This article appeared in the Dec. 1, 2005 Jewish Advocate.

Life experience colors artist’s work

BY SUSIE DAVIDSON

Woven into the acrylic folds of Barry Shuchter’s paintings are a lifetime of influences. His, however, are mainly digestible.

“My art is informed by my identity as a Jew,” he says, “which for me is related to food and politics. I like the corned beef at Michael’s Deli or the hand-sliced nova from Zathmary’s (both in Brookline).” He also fondly recalls surprise Sunday morning visits from his cousin’s family to their apartment in New Jersey, or the return visits they paid to Long Island, laden with bagels, rye bread, babka, rugelach, lox, herring, whitefish, latkes and pastrami.

How intrinsic is the food motif? Shuchter, who goes by the pseudonym of “Lilson” in homage to his mother Lillian, ices and serves a cake in the design of the featured painting at his openings. He’ll be doing the same on Thursday, Dec. 8 from 5-8 p.m., at a wine and cheese reception at the Harding House Bed & Breakfast in Cambridge.

Harding House is a newly-remodeled, 1860’s era Victorian building located at 288 Harvard St., behind the City Hall. The exhibit, coordinated by the Out of the Blue Art Gallery, a Cambridge arts center run by Tom Tipton and Deborah Bloch Priestly, will be their first showing of Shuchter’s work.

A Newark, New Jersey native who currently lives in Arlington and is about to move to Cambridge, Shuchter has produced hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings in his 30 years of artwork. Subject matters range from the various jobs he’s held, which include baking bread, smelting lead and working with computers, to observations on politics and, of course, food. "Every act of creation involves an act of digestion,” he said. On a serious note, he also distills more provocative themes into his pieces, such as identity conflicts regarding poverty and wealth, and natural observations - wind blowing through branches, the mutual effects of adjacent plants, branches stretching over a river. Yet all of Shuchter’s tangents ultimately come together to reflect a universally philosophic and humanistic background.

Shuchter’s father, Jerome, was an economist and poet who, early on, took him to New York museums. His mother, who lives in Brookline, is a longtime political activist and tenant organizer who met her husband on the basketball court at Camp Kinderland when they were teenagers. “She was the one shooting baskets,” said Shuchter, who also went to the camp, located in the Berkshires and founded over 75 years ago as a center for socialist and communist values (it is still referred to as the "summer camp with a conscience"). Shuchter’s parents were regular readers of the Yiddish-language Freiheit (a newspaper founded in 1922 with a mission of socialism, labor and racial equality, theatre and general “Yiddishkayt”) and were immersed in socio-Yiddish culture.

“We considered ourselves Jewish in more of a cultural sense than a religious one,” he said. “We celebrated the Jewish holidays to remember our heritage of struggle against oppression, of our commonality with others who struggle against oppression, and to foster the idea that peace, justice and Jewish identity should all be linked.”

Hear, hear. And pass the babka!

The event is free and handicap-accessible. For more information, please contact Out of the Blue Art Gallery at 617-354-5287, or Harding House at 877-489-2888. To view the work of Barry Shuchter, please visit www.shuchter.com.