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Chelsea Studio Helps Kids Appreciate Highbrow Art

By DNAinfo Staff on January 17, 2011 3:07pm  | Updated on January 18, 2011 6:23am

By Tara Kyle

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

CHELSEA — On her day off from the Dalton School, 8-year-old Charlotte Vaccaro cast a critical eye on her recently completed painting of an antelope.

The rusty hue of the woodland animal's coat finally looked right to her, but on her first try, her paint "got so messed up, it turned out like purple."

At HiArt!, an arts program for kids aged two and up which has hopped between studios in Chelsea and Midtown for the past 14 years, instructors don't shy away from exposing kids to so-called "grown-up" techniques and activities.

During a special Martin Luther King holiday class inside the brightly lit West 29th Street studio, Brooklyn College Professor Ellen Berkenblit taught refined color mixing techniques. On another day, kids might visit operas such as Czech composer Leos Janacek's "The Cunning Little Vixen" or Tobias Picker's "Fantastic Mr. Fox," or take a West Chelsea gallery tour.

"If you feed people hamburgers everyday, they're just going to like hamburgers," founder Cyndie Bellen-Berthezene said of her belief in broadening childrens' artistic palettes early. "It doesn't matter if the kid is 3 or 8 or 10."

For Bellen-Berthezene, a native New Yorker who has danced professionally in Europe, published a series of Scholastic children books, and taught Russian languages and literature while pursuing a PhD at Columbia, the inspiration for HiArt! came from her own experiences raising a now 16-year-old daughter.

When her child was only 2, the pair worked together to create a "quite terrible" art project based on Mahler's Fourth Symphony.

"Being a mother is one of the most creative things that anyone does," Bellen-Berthezene said. "You develop in ways you never knew…and open the doors of interaction and respect for people who have different kind of knowledge than you."

While classes at HiArt! aren't cheap — a half-day of special holiday instruction costs $95, and the full day is $175 — HiArt! also offers nonprofit classes for students from the Harlem and the Bronx through the new Time In program.

The students participating in HiArt!'s holiday, afterschool and summer programs come from across the tri-state area, but especially the Upper East and Upper West Sides and lower Manhattan.

They are, Bellen-Berthezene said, "kids who don't fit into the regular box, who don't want to go to Chelsea Piers and do gymnastics."

Once they enroll, Bellen-Berthezene makes sure her programs emphasize interactivity, let kids freely express themselves, and don't waste time.

Lisa Freedman, Charlotte's mother, said she's been coming back for years because the atmosphere is playful, gentle and intimate.

It also provides her daughter, a perfectionist occasionally plagued by self-doubt, with the space to build confidence.

"You get to do what you want. Nobody tells you what to do," said Charlotte. Looking down on her painting of a blue and yellow parrot, she said, "I feel like I've done something good and it wasn't hard — it wasn't a struggle."