Karen Santry: Painting, Drawing, Illustration

Karen Santry was born in Germany and spent her early years in Holland. Her parents had met overseas during World War II, her father a captain in the U.S. army and her mother an American emissary. Karen says her father developed precast concrete to address the need for rebuilding after the war and was a cofounder of Schokbeton. Soon that business brought him and his family back to America and to Connecticut, where Karen grew up. As a young woman, studying art in college, Karen painted portraits, including one of David Bowie; then through moxie and determination, she established a long association with the Allan Stone Gallery. In pursuing a teaching job, she wound up at the Fashion Institute of Technology and found a career as a fashion illustrator. Continuing her fine arts projects, Karen spent years creating large paintings of Kabuki artists on rosewood cutouts, which she has been restoring since Hurricane Sandy flooded the basement of Westbeth, where her work was stored. She is currently writing a book about her experiences in South Norwalk, Connecticut, where she is credited with naming it SoNo in the efforts to attract more artists.

Terry Stoller spoke with Karen Santry on July 1, 2025, about her years in South Norwalk, her career as a fashion illustrator and teacher of fashion illustration, the creation of the company Fashion Art Bank, her fine arts paintings, the destruction of her work in Hurricane Sandy (2012), her restoration of her paintings, and her love for Westbeth.

Terry Stoller: You were born overseas but grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut, and you have a strong connection to Connecticut.

Karen Santry: Let me tell you a little bit about my education. I went to Skidmore College for four years, which I loved and had wonderful friends there. I met a professor who was very dynamic. His name was Robert Reed, and he made us work very hard. He wanted to see if he could get any of us into Yale because he had graduated from Yale. But so did the other five professors that we had in art. They were all in a contest against each other to teach at Yale, and they needed perfect samples from us, so they worked us so hard. They said, Don’t go away on the weekends, girls—Skidmore was an all-girls school, then—you better do these big drawings, you better do this, you better do that. They gave us lots of homework. So we did, and Professor Reed said, By the way, I’ll get one of you into the Yale summer school, if you’re good enough. And so we were competing against each other and pulling all-nighters. We worked very hard, and we were even rather scared of Professor Reed. I remember every weekend, working, working, working. And then surprisingly after I graduated—nobody did make it into Yale, in that sense—he was the one that got chosen to teach there. He had the best artwork from the girls. After college, I returned to Connecticut—I was engaged to a young man from Colgate—and my father said, I thought you would like to go to Yale graduate school or maybe Penn, one of the Ivy Leagues. I said, I never thought about that, Dad. I broke that engagement and ended up at the University of Pennsylvania, and in doing so I took a year off to make a very good portfolio. And at that time, Robert Reed was working part time and needed more money, so he got a teaching job also at the Silvermine Guild of Art, where I was teaching. That was my first teaching job. And he said, Let’s team teach, and we did. It was a wonderful experience because he would come to my studio in South Norwalk, and he would take a look at my work, and coach me along.

I read that you had worked at a studio painting scenery.

I worked at the Atlas Scenic Studios. That was a union scenery company, and it was in Norwalk, Connecticut. That was my first non-waitressing job, my job to do with art. At first they had me washing the paintbrushes. But because it was a union shop, it was a big honor. They did sets for television, Broadway. They were big time. And they walked on the drop and painted—with one hand on their hip and one hand on a long extended brush and painted that way. They walked on the actual set. I kept washing paintbrushes, and then they said, Now you’ve proven yourself, you may come and paint on the set. In order to get into the union, the United Scenic Artists union, you have to pass an exam, and I was too afraid to take it. I thought, Gosh, what if I didn’t get in? Do I want to paint scenery all my life?

As I was thinking about it, a young man, Bruce Lanehart, was hired to take my place to wash the paintbrushes. I believe he had just graduated from high school. He was very nice. As a rule, we all had lunch together. Bruce said to me, I’ve got to get out of my parents’ house. And I said, Me, too—just to be cool. We went in his car, and we drove four blocks away, from East Norwalk to South Norwalk. We went over a bridge, and we screamed when we hit the base of Washington Street. To the left was a fantastic scene that looked like old SoHo. There were industrial buildings that had been warehouses; they were beautiful. They had Victorian curls and all sorts of things on the other side, but they would make fantastic lofts for artists. There was a bar, and we went in and said, This is heaven. This looks like SoHo. And they said, It does, sort of, but nobody lives here. It’s a dangerous neighborhood. This is industrial, and all of those buildings and the houses here are empty. We said, What a cool place to live.

