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Week of 9 April 1999 Vol. II, No. 30 Arts That Midas touch SFA's Stephanie Kay is an artist of many parts By Hope Green For the longest time, School for the Arts instructor Stephanie Kay (SFA'86,'91) filled her canvases with images of jumbled car parts. Muffler pipes were among her favorite subjects, along with heaps of rusted brakes, shock absorbers, and springs that she carted from a Midas garage to her Fuller Building studio during graduate school. As the years passed, Kay's experience drawing and painting those scraps of metal informed her work with the human figure, and the resulting images are part of her new exhibition, The Endicott Street Pictures, opening April 13 at the Sherman Gallery. The Office of Development and Alumni Relations will host a reception for the artist on April 16 as part SFA's Alumni Weekend celebration. "We're very pleased that during the weekend we will be showcasing the work of a faculty member who was also a star student here," says Katherine French, the school's coordinator of exhibitions and special projects. On view will be a selection of large and small oil paintings and drawings, most of them completed within the last two years, during what Kay calls a "crucial transition" in her career back to figurative work. Facing reality Kay was born in Queens, N.Y., and frequented the art museums of Manhattan as a child. After earning her bachelor's degree at BU's School for the Arts, she returned to New York with what she now admits was a romantic image of an artist's life. For one thing, she could not afford a studio. "It was great to be back in New York, wonderful to be around all that art, but I wasn't making any of it. I was very unhappy." When she returned to BU for her master's degree, Kay thrived, using a studio on campus and developing a network of artist friends. She also won the 1991 Esther B. and Albert H. Kahn Award, which was established to help launch the careers of SFA seniors and graduate students. Stephanie Kay (SFA'86,'91) poses with her painting "I See Dust Rise," which was inspired by the Greek tragedy The Suppliants, by Aeschylus. Photo by Vernon Doucette Halfway through graduate school, Kay began to experiment with nontraditional forms, mainly the muffler pipes, during a phase that would last eight years. She never lost touch with her classical SFA training, however, and always made time to sketch the human figure and other traditional subject matter to keep herself grounded. "One of my teachers, the late Robert D'Arista, used to say that when you set up a still life with an apple at arm's length from you, it's like a cat going to warm milk," she recalls. "It kind of brings you back to your beginnings, like comfort food almost, and for me, it's important to keep going back to those roots." Two years ago Kay began a series of charcoal self-portraits. "There was so much I was starting to do with form and light and space that I had learned from painting the mufflers. I learned to my extreme happiness that I could do the same things with figures. "My figurative painting," she adds, "is a natural extension of my work with the muffler pipes, which are very humanlike forms anyway -- these writhing, alive-looking objects scarred by time." Some of those older works will be part of the Sherman exhibit. Avoiding conformity Kay's mentor since graduate school has been Morton Sacks, now an SFA professor emeritus, who "taught me how to think effectively, and taught me a great deal about sticking to your guns," she says. "You really need to have a strong sense of principle to maintain your integrity as an artist because a great deal of art has become a business." For that reason, Kay says, she has exhibited primarily at academic venues. Her stylistic influences include Greco-Roman sculptures and the Renaissance masters, whose work she calls "timeless and magnificent and never wanting for more." These are qualities she is aiming for in her own work -- regardless of what or whom she is painting. "For me, form is form," she explains. "You could be painting a landscape with sheep in it, a still life with apples, a portrait of your grandmother, or a painting of mufflers or wads of bubblegum -- really the subject matter isn't what the painting is necessarily about. It's what you do with that subject matter that's important. You have to know what you want to say." There goes her neighborhood The Sherman Gallery show is named for the last group of pictures Kay painted in her studio on Endicott Street in Boston's North End, a gentrifying neighborhood where she also rents an apartment. She and her fellow artist tenants were recently forced to vacate the Castignetti Building when a developer announced he would convert it to luxury condominiums. Kay managed to find another space nearby and looks forward to settling in. Yet she speaks wistfully about packing up the old studio, despite the constant rumble of the nearby Central Artery -- still elevated -- and the din of Big Dig construction going on beneath it. As a reminder of her eight years on Endicott Street, she plans to bring the piles of car parts with her to the new studio. "I have to have them around me now," she explains. "They're a fixture." The Endicott Street Pictures will be on view at the Sherman Gallery, George Sherman Union second floor, from April 13 to May 8. The opening reception will be held on April 16 from 5 to 7 p.m. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.