of The Equus Effect, a therapeutic program based in Sharon, bringing people into beneficial contact with the “who” of horses.

Capturing his audience by recounting the circuitous route he took toward the visual arts and painting, Lefferts described a major in international studies at Lewis and Clark University in Oregon, travels in Italy, studying design at the Disney organization’s offices in New York City, serving as a personal assistant to jazz saxophonist Jerry Mulligan and his quartets (“at least when they were onstage, I knew where they were”), and cherishing a fleeting meeting with blues great B.B. King.

Along the way and lately, too, Lefferts said he has been influenced by the American Impressionists, including Andrew Wyeth and Winslow Homer.

One of Lefferts’ newest works, a landscape inspired by an Adirondacks mountain scene, was displayed on an easel. The work will be shown at an April 18 exhibit being planned by the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.

Speaking of his new book and referencing sounds heard from the quiet solitude of his canoe experience, Lefferts explained that “Kek Kek” is his interpretation of the sounds made by the calling frogs.

A theme of the book, he said, is “transitioning from loneliness into solitude and feeling not alone. The animals have a perspective on our future.”

Of his teaching, Lefferts said, “I am a teaching artist, not an art teacher.” His studio art classes are held at his North Light Studio, now in Amenia, New York (in Fudgy’s Plaza), although the enterprise had its roots in Sharon.

Authentically engaging with art is a creative process, Lefferts said of the work of students in his studio.

“Always stay curious,” he advised.

Organized in late 1910, the SWC decided on a motto: “In good things, Unity; In small things, Liberty; In all things, Charity.” Among their first actions was a petition to establish a teachers’ pension in the state and to rally against cruelty to birds whose plumage adorned ladies’ hats.

During ensuing decades, the SWC supported the creation of the town beach and the use of seatbelts. For their 50th anniversary, the SWC donated town street signs. In the 1970s, the SWC was instrumental in initiating the four-way stop intersection of Routes 343, 41 and 4, by the clock tower and sought to control the commercialization of Main Street around the Green.

Coinciding with the 75th anniversary in the 1980s, the SWC began its Town Beautification Project.

The SWC centennial decade began in 2010, seeing the presentation of a flag to the town on Memorial Day and Lyme disease became a focus. In 2019, the pandemic limited activities but even remotely, all but two of the SWC’s 18 committees continued to serve the community.

To learn more about the Sharon Woman’s Club, now accepting applications for its scholarship program, go to www.sharonct.org.