Then we walked down the street, turned the corner, and there was an enormous sixteen room white Victorian mansion with a cupola, and a sign that said FOR RENT. I said, Bruce, let’s live there. Within three minutes, we called the landlord on a pay phone. The landlord came and said, You’re not the type of people that usually live here. It’s very dangerous. Your parents would freak out. We said, We won’t tell our parents. He said, All right, I’ll rent you the top five rooms. You’ll have the cupola, a studio room and a bedroom and a kitchen and all of that. We rented that for $125 a month, and I moved in with Bruce. This was during my out-of-residence year from Penn. I still had a few more months left, and I said, Bruce, I’ve got to get painting.

What were you painting at school?

I did self-portraits and fire extinguishers. Then I did paintings of people in convex mirrors so that there was a distortion. I said to Bruce, We’ve got to unpack and make this place look wonderful. And I’ve got to keep painting because I owe Penn these paintings. So we worked during the day at the scenery company; then I’d work on my paintings, and he would work on his. As time went on, we wished more artists would come to South Norwalk and be with us so we wouldn’t be alone. I was doing the billing one day in my apartment, and I wrote the name SoNo. My mother had called and said, You’d better keep your focus on SoHo in New York City instead of being there in South Norwalk. I hung up, and I started to write SoNo. I thought that would be a perfect name. I’ll tell everybody to come to SoNo, and it worked. More and more people came.

And then the landlord said, Do you want to be in something a little larger? They would take us down, we’d walk around the corner to Washington Street, and we’d go up the stairs to these metal lofts that went on forever. They were about 8,000 square feet. They said, What could you afford? They don’t have heat, not now. I said, Seventy-five a month? They said, All right, we want people to start coming in here. So I started telling more friends. We met two women, restorers from Minnesota who’d been hired to work on the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion. It was right around the corner. Robert Reed would come and visit me from New Haven, and once he said, Santry, let’s check out that mansion. We went in, looked around. Down the entrance is a huge rotunda, and he said what a perfect place for an art show for the Yale faculty. He masterminded it, and they had a show there of the Yale faculty.

Thea by the Refrigerator. Oil on canvas.

I lived in South Norwalk seven to eight years, mid-seventies to mid-eighties. It was wonderful. I had so many friends there. They shared studios. We did great art. When I was teaching at Silvermine with Robert Reed, we got many housewives from New Canaan that took his course and bought his paintings. He was only part time at Yale. Then he had me team teach with him at Yale.

How did you start teaching in New York?

One night driving back to South Norwalk, I thought, Mom is getting madder and madder that I’m not moving to New York. I called up my mother and said, Gee, Mom, I am supposed to move to New York. She drove over to South Norwalk, and we drove to Pratt to see if I could teach there part time. I was all dressed up—those were the days of Goth. I had a long black dress, three pairs of false eyelashes, long blue black hair. I went in to Admissions, and Kingsman Brewster, who was from Yale, came out. He was shocked to see me, and I was shocked to see him. He said, I’ll give you one class at Pratt. But you’re going to go to Fashion Institute of Technology, and you’re dressed for it. So we went to FIT, went to Fine Arts with my portfolio, and I said, Do you have any jobs? The head of the department said, You’d be perfect for illustration. You’ve got people in costume; you’ve got all these imaginative things. These have a story behind them. I went down the hall, and there was a woman with blue black hair, weighed about ninety pounds, very tall. I told her my story and showed her my portfolio. She said, Very good for illustration. Little animals are in it. This is interesting for us. You probably teach drawing. I said, I teach drawing at Yale. She said, I’ll hire you for Monday. I’ll give you a lecturing class on Monday, and then we’ll talk.

