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Arts & Entertainment

Exciting Artwork on their Quiet Willow Grove Street

Alan and Elaine Klawans' home is the mini-Barnes Museum of the suburbs.

It’s a house like no other.

Alan and Elaine Klawans, both artists, live on a quiet back street in Willow Grove where they preside over a wonderland of artwork and art collections.

White walls throughout the house highlight the stunning artwork – both their own and by others – in this mini-Barnes Museum of the suburbs.

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The couple, who have two children and four grandchildren, are best friends. They give generous praise to one another’s work.

“Elaine does delicate work while I do very bold work,” said Alan of his wife of 54 years.

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Alan’s bold, colorful work is represented by the Artists Gallery, 18 Bridge St., in Lambertville, NJ.  He’s getting ready for his next show there, which will run from April 9 - May 1. Works like his brilliantly colored “The Ultimate Fish,” will be on display.

All  are original digital prints, composed and drawn on his computer.

They sell for $900 to $1,200  apiece and can be found in collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Long Island University, the Pennsylvania Historical Society and in private collections.

Retired since 1986 as director of design at SmithKline Beckman Corp. (now GlaxoSmithKline), Klawans works on his prints every day.

He has a foolproof way of facing the blank page. He scans in a single picture, and fools around with it with his mouse, until he gets something he likes.

The couple work in their downstairs studio, which they built after the kids left home.

Like her husband’s work, Elaine’s artwork lines the walls throughout the house.

“I work with my fingers in dimension,” she said. “I don’t paint.”

Her self-portrait, done in fabric, was exhibited at the Plastic Club in Philadelphia.

“The plastic arts,” she said, “refer to art forms such as drawing, painting, and sculpture.”

Her dimensional collage “Tiger Lily” seems to be lifting itself off the canvas in the downstairs hallway.

Elaine, who retired 20 years ago as a graphics designer at the Container Corp. of America (now Smurfit-Stone Corp.),  is a woman interested in just about everything, including politics. She works the polls on Election Day, “Because I think voting is very important.”

She and Alan faithfully attend Sunday movie afternoons at the Upper Moreland Public Library, where she’s vice president of the Friends of the Library.

With so many interests, it wasn’t surprising that Elaine began to make jewelry, which she sells at the Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill. 

Her dramatic earrings and necklaces use various beads that may be made from famous Murano glass. Murano is an island off the coast of Venice, where glass-making has been a tradition since the seventh century. 

She also fashions jewelry from coral and other materials which she buys at flea markets, antique shops and gem shows, or “anywhere I can find something interesting.”

Alan’s downstairs studio is next to the laundry room with its easy-on-the eyes Fisher-Paykel washing machine.

 The multi-award winning artist is never at a loss for ideas.

“We were visiting the Field Museum in Chicago,” he remembered, “and I took a digital shot of a stuffed fish. Back home, I put it in my computer and began working with it.”

He explained, that's how “The Ultimate Fish” was born.

For the print “Rust Bucket,” which is an arc-like ship at sea, Klawans scanned in a photo of the shiny, indented scrap of metal he found behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“I put it in my pocket and knew I’d eventually find a use for it,” he said. The piece of scrap metal became the ship’s sail.

Designs are created by playing around on Adobe Acrobat.

“Sometimes I know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I tell myself, ‘That’s a start’ and go on from there. It’s like jumping into a swimming pool and starting to swim.”

And should the unthinkable occur – lack of inspiration from one of his digital photographs – he simply tosses it out.

“As one of my teachers said, ‘Sometimes the trash can is your best friend,’” he said.

Alan Klawans always wanted to be an artist. Originally from Washington, D.C., the 9-year-old boy took Saturday art classes at the Corcoran Art School, part of the famous Corcoran Art Gallery. He was hooked.

As a teenager, after he found a niche in advertising, a teacher suggested he attend one of the five best art schools in the country: the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts).

He and his future wife, Elaine Ruback, were in the same advertising class.

“He told me he was a poor starving artist,” remembers Elaine, “and that, as a single man, he found it difficult to cook for himself.”

She brought him home to her Oxford Circle row house where she lived with her parents.

While they continued to date others, they finally got married after college and Alan’s stint in the Army. He served in Germany during the Korean War as an artillery surveyor.

Their house in Willow Grove, where they’ve lived for 52 years, is the first and only home they’ve owned.

Life in the corporate world of pharmaceuticals was exciting for Klawans. “Exciting” is a word these artists frequently use.

Alan Klawans was director of design at SmithKline Beckman from 1957 - 1986, working on some of its biggest products. From his offices at 15th and Spring Garden streets, he headed a department of 18 artists.

“We worked on antipsychotics such as Thorazine and Stelazine, in addition to our two largest-selling products - Diazide for fluid retention and hypertension - and Tagamet for ulcers and acid reflux,” he said.

His department created packaging for drugs, as well as picking out the colors of tablets and capsules.

“The color had to work with the ingredients inside, so I worked closely with the chemists who invented the drugs,” he said. If the chemistry wasn’t a good match, “the pill would turn off-color.”

He began collecting cleverly designed tin containers when he and Elaine moved into their empty house in Willow Grove. His collection of lithographed tins lines a wall of their living room and spills over into other rooms of the house.

Not to be outdone, Elaine has her own collection: pincushions. An amazing array of objects find themselves transformed into pincushions: a boy with a violin, a drum-playing clown, a bag of Pillsbury’s Best Flour.

One very special pincushion was made by her grandson, Matthew Mastrogiovanni, now 16. He made it last year out of Legos as a birthday gift.

Their collections have traveled to many places including a show at the Philadelphia International Airport.

Life, for these artists, always holds something new and exciting, which is their life’s pursuit.

“We married,” said Elaine, “because we enjoyed each other’s company. And still do.”

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