George Spencer and Pauline DeCarmo

Pauline DeCarmo

Lives in: Hudson

Currently reading: Healing Meditations by Tulku Thondup and The Nude, A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark

George Spencer

Lives in: Kinderhook

Currently reading The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson and Mislaid by Nell Zink

Two Artists Move to the Hudson Valley

If you are one of the many fans of WGXC, our local community radio station, then you may have listened to the duo George Spencer and Pauline DeCarmo, two visual artists who have interviewed dozens of area artists.

While he now lives with his partner in Kinderhook, George still has an apartment in lower Manhattan, which he describes as “chaos, and getting much worse.” The noise and activity may have once offered inspiration, but he began to find it overwhelming. “It’s just too much. Manhattan has just become a billionaire’s playground. Brooklyn is becoming the same thing.” With two children with houses in Brooklyn, he still visits the city but is glad to return to his new home.

Pauline and her partner spend time between NYC and Hudson. They began visiting upstate during winter holidays. One year they came to Hudson and Pauline’s partner fell in love with the town.

It took both artists time to adjust to a quieter life but the benefits of their new situations became clear: George began to love the tranquility and Pauline discovered that she could afford much more space in which to make her art.

Both of them enjoyed the artistic community they found. “The community is right here. It’s not like the city,” Pauline says. “Here there is a community of artists in walking distance and lots of galleries on one strip.”

Their work has evolved as a result of the move away from the city. Pauline works in acrylics on canvas or paper in small and large formats, creating figurative and abstract imagery. George’s recent work has gone from 2-D to “the point where painting becomes sculpture and sculpture becomes painting. I had them in frames and then I realized that they became more themselves if you could clearly see the edges turn.” George’s current pieces are six-foot towers created from recycled mailing tubes with repurposed materials from previous work, found objects, and other recycled material. “You can actually put them on the wall if you want, you can hang them from the ceiling, or they can be freestanding.”

From Art Studio to Radio Studio

George had hosted 50-60 episodes of a cable show focused on artists in New York City, but gave up the project when he moved. Shortly after his arrival in the area, he attended a gallery opening where he met musician/artist Sam Sebren who encouraged him to start a show at WGXC along the lines of his previous cable programming. While searching for artists to interview, local gallerist John Davis recommended that he contact Pauline. They hit it off right away and George proposed hosting the radio show together.

Since they began co-hosting they have talked to artists with upcoming exhibitions, authors with books about to be published, and musicians with new albums. The goal is to create an easygoing conversation. As George gleefully puts it, “we want to be completely, diametrically opposite from Art Forum,” referring to the legendarily highbrow art journal.

In preparation for each radio hour, George and Pauline familiarize themselves with an artist’s work. This might happen in a phone call with an author or an in-person visit with a visual artist or musician. They also check ahead to see if there are any off-limit topics because then, as Pauline says, “they feel a bit safer.”

Some guests are natural talkers and others are more reserved. “Some people will come into the station and it’s like they’ve been sitting at The Spotty Dog (our excellent local bookstore and pub) having a beer,” says George. In a few cases Pauline used a gag sound effect toy to break the ice with especially quiet guests. “It’s even hard for writers to talk about their writing,” says Pauline, “hard to summarize.” As interviewers they aren’t looking for sound bites, rather they hope to draw out something deeper from authentic conversation.

“Once you spend an hour with a person and talk about their work, and they understand that you understand their work, it just carries over,” says George. “I always tell people: I’m not going to leave you hanging. It’s like your first date ever. Your friends tell you what’s going to happen, but you don’t quite know until it’s over. But I can’t think of anyone who didn’t have a good time. The show is one great mishap on purpose,” George continues, “and we try to keep it that way! I usually have a list of questions and maybe I get through two questions, and then it goes off on its own.” George emphasizes that even when shows are taped and edited for later airing, the goal is to preserve the guest’s natural speaking style “and the same movement of the subject matter.”

Both George and Pauline feel that the radio show has helped create a community for creatives in the area. “We meet a lot of people,” Pauline says, “and learn about their backgrounds and their struggles and their work.”

The radio show will start up again as a monthly 2-hour broadcast, starting in March 2020. Each show will have two guests for an hour each: one will air live and the other will be previously recorded.

Political Art Show

While George and Pauline generally avoid current politics in conversations with artists, they teamed up to organize a political art show in 2019. The inspiration for the project came out of Pauline’s personal experiences the prior year when she was treated for breast cancer. She realized how fortunate she was at that time to have quality health insurance through Obamacare/New York State of Health and how many other people couldn’t afford her level of care. For Pauline, the personal became political as she considered the consequences of not having something as basic as access to medical care, especially given that President Trump has continuously attempted to dismantle access to health insurance through President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

“I’ve always been political,” Pauline says. “I would go to protests but I was never leading something. I was there because I wanted change, but this was more about how I needed to say something with my art. And art was the best place to do it, especially now, while Trump is in office. So that’s how that came to be.”

The first political art show was held at Time and Space Limited in Hudson in August 2019 and proceeds went to TSL and the Columbia County Bail Fund. Fellow artist and contributor Tom McGill, who also runs the 46 Greene Street Gallery, assisted with organization and hung the artworks. As the show was well attended, George and Pauline are planning to mount another exhibition of art posters in summer 2020 with an even sharper focus on direct political messaging while offering artists an opportunity to sell their pieces.

“We want to be focused on strong graphics,” George says, “and it has to be priced right. The next one will be just before the election. People will do their own thing, no doubt related to the political environment we are living in.”

Bloomsday Celebration in June

George has been involved in another project to celebrate Bloomsday, named for Leopold Bloom, the wandering hero of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses. June 16th, 1904, the day captured in the novel, is celebrated around the world with readings from the book. George hosted an 8-hour program broadcast by WGXC of readings by local Joyceans, with related music curated by Tom Bo, a Chatham-based composer and conductor. For this year’s presentation, George hopes to expand from the previous airing.

“We are using the recordings that we have,” George says of progress so far, “and there will be more music. We aren’t sure how many hours of it we will do.” Tom plans to include musical selections of songs from the era of the novel, including some written by Joyce, as well as musical references such as snippets of opera, to create a rich listening experience. “When you hear it, it works!” George says. “If it’s well performed, it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand all the language or references. We had someone reading each of the 18 episodes. We had three readers for Molly,” George adds, referring to Molly Bloom, Leopold’s Bloom’s wife, whose final unpunctuated monologue concludes with the euphoric yes I said yes I will Yes.*

In addition to their radio collaboration, George and Pauline continue to exhibit their artwork in galleries throughout the Upper Hudson Region. You can view Pauline’s work at: paulinedecarmoartist.com and on Instagram www.instagram.com/paulinedecarmo_painter. You can view George’s work at: georgespencerartetc.com and on Instagram www.instagram.com/georgespencerartetc.

*For readers who haven’t yet encountered Ulysses, you can get a taste of Molly’s  mesmerizing inner life by listening to Kate Bush’s 1989 hit The Sensual World, which includes lyrics taken from Molly Boom’s soliloquy.