I thought she was hiring me for full time. After my first class, I asked her, When is my next class? She said, You’re nothing. You’re just a tiny dot here. It’s going to take years to prove yourself. My heart just stopped. And I said, But I’m teaching at Yale. She said, You haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve stepped into your future, but you’ve got to understand in New York, it’s harder and you’ve got to learn some things. I want you to go up to the Society of Illustrators, right now. There are three floors, and I need you to do all three floors and then come back, I’ll be here, and tell me if this is worth it to you. So my mother and I went there. I loved the Society of Illustrators. My mother said, The Fashion Institute of Technology is a place to get a job because of drawing. We called Dad, and I said, This place fits me perfectly. He said, It’s OK. You’ll just have to work at Max’s Kansas City. I got a waitressing job there and commuted in from SoNo for my one class for about three years. It was about ten years before I got my full schedule.

Now you’re moving into illustration. How did you get into fashion illustration?

Eventually when I had enough FIT classes, not many, maybe two, I moved into a loft on Thomas Street in Manhattan with a friend. I stayed at Max’s. That was fun to be there; then I would go to teach, and then run home and work on painting. I had a dealer all this time named Allan Stone. That’s very important information. He was a wonderful man.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Marcel Marceau. Oil on wood.

How did you get into the Allan Stone Gallery?

We heard about that at graduate school as being the best thing to do. I bench sat for a year; waited every Saturday for one year, and they said time to see Allan Stone now. I was showing paintings there, portraits, but they always had a twist, either in a reflection or there was something unique about them that he liked. They would have animals in them and different things like that.

So slowly, as I was teaching more classes at FIT, I would go and watch the fashion classes. I loved those fashion illustration classes with those great models. I learned it was very easy to teach that. The only difference was the models showed up in fashion outfits, so you’d show the students how to draw that. The choices in the world of illustration are general illustration or fashion illustration. I learned that from the Society of Illustrators. Also the faculty at FIT started to be nice to me, slowly over forty years, and they would say, That was a fashion person whose classes you might want to check out. By the way you dress, you’d probably like that, you’re timely. General illustration would be regular clothes and different situations, like they’d have to do a picture of a car, put a man in a car. As time went on, they gave me more classes, not quite full time for about fifteen years at least. The big stars were full time.

Karen representing Fashion Art Bank at SURTEX Exhibition, Javits Center, New York City.

What was the genesis of Fashion Art Bank?

When I brought my portfolio around to the Society of Illustrators meetings, people said, You have a fashion flair—so I would go over to fashion. Then I met a bunch of women who were very nice, and they had work that looked very good. I said, Maybe we could get together, all eight of us, and form our own group. We did, and called it Fashion Art Bank [1999]. We became the world’s largest licensing company for fashion illustration to service design. We were very successful. When we got together, we said, What would we like to do? And one of the women said, What we would like to do is get to know the big names like Kenneth Paul Block. If we could see the portfolios of other people, we could see how to improve our work and get more famous. We went to Kenneth Paul Block, and he showed us his work. And we said, Would you like us to represent you? He said, How so? What does that mean even? The companies buy my work, or I just do the deadlines. We said, These drawings are very valuable. They could be a book. Indeed there’s a Kenneth Paul Block book there [she points to her bookshelves] saying thanks to Karen Santry. That gave us the privilege to go over to his house and put all his work together. Then I said, Shouldn’t you have a show at the Society of Illustrators? He said, That’s a great idea. So I went and asked the Society, and they said, God, yes. We framed all his work for him and brought it to the Society. He had a one-person show. All good. Then along came an author that said, Thanks, Karen, but I think I’ll do the book. She had more credentials than I did. And she did the book, but she thanked us all. So we did that for other people: Steven Stipelman and people like that. And really all we wanted to do was to get closer so we could improve our art.

How long was Fashion Art Bank in existence?

Twelve years.

What happened to it?

I can answer that very clearly and sadly. It was the time of the big flood here. We had an office on Madison Avenue in a very swank place, but we also had all our artwork and everything in the basement of Westbeth. Charlie Seplowin had studios down there. There was a special area that was built up with white paint, that were like stalls, but the rooms were twice the size of my living room. Charlie came to me one day and said, I see you’re in the basement, and you’ve got your fine art paintings and top dealers coming. Do you want an extra studio over where I am? I went down to see it and thought, This is so clean and perfect. Maybe Fashion Art Bank would pay less than what we were paying on Madison Avenue. So I told the girls, and they said, Just do the artwork there. The flood destroyed every bit of art, every molecule. We closed, and they never spoke to me again. They’re not mad at me; they don’t hate me. It’s so awful, we cannot think about it. So that went down.

