By Cathy Miller

This week’s People of the Week, long-time Hampton residents and lifetime artists, Doris Ettlinger and Michael McFadden, recently shared their ongoing journey, from childhood into retirement, offering great insights into their artistic selves with detail, candor, affection and humor. NOTE: Doris will have an exhibit in the Art Gallery at Warren County Community College, Route 57, Washington Twp., in the month of March. The exhibit is free and open to the public anytime during regular college hours.

The artists’ journey began at the University of Wisconsin, where Doris and Mike first met. When asked where they resided before coming to their beloved Mill in Warren County, Doris said, “Mike moved to Leonard Street (in Manhattan) in 1979. We were married in 1982 and lived in a loft in Tribeca. One day, I realized I hadn’t been above 14th Street in over a year. Why live in Manhattan if you can’t take advantage of it? We moved to Hampton in 1987. We used to see pigeons in the shaftway of the loft. When we first moved out here, I’d get up at 6:00 a.m. with the baby, walk to the window and see a heron. He’d see me and then take off. Now we see a huge bald eagle flying straight down the river.”

Doris, who grew up on Staten Island, spoke about her mother’s impact on her personal watercolor style. “My mother always encouraged my drawing. When I went to the Rhode Island School of Design and the youngest of her five children was in high school, she had more free time. She started taking watercolor lessons and soon thereafter was showing and selling her work.”

Doris never took a watercolor class. She learned watercolor by studying what her mother had painted, asking questions and Iistening to her talk about certain colors and how they behaved. She reminisced about the shows they did together, on Staten Island as well as at the Lebanon Township Museum in Hampton.

“I was showing what I’d done in grad school, and she’d always sell out her watercolors. I recently started a Facebook page in her memory called Watercolors of Minnie Ettlinger. I’m scanning slides of her work and posting her paintings so she’ll have an internet presence. My mother deserves to have a place in the ether where people can see her work.”

After college, Doris attended grad school in Wisconsin for printmaking. She said, “I was illustrating and using watercolor in my work after graduate school. As things progressed, I took up editorial illustrating, doing work for the New York Times and financial magazines. I moved into children’s illustrations, using a lot more watercolor, when we moved from NY to Hampton. I’ve done 40 children’s books using watercolor. As the market changed, I realized I wanted to do more personal work. For about 20 years, I’d been teaching small groups of children but ten years ago I took over the Musconetcong Watercolor Group. It changed my life. I’ve become friends with my students. We have people coming and going here at the Mill. A few years ago I started doing watercolor workshops at The Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Bedminster, which made me add Saturday workshops here for those who can’t make a weekday or evening class. Teaching is my strong suit now. Although I haven’t been illustrating that much in recent years, if I were offered another book I would take it – I’m just kind of retired from educational publishing.”

Because of sacrifices Mike made Doris was able to freelance, working at home, and be a stay-at-home mother. When they moved to Hampton Ivy was 3-1/2 years old and Ben was an infant. The next year she didn’t even pick up a pencil. She recalled, “To get my confidence back I began doing little sketches, and finally I started to get work in the children’s market. When I was commissioned to create Sunday school workbooks, Mike carved out a space on the first floor for my studio, a room of my own. Before that I’d have to work at the kitchen counter.” She said, “I made my schedule fit our kids’ schedule. I’ve always freelanced, but I was kind of lonely. It wasn’t until I got involved with a children’s book group called Hunterdon County Children’s Book Writers that I met people I had something in common with.”

Ten years ago Doris started the Musconetcong Watercolor Group at their home. The group regularly exhibits at the Lebanon Township Museum, most recently in November 2019. Doris spoke highly of Gina and Robbie-Lynn, the museum curators, “They have so many ideas. It was great working with them this year. They offered us a show every year during the six weeks leading up to Christmas,” with paintings and prints are for sale, and greeting cards for purchase. Although the Musconetcong Watercolor Group shows at several locations, Doris noted, “I refer to the Lebanon Township Museum as ‘our museum’ because we have such a good relationship with them.”

Digging a little deeper, Doris said she paints a lot of dog portraits. Generally, people painting a dog are inclined to reach for black, brown, tan and white. What sets her watercolors apart is that in those dark colors are hues of a similar light value. She said, “It still reads as a dog, and yet there’s so much more life to it because of all those colors.” When she was illustrating children’s books, she based many of those figures on people she knew. “You could walk around Washington and meet some of my models. The most fun project was a book of Bible Stories when I was going to St. Peter’s Church, here in Washington.” She smiled and said, “A number of people from that church appeared in the Bible Stories, along with all four of my brothers. Mike was St. Peter.”When she started to teach watercolors, she had one 12 year old student. Later she worked with two or three kids at a time. Once they insulated upstairs, she was teaching five children at once. She remembers, “It was fun coming up with lessons, but difficult to get all five together for a class. Now I’m just teaching adults, and the occasional high school student. I still teach workshops two or three times a year at CCA, as well.”

