Sandra Corpora – Award-Winning Painter

November 27th, 2024 | In The News

Written by Amy Unger

On a warm Friday afternoon in late summer, the light is falling perfectly inside Sandra Corpora’s studio in Bethlehem. Bright, sunny oblongs, courtesy of the oversized windows on the front wall, illuminate the many paintings arranged around the room. They are nature’s spotlight. A warmth exudes from the artist, too, as she turns, paintbrush in hand, to welcome the visitor stepping over the threshold and into her world. She’s eager to talk about two of her latest works, although neither will join its cousins as permanent residents of the studio. One – a painting of former Pennsylvania House Speaker Mark Rozzi – will become part of the portrait gallery at the state capitol in Harrisburg. The other is destined for a place of prominence to be determined, although it’s safe to say it just might be the ultimate 2024 holiday gift in the Christmas City.

Corpora, who grew up in Belvidere, NJ, has been creatively inclined for as long as she can remember. “I was always the artist in the class,” she says. She can vividly recall drawing a bird in the second grade. But painting, it seemed, would be her passion. When she was nine years old, her parents bought her a paint set – and not the standard issue, kid-friendly watercolor set that was a staple of many elementary school classrooms. Instead, she was gifted with oil paints, the medium of the masters: Rembrandt, Cézanne, van Gogh. “I would take my oil paints outside and do plein air painting,” Corpora says. She had the paints in tow on a family trip to Lake Susquehanna. The landscape that poured out of her brushes won a Scholastic Gold Key, a prestigious honor for a budding young artist.

She branched out into pastels and portraits, working on a pastel likeness of her sister in secret, as the sister slept. She can also recall finishing a series of watercolor portraits while she was a student at Belvidere High School. By that point, she was set on studying fine art in college – although her parents would have preferred she pursue a career as an art teacher – and enrolled at Kutztown State College (now Kutztown University), where she received the prize for the top graduate in her field.

But as even the most gifted fine arts major will attest, talent doesn’t always pay the bills; at least, not at first. After college Corpora worked at a variety of jobs in design, illustration and advertising. A small, local newspaper and a belt company in Allentown were among her early employers, she says. In the mid-1970s Corpora began working for the now defunct publishing house, Emmaus-based Rodale, Inc., and was promoted to creative director within a few years. Her department made all the marketing and sales materials for Rodale’s signature titles, and won several industry awards over the years. There was a major personal perk, too: she met her husband, Pat at Rodale. He was the head of the company’s book division for many years.

All the while, Corpora never abandoned painting, but a busy career necessitated pushing it to the back burner at times. After 14 years with Rodale, she decided to shift her focus to honing her craft as a full-time artist. She also became a student again, immersing herself in workshops and techniques of artists whom she admired, something she continues now, decades later. At the time of this interview, Corpora had just wrapped up an eight-week-long portrait boot camp hosted by Arthur Gain, a Russian-born artist who lives and teaches in Spain. “It was intense,” she says. “But I felt I was able to bring myself forward a step.” A trip to Sicily to study with Swedish painter Nick Alm, whom she’s long admired, is on her calendar later in the fall. Constant evolution in her paintings is the goal: “You can keep improving if you study and practice.”

When asked how she chooses her subject matter, Corpora says inspiration is everywhere. “A lot of it is the light or the emotion,” she explains. “I’m really looking for an idea that grabs me.”

Of course, not everything she touches with her paintbrush turns to gold. But there is opportunity even in those so-called “wipeouts” – when a painting is abandoned and painted over with something new. Inside her studio, Corpora points out a painting of her sister-in-law’s granddaughter that was done on top of another painting. It’s still possible to see some texture from the previous painting beneath it. “It gives you urgency to paint faster to cover it,” she says of the wipeout process. She is matter-of-fact about the inevitability of a few missteps. “There’s the hopefulness that you’re going to create something really beautiful and make it more than just a physical representation fo something,” she says. “And it doesn’t always work.”

But it certainly seems to work a lot more than it doesn’t. Corpora has amassed a lengthy list of awards and accolades, both in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. Her work is in private and public collections across the United States, as well as Europe, Canada and Australia. She is a signature member of both Oil Painters of America and American Women Artists. Her work has been featured in publications like PleinAir magazine and American Artist magazine. In 2023, her alma mater Kutztown University awarded her and her husband an honorary Doctor of Public Service for their many philanthropic efforts supporting students and the arts at the school.

Corpora is also a teacher, leading private lessons and small group classes at her studio in Historic Bethlehem. She and Pat also reside on the property. They previously lived in a smaller house a few blocks away – a place where the laundry room had to suffice as her studio. The current space is one she designed herself: generously sized windows, high ceilings and wrap-around ledges that provide ample display space for a lifetime of work. Paintings of all sizes hang from the walls and adorn the ledges, taking the eye around the room and back again: landscapes, figures, portraits, still life paintings. On one wall there’s a tomato ripening into a delicious, juicy red. On another there’s a girl from the neighborhood who agreed to serve as a model for a head-and-shoulders portrait. Landscapes are sprinkled throughout, many of them painted on location – Maine, Virginia, Tuscany, Venice, Sicily and, of course, Historic Bethlehem. She finds plenty of subject matter outside her front door: “You don’t have to go very far to find something beautiful.”

When she was approached to create the featured painting that would go to the highest bidder at the 2024 Historic Bethlehem Holiday Dinner and Auction, Corpora agreed, as long as she could do it her way. She wanted to pick the size and subject matter. No one would see it until it was finished. “My goal as an artist was to do this painting that was so amazing that people would gasp,” she says. The end result – Winter’s Glow (24″ x 36″, oil on linen) – did evoke gasps when it was unveiled at a preview party at a private estate, Corpora reports. It’s a quintessential Christmas City scene at wintertime, featuring an old, stone Moravian chapel and church belfry, bathed in the warm light emanating from nearby street lamps. “I wanted it to feel like this magical snowy night, maybe Christmas time, walking in the oldest and most treasured spots of Historic Bethlehem,” Corpora says.

She feels confident she got it right. Judging by its gushing write-up of the unveiling, Historic Bethlehem agrees. There are other works in her collection, though, that Corpora is not yet sold on. She approaches a painting of a landscape that hangs in her studio, takes it off the wall, and studies it: “There’s something I still feel I’m going to do to this.”

As written in the December 2024 issue of Lehigh Valley Style.

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