the arts
Living Moment
in
the
Long before COVID-19, writer Debbie Galant decided not to postpone her passions
WRITTEN BY JULIA MARTIN
I
n 40 years as a writer and journalist, Debbie
Galant’s career path has had its share of twists
and turns. She’s been a columnist for The New
York Times, the founding editor of the Montclair
news site Baristanet, an associate director with the
Montclair State University Center for Cooperative
Media and co-creator of an award-winning podcast.
Then, in 2015, a brush with mortality in the form
of an aggressive type of breast cancer caused her to
reevaluate her life and ultimately jump off the journal-
ism track. Now, at age 64, she is enjoying a flourishing
career as a studio artist. Her paintings of New Jersey
people and places — from a waitress at Red Eye Cafe to
the Meadowlands, Verona Park and the Great Falls in
Paterson, have been displayed at Studio Montclair and
the West Orange Arts Council gallery.
Galant didn’t give up writing altogether; she
still writes for New Jersey Monthly magazine and
MidCenturyModernMag.com, a website she founded
featuring articles by and for baby boomers.
The decision to quit her job at MSU wasn’t easy:
It meant cutting her family’s household income in half.
At the time, her husband, Warren Levinson, was a
correspondent with Associated Press; he retired last year.
The couple have two adult children.
To make ends meet, Galant decided to begin taking
Social Security payments at the relatively young age of
62, despite the standard advice to wait as long as pos-
sible to maximize payouts. As she wrote in an article
for MidCentury Modern titled “Why I am painting (and
decided to take Social Security at 62),” some of her
friends told her she was crazy.
But her cancer, and the triple-bypass surgery Levison
needed while she was getting chemotherapy, led her to
think, “‘Wow — this could all end. Why wait for Social
Security?’ I took it as a permission slip to go ahead
and live now,” she says. She also credits Levinson for
encouraging her to follow her passion, and providing
the steady paycheck and health insurance that made
the transition possible.
During Galant’s cancer treatment, she and her son,
Noah Levinson, a podcast producer and editor, cre-
ated a series of podcasts about her experience called
“The Chemo Files.” It won an award from the American
Association of Cancer Research.
Her “aha” moment about painting came a couple of
years after she quit her job. She and her family were
visiting with a friend, Noel Nowicki, who’d left medicine
to paint, and he was showing them photos of his paint-
ings. “He said, ‘I can work on a painting all day and feel
more joy than I do from healing a patient,’” Galant says.
Galant, who’d taken art electives throughout her
school years and had considered a career in art before
choosing journalism, felt a stab of jealousy, and took
that as a sign of her strong desire to paint. “I realized that
he doesn’t own this, it’s not a zero-sum game. I could do
it, too,” she says.
She started taking classes at the Summit School of
Visual Art and Montclair Art Museum, created a studio in
her daughter Margot’s old room and became a regular at
Jerry’s Artist Outlet in West Orange. She started with oils
and moved to pastels.
Those who know her well weren’t surprised to learn
she was pouring her creative energy into painting.
“Debbie’s always tried to reinvent herself,” says her
friend, Bernadette Baum. “She’s always been a veritable
da Vinci in terms of the scope of her creative interests.”
Last year, Galant made another life-altering move:
She and Levinson sold their Glen Ridge home of
30 years. Since then, the second bedroom of the couple’s
two-bedroom apartment in Edison Lofts on Main Street
in West Orange has served as her studio (Galant and
Levinson are now moving to a more spacious apartment
in Clifton).
These days, Galant’s art is informed by her “post-
industrial” surroundings and the COVID-19 pandemic.
An interest in urban sketching, which merges her
passions for reporting and drawing, has blossomed,
with sketches of roped-off schoolyards and parks and
even a graveyard popping up on her Instagram feed.
She takes her art seriously, painting every day, but
decided against getting an MFA degree. Her goal is not
recognition by the art world, but the joy she gets at the
easel. “When I paint, time changes,” she says. “Sometimes
it expands, sometimes it goes away totally. It’s transfixing.
“To me, painting is like cheating death.” ■
MONTCLAIR MAGAZINE MAY 2020
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