Wilmington artist Stevie Capozio laughs as her cat sits on a table. She turns 100 years old on March 19. (Photo provided)

(Editor’s note: Alison Follos lives in Wilmington and Venice, Florida. She wrote this story about her mother, Stevie Capozio.)

WILMINGTON — A century of time is a limited measure for a woman with an imagination.

Stevie Capozio has enjoyed a long, unique career and has sold countless paintings, enamels and prints over the past four decades. Before that, the Wilmington resident worked as a writer, illustrator and schoolteacher in Westport, Connecticut. She turns 100 on Friday, March 19.

When asked about her career highlights during a 2011 interview, Capozio (who goes by “Stevie” professionally) said, “I don’t think I’ve ever had something I considered a great success.”

“After I do something, I usually think, ‘Wow, that’s great.’ A few days later, I think, ‘I could do that a lot better.’ Sometimes I luck out and get something I think is quite good, but mostly it’s just fun. I like to keep working. I’ve done a lot of successful commissions over the years, so that’s a pretty good record.”

Stevie Capozio is seen at one of her past studios. (Photo provided)

“I don’t have any sense of my work being exceptional. I never have. The fact that I enjoy doing it is the main thing. I turn on the kiln downstairs in the morning, and it takes at least an hour to heat up, so I’ll go back upstairs to paint for a while. Then, once the kiln heats up, I’ll enamel for a while, and when I get tired of doing that I go upstairs and paint. I’m up and down all the time between the two studios, which is good, because I tend to overwork — not so much anymore, but for years I did overwork everything. I’ve learned over the years to stop.”

A 1999 Lake Placid News profile, written during her tenure as an artist-in-residence at the Adirondack Craft Center in Lake Placid, focused on Capozio’s enameling work.

“I work all the time,” Capozio told Andy Flynn, the current News editor who was a staff writer at the time. “I’m addicted.”

She used her addiction to learn, experiment, and push her talent, painting in the style of artists such as Mary Cassatt and Thomas Kincaid for the challenge and fun of it. Fixtures of her work are Adirondack landscapes, fishermen, winsome local scenes, and commissioned portraits of people and animals.

Even at 100, Capozio continues to paint landscapes and portraits.

Some of Stevie Capozio’s paintings (Photo provided)

“Sometimes I’m dreaming, and my hands keep painting and painting,” she said recently. “I can’t get them to stop.”

She lives, breathes, and dreams a creative life.

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Unlimited oeuvre

“I do everything — anything that appeals to me,” Capozio said during an interview for a 2011 press release written by her grandson, Tim Follos.

“I like painting big cats, like lions and leopards. I didn’t want to do the traditional type of wildlife portraiture that was being done. I was trying to get a more modern look, so I did them more stylistically than I normally would. I keep trying different things.”

Discussing her work as a portraitist, Capozio was matter of fact: “I get a likeness,” she stated, flatly.

“My brain works that way. When I was writing children’s stories, if I was writing about a mouse, I became that mouse while writing. And if I’m painting a person, I no longer am trying to think of how I want it to look or which way the lines go. I think, ‘How does that person look?’ I capture an image in my brain and that’s the image that I put down. That’s where the likeness comes from. It isn’t that you get the eyes in the right line. It’s something else, and I don’t think everybody can do it. There are better painters than I am — but, almost always, I get a likeness.”

Like her paintings, her kiln-fired glass and copper enamels are varied in size, shape and subject matter. Most of them feature wildlife, flowers, and nature scenes, but, in the past two decades, her “pitch-its” — small, dish-like containers with colorful patterns — have proved particularly popular.

The subject of press attention from outlets such as PBS and the international art magazine “Glass on Metal,” Capozio is the creator of the “Naml-On Color Controller,” an affordable gadget for beginning enamellists to use while replicating small designs of powdered glass on copper.

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Route to the Adirondacks

Capozio grew up in Rockville Centre, on Long Island. Her father, Abe Goldman, was an ophthalmologist, and her mother, Caroline (Elias), was a nurse. Stevie’s mother was artistic, and Stevie’s younger brother, Joe, is a professional artist.