Mike grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His mother was an excellent craftsman, as well as a talented musician. She always played piano and loved to play for other people. For years she was music and choir director at several different churches. His father’s family were carpenters, although dad didn’t get any of their skills, he became an insurance agent. But he had tools and for Mike to work with. Mike said, “When I was 12 years old I built a boat featured in a Popular Mechanics magazine. I’ve always been making things.”

In grade school, people encouraged Mike to draw. Someone suggested going to the art center for summer school. “I loved it,” Mike said. “I did a drawing of the room which looked like a box that exploded! There was no perspective but it was cool. I had solved the problem of how to get everything into the picture. When I showed it to the teacher, she looked at me, lamenting, ‘I thought you had promise, but you don’t.’ He was only eight years old and didn’t know perspective, but he remembers feeling like, “I wasn’t an artist.” 

“Although my family didn’t support me in the arts, I did get a lot encouragement in engineering from grade school through high school,” he remembers. It was the beginning of the space program and there was a growing need for engineers. In junior high shop class Mike built a cherry coffee table with hand painted ceramic tiles and an architectural model of a domed house. In high school he really wanted to take art and architectural classes but was told “you really shouldn’t do that, you need all these other things if you’re going to be an engineer.” Much to his frustration, he never studied art or architecture in high school.

Mike attended Carleton College, a small liberal college in Minnesota with about 3,000 students. As soon as he discovered there was a workshop on campus, he began to spend all his time there. By the time he became a sophomore, he’d switched to an art major. He said when people would ask his parents what he was doing, they’d say “he’s studying architecture.”

After Carleton, Mike moved back to Fort Wayne, and joined the workforce. He got a job at a head shop in the early 1970s, the only one in Indiana at the time. He’d learned metal work, so he sat in the back making jewelry. Realizing this was a dead-end, he went to work in a music store for about a year and a half, “They were the big music store in Fort Wayne and I became their guitar man.” Soon it became clear this wasn’t going to work out either. When a good friend in the art department at Purdue told him he could get a job teaching there,

Mike jumped at the chance. “I applied to their graduate school, got accepted, and was given an assistantship in their art department. I attended Purdue for two years and earned my graduate degree. They paid my tuition and enough so I could rent a place. Once I filled a whole kiln with thrown pieces and fired them for Christmas presents! I had excellent metal teachers there. They crafted exotic jewelry using Japanese techniques, which they taught me. I studied with a couple of talented sculpture teachers too. Purdue didn’t offer an MFA program, but I wanted to continue teaching and needed an MFA. I applied to other schools and wound up going to the University of Wisconsin, where I met Doris. They gave me a graduate assistantship so I was able to teach my way through three years there. Most of this time I was sculpting and learning to draw. I honed those skills at Purdue, so by the time I got to UW Madison I looked pretty good on paper.”

As school was winding down, Mike knew he needed to be near New York feeling it would be the next place to learn something new. Unfortunately, Mike was broke by the end of graduate school. Pabst Brewery in Milwaukee offered an award to a group of four students from a Wisconsin school for a 12′ x 60’ depiction of the history of beer making. They intended to display it in a public waiting area in their facility. “A lot of teams entered the competition,” Mike recalled. “My group was completely mercenary. We wanted to get this grant, we wanted to win this award, we had to give Pabst exactly what they were asking for. We designed a four panel mural, submitted our proposal, and received the grant! We spent the summer after graduation in a garage working on the 60 foot long painting. It was really hot so we worked at night. Back then, Pabst Brewery placed coolers  filled with mislabeled bottles everywhere. They put one of in with us, a cooler always filled with Michelob, and our friends would visit us while we painted. In the end, Pabst gave each of us $5,000. That’s what I used to move to New York.”

Still in recall-mode, Mike continued, “When I first got to Manhattan I stayed with a friend for a few months. He lived with his girlfriend in an old tenement on Hester Street. Two floors below her Sol Lewitt (an artist) had a space. It was pretty neat being around him. I finally found a place on Delancey Street. I was looking for a way to make a living and the most marketable skill I had was woodworking. The first thing I built was a bookcase using hand tools in my loft. Early on I was associated with some artists who’d become contractors, and had other artists as customers. I did that for ten years, going from doing anything that I could to designing fine furniture. By the time Doris and I left NY, I was paying rent on two lofts – one that we lived in and another a few doors away where I had my shop and two or three employees.”

Mike kept painting throughout this period, it was always his intention to continue. “When we decided to leave New York I felt like I was doing my best painting ,” Mike said. “I’d actually discovered and started to do what I do now.”

Regarding their young family, Mike commented, “I’m from Indiana and I grew up outdoors. My mom wouldn’t know where I was until she felt jelly on the door handle. I couldn’t imagine raising our kids in New York.” They wanted to raise them where they didn’t have to hold their hand every time they went out the door.

Doris’ parents moved from Staten Island to Tewksbury in 1984. With their second child’s due date approaching, they mentioned to her parents they were considering moving to the area. The very next day, with his friend’s realtor’s book in hand, her father drove around looking for a place with an outbuilding for Mike’s machines. Two weeks later he found the Mill. Doris said, “We came out to look at the place on Ben’s due date. We went to contract while I was in the hospital with the newborn Benjamin. We went back and forth between Hampton and NYC for a few months and finally, on Halloween of 1987, Mike moved his machines in. That’s our official arrival date and every Halloween we remember that day.”