You also have a huge list of clients on your website. What is it you do for them?

They bought my art. Because my dealer wanted more paintings, I came up with a clever combination of fashion illustration figures with animals, and I kept with that theme. They would sell through Fashion Art Bank, and they would sell through Allan Stone. Fashion Art Bank represented the best fashion illustrators, but we also went home and did our own work.

Who was buying the fashion illustrations?

Bendel’s, Bergdof Goodman. By then we were buddy, buddy with all the top fashion shows. They’d say, Karen, I like the way you draw. Could you do something for us? You always want to put an animal in. Could you do some of our dresses with a zebra? I’d think, Sure, of course, I could.

Zebra Lady. Oil painted on rosewood cutouts, mounted on rice paper.

You’ve studied with a number of artists over the years.

I studied with one of my favorite people in the world, Jack Potter. He taught at the School of Visual Arts, but he taught adults too. The adults were all teachers and famous artists. There was a special class that my friend and colleague Janis Salek knew about. She said we’ve got to keep drawing—and I still keep doing that, with Steven Broadway now. We went to the class and because we were teaching at a fashion school, we were doing fashion illustration. Jack Potter was a famous fashion illustrator, and the greatest fashion teacher ever in the whole wide world, amen. We would go, and we would draw the fashion model with Jack Potter. He was very strict and very scary, and only the best could go there or they’d get kicked out. I was just trembling all the time. So all the time I’ve lived here, I draw and draw and draw. I have thousands of drawings done in the style of Jack Potter that’s all about shape, and shape is very needed for fashion. Those drawings can sell. That’s another thing I will do one day, have a big drawing show.

Some writers about fashion illustration deal with the issue of photography overtaking fashion illustration. Do you feel illustration can do things that photography can’t do?

The answer is one word, edit. Let’s say I’m drawing you right now. A photograph would put in all the shadows on your blue shirt and all the tones. Whereas as a fashion illustrator, I might choose to keep your hair one shape and the blue shirt a shape, but I might want to go into lots of detail where those pleats are. I can do that with a pencil. While you are drawing, you can edit and leave things out or blend things together. If I wanted to, I could draw the top of your dress and your shirt as all one shape. People who draw like to work with the game of shapes. How much do you connect together and how much do you not—and how much shadow do you put in or do you not.

Are these the decisions you would make when you were working runway shows?

Yes, that’s absolutely true. We drew as fast as we could. But Jack Potter used to always yell about the shapes. Get the big shapes right and make them better than they are.

You did fashion shows for a number of years. Who did you work for?

Bergdof Goodman or particular designers would call Janis and me in; and companies would call us in. Most of them were at the Javits Center. Sometimes they were at FIT or Parsons. They would use those two schools for the runway shows.

Karen’s cover art for Big Book of Fashion Illustration. Oil painted on rosewood cutouts, mounted on rice paper. Karen also wrote the preface for this book by Martin Dawber.

Let’s talk about Hurricane Sandy, what happened and how you recovered from it.

I lost everything. All of the Fashion Art Bank was completely demolished—all the records, all the artwork, the mannequins, the clothes, everything.

And your personal work in the Sculpture Studio got destroyed.

Totally destroyed. All the Jack Potter drawings, everything. I could do nothing. There are no more Jack Potter drawings, there’s no more paint, no paintbrushes. George Cominskie is the one that jumped in the water and was trying to save everything of mine. George is like a saint. He would pick up paintings that were on wood and say, This is on wood. A wave would come along and push him over.

Twelve of Karen’s Kabuki actors. Oil painted on rosewood cutouts.

You had your Kabuki cutouts there.

I did. They crashed in half or cut off. The wood broke. Twenty days they were under water. I was clueless. I didn’t know. I was upstairs for twenty days with my friend Richard Holly, who worked with me.

Management didn’t let people down there right away.