In her youth, Capozio was a member of the New York Art Students’ League, and the Silvermine Guild of Artists. Her family visited Lake Placid when she was a child, but she first spent a prolonged period of time in Upstate New York when she attended Skidmore College, where she was an art major, in the 1940s.

In the 1950s, she worked as a newspaper columnist, writing and illustrating a weekly children’s series titled “Slumber Corner.” She also worked as a freelance writer for Dell Publications, creating stories for characters such as Tom and Jerry and Woody Woodpecker.

She taught elementary school for 18 years, but her heart was not fully in it. As she observed to Flynn during their interview for the 1997 story, “It was hard to do both. … I think it really takes full commitment to be an artist.”

In the 1960s, she co-directed Camp Whiteface Mountain for Girls, in Wilmington. She moved to the area year-round in the early 1980s.

She has four children, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

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“I paint their toenails”

Speaking personally about my mother, I know her as fascinating and gifted, with unlimited amounts of creativity.

She was always doing something interesting. The smell of turpentine takes me back to my childhood, when I took naps in her studio.

While some moms were baking cookies, mine was telling me stories. She’s always been brilliant, idiosyncratic, visionary, strong-willed, whimsical and infuriating.

For years, she nabbed mice in her “Have A Heart” traps, then chauffeured them a short distance away from her house. I tried to explain to her that they’d just come back in.

“No they won’t,” she said. “I paint their toenails, so I’ll know if they do.”

I think that I speak for my brother, Bill, and my sisters, Terrie and Jamie, when I say we have tremendous admiration for our mom.

She did things while we were growing up that few women are able to accomplish, and through it all she was always creating art. She remained ambitious and inventive. She had some hard times, but she rarely let the tough parts of life get the better of her.

She created her charmed life.

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“I erase more than I put down.”

“I’ve had lots of really great times, really great experiences, lots more than most people have,” Capozio said during the 2011 interview.

“I’ve met interesting and exciting people over the years — some celebrities, some not — and I have had bad things happen, too. I wouldn’t trade my life for any other life. As I always say to people who talk about art: I erase more than I put down. I do that with my life, too. I erase the things I don’t like. Things I’ve done that I don’t like: Erased. I don’t feel guilty about it. Things done to me that I was really furious about: Erased. I don’t refer to them at all, unless somebody says, ‘What about that?’ Then I can maybe pull them out, but I never give them another thought otherwise.

“But I do think about the great stuff. I met the writer Peter De Vries at a cocktail party, and we had a great conversation. …

“You’re in the loop at certain times of your life. There may be a number of loops that you’re in. When you’re in the loop you understand the vernacular, you understand the taste, and you go with the taste. You dress with it, you think with it, maybe you even eat with it.

“I was in a loop with people I was friendly with and who enjoyed my company. I was hired as a freelance writer because I was in the loop.

“I couldn’t do that today. That was a whole different time. Today, I’m not in a loop. I don’t understand the vernacular. I don’t know why people dress the way they do. The thing that has come home so very definitely to me in the last few years is: I’m out of the loop. And you can’t get back in it.

“This is now — deal with it.”

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Life beyond the loop

Like many creative people, Capozio is far more interested in politics, philosophy, and similar “big picture” topics than the prosaic aspects of daily life.

In addition to being exceptionally inventive, Capozio is exceptionally determined. Around a half-dozen years ago, a friend characterized her as “Like a warship that will not be deterred.”

“Well, that’s good,” she responded. “You can all warship me.”

Witty and content far outside of the loop, Capozio still lives at the site of the former Camp Whiteface Mountain, in a house high above a bend in the AuSable River.

“Although much of Wilmington’s great wooded acreage has been compromised by ‘progress,’ my view of the river and distant mountains remains wild and wonderful,” she said, summarizing her current lifestyle.

She enjoys a cocktail at the end of the day as she gazes at the view.

A 1953 newspaper profile of the artist as a young mother, written near the peak of her career as an illustrator and freelance writer, began with the following observation: “There are some people who feed on the imagination, delighting in it for its own sake, and who also possess the spontaneous skill that sometimes enables them to even peddle this intangible commodity.”

Those words will remain true on March 19, when Stevie Capozio turns 100.