by Eileen Watkins

Just past what our society calls “retirement age,” she made a radical change in not only her style, but also her medium. She admits being motivated not only by a desire to conquer new worlds, but also by more practical considerations.

Chesley with some of her work.

“I was working on big paintings that took an enormous amount of energy,” she explains. “I needed to find something I could do sitting down!”

Chesley had made her reputation as a pastel and watercolor artist, creating impressionistic studies of landscapes and Victorian houses found around her hometown of Ocean Grove, N.J. Her more recent work breaks out into the third dimension, using ceramic mosaics to embellish vases, planters, drawer and cabinet knobs, mirrors and even furniture.

She combines broken bits of found and donated china with some fragments she creates herself; she also shapes three-dimensional flowers and spirals to serve as focal points for her compositions. Once in a while she will keep a particularly interesting image — such as a Madonna or a romantic-looking genre study — more or less intact. This can give her work a sense of hidden narrative, like an artifact found in a dig and pieced back together. Starting with mundane objects, she gives them a sense of history and mystery.

The Renaissance overtones are not accidental. When Chesley decided to study mosaic, she traveled to Ravenna, Italy, to study the craft. She found herself in a class with nine other Americans. Nevertheless, she says, their instructor treated them to “the full Italian experience,” supplementing their hands-on training with trips to local museums and other historic buildings to see hundreds of mosaics.

Chesley returned to New Jersey and began to collect raw materials in her studio, located in a vintage office building in Asbury Park.

Another close-up of Chesley’s work.

She says for a small piece, such as a mirror frame, it usually takes her about an hour to collect the fragments and another hour to set up the design.

If she feels the need for a distinctive color or shape, she’ll roll out a sheet of clay herself, emboss a pattern, glaze it, have it fired and then break it up. When she has the final design she wants, Chesley transfers the fragments to the background object with thin-set cement, then grouts everything.

She sells the most through Main Avenue Galleria in Ocean Grove, which devotes one corner of their space just to her work. A few of her pastels and watercolors hang on the wall above mosaic items ranging from knobs with beaded centers, at $12 apiece, to a desk or chest of drawers priced in the high hundreds. Her most expensive piece to date was a bureau that sold for $1,100.

“I pitch my prices to move things,” Chesley says. “Then I can make more!”

She has given the mosaic treatment to a letter caddy, a sewing box, a breadbox and many side tables in assorted, fanciful shapes. At Main Avenue Galleria, she displays her smaller pieces on “found” furniture hand-painted by her son-in-law Thomas Iannaccone, a fashion photographer.

Another example of the work Chesley creates.

Chesley also sells through several other New Jersey galleries, including Antique Emporium in Asbury Park, Cool Cats in Cape May and Walker-Kornbluth in Fair Lawn. In September of 2005, she took part in the juried Lincoln Center Crafts Fair in New York City.

She decided early on that selling at outdoor shows didn’t work for her, and started looking for a gallery. The first to accept her work, in 1978, was the Lillian Kornbluth Gallery, now Walker-Kornbluth.

She credits Texas artist Sara Eyestone, a former New Jersey resident, for helping her a great deal when she first got into the business. “I learned so much just from talking with her,” Chesley says. “I also asked questions of other people who seemed to have good business sense.”

Currently, Chesley’s only marketing tool is a pamphlet for her studio, The Paint Place, which features black-and-white photos of her work. She had a Web site for a while, but “let it lapse.” She does not use an agent and rarely advertises; she relies chiefly on word-of-mouth and publicity put out by the galleries.

“I think the optimum thing is to be widespread — to have a small presence in a lot of places,” she says. “Then I just have the problem of supply.”

Another example of the work Chesley creates.

Admitting that it’s a challenge to keep her approach fresh and innovative, she adds many witty touches to her smaller works.

I love stuff that’s reminiscent of other stuff,” Chesley says. “I like a piece to have some hidden meaning.” She feels the “exploded ceramics” now have become her trademark, and adds, “I always try to make the challenge tougher for myself, and to make each piece a little better than the last.”

Amazingly, she has kept her career going strong for all these years while raising six children (she now has 18 grandchildren). Her secret? “I was casual about the housework,” she says, laughing. “With a large family, at least you’re not the only one available to deal with it.” She also would get up early or stay up late to paint, and stresses, “You have to have self-discipline.”

Now that she has just turned 70, Chesley admits it helps to have her studio just two miles from her home, and the Ocean Grove gallery only about the same distance in another direction.

These days, her husband’s health problems present a new set of challenges.

“But I’ve still been able to do what I do,” she says. “When my personal life becomes difficult, it actually helps me to be able to zone out and not think about anything but my work. As interrupted as my life has been, I’m still moving forward.”

Eileen Watkins is a free-lance writer based in New Jersey who specializes in art, fine crafts, architecture and interior design. She covered these subjects for more than 25 years for “The Star-Ledger,” New Jersey’s largest daily newspaper.

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