And they just couldn’t tell us. Then finally George came up and said, You’ve had a horrific loss. I couldn’t put it together. And I blocked it out about Fashion Art Bank. After a while, George said, I need to show you something creepy, but you just have to see it. You have to be brave. He brought me down to the water, to look inside, and I said, Wait a minute, there’s the Knight in Shining Armor painting. That’s going around in circles. That’s a really expensive painting. Allan Stone wanted that. It’s in the water right now. He said, But Karen, your other work is too. Your work from Connecticut, all of the drawings are under there. I said, We have to get them. He said, They’re in the water. They’ve been in there for twenty days. They brought up our stuff and put it outside at night, and then somebody came and stole all of our oil paints, all the things that we could save that were drying.

I decided to take out a really big loan, and buy new art supplies. And nicely, people would knock on my door, and hand me a whole bunch of brushes: This is from my daughter; she doesn’t do art anymore. So when you come into my studio now, the art supplies are on the left, and there are so many brushes. Westbeth people gave me their brushes. An artist who died put me in her will and left me her paints. Other people left me their paints. And people would leave brushes by my door.

Karen with the restored Knight in Shining Armor painting.

You told me about Richard Sanca helping you with the Kabuki cutouts. How many Kabuki figures did you have down there?

Ten, possibly fifteen. All done, ready to go to Allan Stone’s. So when I got the studio on the third floor from the former executive director Steve Neil, he said, Did you ever lose a lot. I’m putting you next to a guy who loves to cut, to saw. You could fix some of your Kabukis if you cut the bad parts out and redo that part. That man could do that for you. It took me a couple of months to set up that studio. And repairing the Kabuki cutouts took a long time. I wanted to be sure to pay Richard. He’d do one, then I’d have to sand it and put gesso on it and then paint that part. I wouldn’t give him a new thing to do until that one was done.

Karen working in her studio to restore a Kabuki actor cutout.

We haven’t talked about your dalmations.

Very simply, it was Steve Neil that said, Why don’t you put those dogs running along the wall opposite the Westbeth Gallery.

Karen with the Dalmations installation on the wall opposite the Westbeth Gallery.

Where were they?

In the basement or different places or I had them here in my apartment. He said, Why don’t you do some nice ones for outside. Those are made out of metal. Charlie told me, You could get those printed upstate New York, and they will print them on metal. Then you can get a special glue that’s used for underwater submarines, and glue them onto the wall.

You’ve got the painting The Chanel Twins on your website and on your apartment wall.

Back on Thomas Street, I was finishing up The Chanel Twins as a work of art, and I decided to keep it. My favorite period in art is the Memphis Design period—bright colors, stripes. I got permission from Vogue and also Harper’s Bazaar to paint from those magazines. Those two women in The Chanel Twins, that’s from just one photograph of the woman, which was in Vogue. I wanted to paint her, and I put her in with Memphis Designs.

The Chanel Twins. Oil painted on rosewood cutouts.

That painting consists of cutouts. When I looked at your work online, I understood that your series of Kabuki figures were cutouts. With the other pieces, like the artwork on the cover of the Big Book of Fashion Illustration, I had no idea that was a cutout until I went to your studio.

I just like cutouts. When I draw, I’m pressing the paper really hard and simplifying and editing, making it a better shape. I’m doing it with the saw.

Any last words?

I’ve been here for thirty-five years. I’m so grateful for Westbeth. It’s fantastic. I love every single day here. You meet new people, and they’re good people. The whole reality of Westbeth gives you the opportunity to do your art. So Shelly Staine and the other people in the office say, Why don’t you go someplace over the summer? I say, I’ve been everywhere. I don’t need to go anywhere. I’d rather be in Westbeth. The river is right there across West Street. It’s a dream come true, but it’s more than what you could ever dream of. And the best thing I could do to say thank you to Westbeth is to be in the studio.

Karen’s life-size oil painting of a Kabuki actor, on rosewood cutout.

To see more of Karen’s artwork, go to: www.karensantry.com

To read more of Karen’s family history, go to: https://newcanaanite.com/new-canaan-there-then-captain-george-j-santry-12630696

Photo credits: Headshot: Judy Lawne; Karen at Javits Center: New York Times, by permission; Karen with Knight in Shining Armor painting: Judy Lawne; Karen with Dalmations installation: David Plakke. Courtesy Karen Santry.

Terry Stoller is a Westbeth resident and author of Tales of the Tricycle Theatre.

Profiles in Art, Copyright 2025 Terry Stoller and Westbeth Artists Residents Council