Most people wouldn’t think of taking the ghoulish face in Munch’s “The Scream” and placing it on the goddess body in Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.”
But most people aren’t Beth Schwartz, a retired pathologist who now pursues the life of a professional artist.
Schwartz, a Pikesville resident and Beth El congregant, focuses on what she calls “mixed-media collage,” which utilizes both painting and photography and “straddles the art-and-craft world.”
In some cases, this involves her shooting photos of images and using a program like Photoshop to alter their elements to express a particular idea. At other times, she uses copyright-free imagery from other sources, such as classic art from the Renaissance, to form her collages.
Many of her collages are placed on items like the lids of jewelry boxes.
“I find myself drawn to using images from my travels and images I find at random during the course of my normal life,” says Schwartz. “I alter these images, using paint, inks and three-dimensional objects, and bring them to life with a whole new meaning.”
The first solo exhibition of Schwartz’s work will be held this Friday, Nov. 4, at Highlandtown Gallery, 248 S. Conkling Street. The show will run until Nov. 26.
The mother of two adult children, Schwartz, 65, grew up in Queens, New York, daughter of a pharmacist and a teacher.
She attended religious school but “definitely did not want to be in Hebrew high school by the time I was [an early teenager],” she says. “So I made enough [creative] mayhem and mischief there to ensure that I would get kicked out.”
From an early age, Schwartz was interested in art. She says she could often be found drawing during classes at Princeton University and later while attending Harvard Medical School, and also found an interest in sculpting.
But as the demands of her medical career and children intensified, she found less time for artistic pursuits.
For more than 26 years, Schwartz worked as a pathologist at Greater Baltimore Medical Center, and later at Woodholme Gastroenterology Associates. She retired from the field last December 2021 to travel and “just to have a good time.”
“I have a lot of other interests, and it was time,” says Schwartz. “We don’t know how many years we will be gifted on this earth.”
Schwartz began focusing more on her artwork. While she initially gave away her pieces as gifts, in time she formed her own business to promote and sell her art.
The piece that incorporates both “The Scream” and “The Birth of Venus” — titled “The Ambiguous Joy of Turning into One’s Mother,” — has been one of Schwartz’s more popular and humorous collages.
“It’s a piece about transformation and about turning into your mother and how, at first, it’s horrifying,” she says. “But then, really, my take on it is there’s no one else I’d rather turn into.”
One piece Schwartz is currently working on consists of photos she took of fire escapes from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and is “a work about navigating space” and “reflects living in cities today.” At 16-by-20 inches, the piece — with the working title of “Navigating the Grid” — is one of Schwartz’s larger pieces and will be featured in the Highlandtown Gallery show.
When starting a new art piece, Schwartz says she often takes inspiration from a concept she encounters in something like a literary work, or by a pattern or color that intrigues her.
“What I love most in [artistic] creation is that it’s a series of problems that need to be solved,” she says. “And you have to treat each problem with respect.”
As an artist, Schwartz says the types of problems she works to solve include questions on how to balance a work, or how much variation and dynamism there should be.
“And that’s what my career in pathology was,” she says. “You have to ask yourself the right questions when you see the visual cues. There’s a direct line between my work in pathology and my work as an artist.”
In addition to honing her skills as an artist, Schwartz says the promotion of her business has required acquiring new skills such as marketing, website development, social media and product photography.
Over the past five years, Schwartz says, sales of her works have been “mounting and mounting.” She notes that 15% of her sales go to the nonprofit Healthcare for the Homeless.
Schwartz says she has enjoyed meeting other local artists and becoming part of their community.
“The other artists I’ve met, in Baltimore and in Northern Virginia, have been the most generous, lovely people I’ve met in recent memory,” she says. “Everybody is willing to share resources, ideas for shows, and I try to follow suit and be as generous with my knowledge to people who are coming up behind me.”
To up-and-coming artists, Schwartz stresses the importance of fearlessness as key to success.
“The way I see the art career is that you open a door and you don’t know what’s going to be in there,” she says. “There may be nothing or there may be rejection in there. But in that room that you’ve just entered, there are other doors. You open those doors, and eventually there’s another great opportunity. And I’ve had so many opportunities.”
For information, visit bethschwartz.studio.
A former Baltimore resident, Jesse Berman is a freelance writer based in East Windsor, New Jersey.
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