remembering Edmund Casarella, a ROCKIN' family friend (and great sculptor) from across the street

(above) "Behind the Eight Ball" (1960), by printmaker and sculptor Edmund Casarella

(all three prints courtesy the Annex Galleries, Santa Rosa, CA)
(above) "Detroit" (1961)
(above) "Climax" (ca. 1960)
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Across Linden Avenue in Englewood, NJ, where the Grushkin family made its home beginning in 1950, there lived printmaker and sculptor Edmund Casarella. He was one of my dad Phil's and my mom Jean's closest friends, along with Ed's wife Nikki, and their (and thus our) neighbors Sam and Soni Fischer (Sam was a fine art painter), and everyone's respective kids. Phil, Sam, and Ed had one whale of a great time together for 60+ years.

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As kids, my brother Jonas, and our sister Dena, and I often made our way across the street to Ed's studio, a somewhat re-converted, rambling old carriage house dating back to the horse-and-buggy days. Englewood (where George Washington marched down Palisade Avenue, fleeing from the British) was and still is a prominent suburban city across the Hudson River from New York City. Residents of Englewood can take public transit and be in midtown in less than 30 minutes. Ed's studio was a fantastic place, full of his enormous steel sculptures and printmaking presses. And Ed himself was wonderfully eccentric, just a great guy.

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I knew about his work because the Grushkins displayed some of his--and Sam Fischer's--prints and paintings on our own walls. I grew up with that art, along with 10,000 artbooks that my dad collected (he himself was responsible, as art director for publisher Harry N. Abrams, and as an independent book designer of great renown, for hundreds of these). My mom was a longtime para-professional librarian in Englewood, so it was all about books, art, sculptors, printmakers, typographers, caligraphers, and such at the dinner parties.

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What I only recently learned was that Ed handled at least one automotive-styled commission for the magazine Business Week to illustrate their "Business America" series in 1960. The piece titled "Behind the Eight Ball," atop this blog, obviously a modern abstract expressionist view of a V-8 engine, is a paper-relief print. That kind of print was Ed's specialty, a variation on the woodcut print.

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I'm not sure if the other automotive piece, "Detroit," a color woodcut print from 1961, was also commissioned similarly for Business Week. But they're both great takes on a subject I've come to know well.

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The third piece, "Climax," originally commissioned by Upsala College, is more typical of the oversize black and white woodcut prints and 8-foot-high sculptures Casarella created throughout his career.

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Ed was born in 1920 and died in 1996. He studied, like my dad, at Cooper Union in New York, before being hired by Antony Velonis to print serigraphs at Creative Printmakers under the National Youth Administration. After his army service, he took courses under the G.I. Bill from 1949 - 1951 at the Brooklyn Museum School. I myself was born in 1951, and both the Casarellas and Fischers, came to live across the street from us in the late-1950s.

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Casarella earned a Fulbright Fellowship in 1951 which allowed him to travel to Europe, in particular Italy and Greece. He returned to the U.S. at mid-decade, having also earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1956 began teaching. Ultimately he would head up courses at Cooper Union, Finch College, Hunter College, and hold temporary positions at Yale, Rutgers, Columbia, and Pratt. My dad did similarly, in book design, at Harvard-Radcliffe, NYU, and others.

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You can see many wonderful Casarella prints (also for sale) at http://www.annexgalleries.com/artists/Edmond_Casarella.html

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As far as the cars go, I've no particular memory of what Ed or Sam drove, but my dad in his day had one of those rocket-nosed Studebakers along with a rugged-looking Willys station wagon

(some of the readers here will remember an earlier blog that included a childhood photo of that Willys, with me poking out thru a window). Mostly, though, the Grushkins were a Ford Country Squire family.

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The Fischer family will live in my heart forever, as the Fischer girls were responsible for turning me on to the MEET THE BEATLES lp, and maybe what I've done professionally ever since stemmed from that pivotal moment in time.

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RIP Ed Casarella, it was a pleasure being a kid across the street from you and your welding torch.