Lenora Kandiner of West Windsor has been working in polymer clay since 1991, when she accidentally walked down the polymer clay aisle in an art supply store. A self-confessed “color junkie,” she likes polymer clay because it allows her to let her color sense reign. She creates wearable art including necklaces, earrings, pins, and barrettes; dolls and other sculptures; and functional decorative items including clocks, picture frames, vessels, pens and pencils, pill boxes, and lifetime nail files. She will be exhibiting and selling her art at the YWCA Crafters’ Marketplace on Saturday and Sunday, November 20 and 21, at John Witherspoon Middle School, in Princeton.
Born in Washington, D.C., Kardiner spent many years in Philadelphia. She received a scholarship from the Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She started out majoring in mathematics and graduated with honors in romance languages after studying both Spanish and French in Europe as an undergraduate. She stayed to do graduate work in formal linguistics and mathematical logic.
“My parents appreciated art and I now own my favorite pieces of the art which surrounded me as a child,” she says. “We had many friends who were professional artists.”
Her father was a chemical engineer whose hobbies were photography and woodworking. “He did cabinetry and carved exquisite earrings out of exotic hardwood scraps,” she says. Her mother, a ghost writer for two Secretaries of Agriculture and a speechwriter for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a knitter. “My mother knit every sweater I owned until I graduated from high school but she was more of an artisan than an artist,” says Kandiner.
Kandiner cannot remember a time when she did not appreciate art — and shapes. A story that remained in the family was that when she was three or four she remarked to a professor of math at Duquesne University that he should look at the trapezoids on the ceiling.
A congenital ability to dislocate her right thumb resulted in teachers telling her that she could not paint or draw as a child. After it was surgically repaired during her teen years, she began doing ceramics, both hand-building and wheel thrown pots and sculpture. “I’ve made a point of getting past all the things I was told by narrow-minded teachers that I couldn’t do when I was a child,” she says.
Her wood sculptures created in junior high school were exhibited in the Ford Industrial Arts Exhibition. “I stopped working in wood because it was too time consuming and it interfered with my academic work,” she says.
After taking a programming job when she graduated, she studied operations research at Stevens Institute of Technology. The learning continues and she is now a senior citizen auditor at Rutgers, studying French.
Kandiner came to the Princeton area in 1969 to join Mathematica. “I was looking for a house with trees that I could afford,” she says. “I bought my West Windsor house in 1971 when single homeowners were very rare. The day after I made the offer, I found out that Mathematica was moving from Palmer Square to Princeton Junction.”
She worked in the computer field for 32 years, 25 of them in the software industry. Starting out as a programmer, she wrote her first computer program in 1955 while in junior high school. She moved into technical support, project management, software sales and sales management, business development, and corporate management.
“When my employer did a leveraged ESOP (employee stock ownership plan) in 1997, I decided that it was time for another phase of my life,” she says. “I went back to work for a non-profit organization that had received a three-year grant from NEH. It needed a bilingual (Spanish) project manager with computer skills. I retired again when the grant ended in 2006.”
She studied drawing at McDaniel College in Maryland and later studied watercolor with Russ Johnson and others at the West Windsor Senior Center. Kandiner began working with polymer and within six weeks people tried to buy her earrings out of her ears. “I’ve also been able to take workshops with many famous polymer artists over the last 10 years,” she says.
A member of the New Jersey Polymer Clay Guild and Philadelphia Area Polymer Clay Guild, Kandiner is on the board of the International Polymer Clay Association. Her work was on the cover of the Polymer Clay 2000 Calendar and is included in 400 Polymer Clay Designs published by Lark Books.
Her work has been shown in New Jersey at the Montgomery Center for the Arts, Bristol Myers Squibb Gallery, Sweetree Gallery, University League Gallery, St. Peters University Hospital, Jacob Swerdlow Gallery in Bound Brook, Woolbearers in Mt. Holly, and Princeton YWCA Crafters Marketplace. She has also exhibited at the gallery at the Synergy conference and at Common Ground on the Hill in Maryland, Artworks in Utah, the Augusta Heritage store in West Virginia, and the artisan areas of the Old Songs Festival in New York and the New England Folk Festival in Massachusetts. Visit www.lenorastudio.com for more information.
— Lynn Miller
Crafters’ Marketplace, YWCA Princeton, John Witherspoon School, Walnut Lane, Princeton. Saturday, November 20, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Sunday, November 21, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The annual juried craft show showcasing more than 140 professional artisans from the Northeast exhibiting original handmade jewelry, pottery, clothing and other gift items. Cafe lunch and homemade baked goods. Proceeds benefit the Pearl Bates Scholarship fund. No strollers. Handicapped-accessible. $6. 609-497-2100. www.ywcaprinceton.org.