Because there had been a business on the first floor with the owners living on the second floor, the building was already a mixed use space. It was one of the few places where they could have a business and a residence. Mike explained, “I had my shop downstairs, which was handy. It felt like we just bought our own loft building.” Except it was on the Musconetcong, in the midst of breathtaking scenery, with more than pigeons roosting outside their windows.

Mike recalled, “I’m working, I’ve got two employees out here, I have a guy in New York installing things as needed. The architects all require shop drawings before anything is built so I taught myself CAD (computer-aided drafting). What drove me out of the cabinet-making business was physical problems with my hands and my back. There was also a recession, so there wasn’t much work either. We had a family. We realized one of us had to get a job with benefits.”

Doris said because of Mike’s experience with the growing environmental movement around here he became involved with the Musconetcong Watershed Association. He was there with Richard Cotton, Dennis Bergman, and Susan Dickey during their initial meetings.

That led to him being asked to join the environmental commission in Washington Township. “Eventually I got a grant from ANJEC (Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions) to publish an environmental resource inventory. To create the inventory, I was having the maps done graphically and working with a photographer. The book had 25 maps with overlays. Every word in it had to come from some other source because I wasn’t an expert. Everything had to be footnoted or else it wouldn’t have any validity. The main thing was you could review a site plan before the property was developed, look at these maps and see if there’s wetland that’s been mapped by the state.”

Robert Bogart, a municipal engineer in Hunterdon County, was very interested in Mike’s environmental resource inventory. He hired Mike, training him to be an environmental technician and specialist. He attended workshops at Rutgers for wetlands delineation and septic design. Mike said he’d “go places and identify every plant within a certain area, determining whether or not it was a wetlands species.” Never a draftsman with Bob, he did help configure his CAD system and worked for him around 3-1/2 years.”

After a short return to cabinet-making. Mike took on a new job with Andrew O’Sullivan, an architect from Hunterdon County who worked on a lot of municipal buildings. He was mainly involved in drawing, but there were design opportunities too.

“Through all this, I kept searching the want ads,” Mike said. “One day I found a listing for a CAD instructor at Hunterdon Central High School. I could do that!” He applied for and got the job. He conceded, “I think they were a little hesitant because I was older. At first I was teaching introduction to technology for freshmen. When I retired three or four years ago, I was teaching honors classes in engineering and architecture. Most people thought that my engineering and architecture classes included a lot of art. And they did. What I was doing was STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), a kind of project-based learning. I was there for 16 years and really enjoyed it.”

Doris quipped, “Mike is my Leonardo,” then later laughed and said, “I call him a serial careerist.” Mike philosophized, “Throughout my life, I’ve always felt that you get exactly what you ask for. If you’re doing something, it’s probably because you want to.”

Regarding his current artwork, Doris referred to it as “collage” saying, “Mike uses the collage as a structure for the painting.” Mike explained, “It’s collage, but it comes out of something I did more three dimensionally. Even when I paint now, what I’m doing is making two dimensional sculpture in a way. I’m most interested in the sort of primitive ways you show things that are in front and behind each other, rather than pure perspective.” He offered a bit more clarification saying, “There is nothing but handwork. The pieces I make, I draw on the paper and then cut those pieces from that. Most people have a preconceived notion that with collage you’re taking something out of a magazine and glueing it down on something else. What I’m doing is constructing an image. Using the word ‘collage’ falls a little bit short of what I’m doing. The other thing is I take these drawings that are put together in this process and then I paint them without any collage or any paper. Color is important in my paintings. I like colors to reflect light, colored light, like a VanGogh background.”

“There are certain themes that are really poignant for me,” Mike went on. “I keep working with them. Maybe the first time I do it, it’s a sketch. Maybe the next thing’s a better sketch. Next might be a collage where I’ve taken pieces of paper and found the object within these scraps of paper.” Doris added, “Now he’s taking elements from these paintings and creating maquettes (small three-dimensional models) out of cut cardboard, so it becomes a sculpture. It’s like an afterlife.”

Currently, Mike and Doris are trying to market their work. Doris noted, “It’s not the same as when you had to find a brick and mortar gallery. We’re involved in social media and putting our work online. It’s one thing to make the work, it’s another thing to create your online store or gallery, and it’s yet one more thing to drive traffic to your store. That’s our challenge right now.”

When asked what they do in their down time, Doris was quick to answer “We’re always in our studios. Some people travel, play sports, hike, ski. We don’t do that. We make an effort to stay fit, going to the gym and the yoga studio. Our routine is coffee, breakfast, then a 1-1/4 mile walk with Bruce, our 14 year old dog. It’s a pretty exciting place to live.”

Learn more?

Doris Ettlinger, www.dorisettlinger.com.

Michael McFadden: www.mcfad.com

Cathy Miller is an award-winning photo-journalist from Warren County. She has been capturing the people and places of the region for many years. Her work has appeared throughout New Jersey.