Amy Fusselman [see About Me] is now officially an arthole. From time to time she will contribute conversations with artists based on what they do to get by. Joe Fig’s last show was awesome, but the life of every full-time painter is somewhat the same [get up, go to the studio, paint, paint, paint!]. Amy will chart the paths followed by the rest of us.


art/work
By Amy Fusselman


Elizabeth Zechel is an artist and Kindergarten teacher at a private school in Brooklyn, NY. Her most recent exhibition featured a series of drawings entitled “Goddamn Bully” at A.I.R. Gallery in Chelsea.

She is currently working on:

-Over 90 drawings of pies for Bubby’s Restaurant’s forthcoming pie book
-Drawings of Chickasaw Indian myths for display in the permanent collection of the Chickasaw National Cultural Center in Oklahoma.
-A book with poet Jen Robinson
-A children’s book for Soft Skull press with poet Matthea Harvey

Where do you work?

My dining table. Elizabeth’s table, with pie.

How did you get your teaching job?

I had been waiting tables forever—and couldn’t keep doing that--I didn’t know what I was going to do. I mean, God help me, I even thought about Clown School at one point.

Oh, you are my hero.

I was like ‘What can I do? What do I like? I like to do silly things. I like to fall down. I like kids. Clown school! Of course!’ [laughter]. But it went from waiting tables to thinking about what to do, to even thinking…I took a class at the New School for writing and I was going to write this book and I was all over the place. I was drawing, I was painting, I was da-da-da-da… And then Todd [Colby, Zechel’s husband, a poet] was looking in the Village Voice at restaurant waiting jobs and saw out of the blue: ‘Looking for painters to paint prosthetic hands and fingers.’ And he said ‘You should try that.’ And I was like ‘OK. Sounds good to me.’ [laughter].

So I called up and got an interview. The company was called ‘American Hand Prosthetics.’ It was the trippiest job I ever had. It was… Well, first there was a three-hour audition… They gave us these little plastic swatches …you had to paint with latex paint, and you had to continuously put this liquid in the paint or it would turn into… a piece of silly putty….I felt like Lucy out of the Lucy show because I was looking at the time and I had to match about 25 different colors of skin swatches, and while I’m trying to do this, the paint is drying and I’m like ‘I can’t do it. I’m a loser. I can’t believe I’m the last one here.’ …I got the job.

Yay!

I worked with patients. It was fascinating. There was a guy who just did fingernails. He was amazing. And there was a guy who took the molds. We did arms, hands, toes…Some poor girl has my toe actually.

The prosthetics makers would take a mold of a patient’s right finger, you know, ‘cause the left one was gone, and then they would reverse it. And then …the patients would come in and I would paint. While they were there I would match their skin tones….The last guy I did was this older man who had lost his arm in World War II and I have never been so stressed out in my life because I had to do his entire arm and hand… it was looking orange…so I had to re-scrape the paint and he was being very patient and very sweet and we finally got it right but it was: ‘Let’s just put this arm [the other arm] in the sun for a little bit.’ [laughter].

So this is a long answer to your question, but I had that job and then my mom got sick and I left New York and went to Chicago to help her and I stayed there until she died in July 2001. When I came back, I needed a job and I wasn’t going back to the hand place…

Right.

Because I needed something a little more uplifting. [laughter]

Then I bumped into this woman who I had waited on years ago. She was a realtor in Brooklyn and she’s like ‘So what are you going to do?’ and I said ‘Well, I really don’t know. I was thinking maybe teaching art classes’ And she said you should call X and Y at these schools so I called...and interviewed and became the Afterschool Head at this school for a year. Then… they bumped me up to kindergarten. And there I stayed;… I’ve been there six years.

What’s your day like?

Whole day?…Get up at ten of seven, have my ritual oatmeal, coffee…

Uh-huh.

And we have everything. We have math, we have reading, we have this and that…. We have horrible fights between children, you know we have lots of happiness, lots of sadness and then it’s time to go home.

…I usually get home around 3:15. Get here, chill out for a little bit and start drawing.