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Linda Perlmutter
President and Founder of Odyssey Art Centers & Odyssey Art At Sea
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Background and Education
Linda has taught art everywhere, from her studio, to the QE2, to the Whitney Museum, and many places in between. She got her start teaching art in the New York City public schools, became an art supervisor and went on to teach a graduate course to teachers on the creative use of art media. Linda studied watercolor painting at the Art Students' League in New York with Mario Cooper for ten years in addition to studying at the China Institute in New York. She holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Hunter College.
The Beginnings
As her classes became more and more popular, she was invited to teach in various places outside of her studio. While she was a guest at Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires, the activities director watched her paint and invited her to come and teach the guests there. For seven years she went there three times a year and taught creative watercolor classes. She had a cable show for many years, where artists of all levels watched her create paintings. Over thirty years ago she was invited to be an instructor on the Cunard ships. Classes which started with eight or ten guests (and before Odyssey Art at Sea typically shrunk to two or less participants) often wound up with thirty five or forty guests, or more.
Odyssey Art at Sea- Success
Based on her experiences as an art instructor on luxury cruise lines, over thirty years ago, Linda was asked by the Cunard cruise line to establish the Odyssey Art at Sea program. She has since trained more than three hundred fifty instructors in her special method of teaching creative art to cruise guests. Potential instructors come from all over the world to her studio in Sleepy Hollow, NY for an intense workshop. She created a special program exclusively for Crystal Cruises called the Masterpiece Program, where guests enjoy an in-depth art experience working with a particular medium. Some of the areas explored to date are: acrylics, scrapbooking, stone sculpture, jewelry design, collage, mosaics, clay sculpture and reliefs, watercolor, pastel pencils, decoupage, relief paintings, and weaving. She is very proud that the Odyssey Art at Sea program is on every Crystal Cruise.
Personal Artistic Success
In addition to teaching, Linda continues to paint regularly. She employs a wet-on-wet technique in which she applies paints to already moistened paper, which lends a soft-edged, almost misty look to some of her works. Linda's works are included in many private and corporate collections and have been shown in galleries from Tel Aviv to Wisconsin and Maine. She is also known as an artist for collections published by H. George Caspari, a note card company, which has been reproducing her paintings for over forty years.