Multi-talented musician and artist D. Vincent Biase shows some of his collage work and sketchbooks outside of the Topaz Room art space.
Dawn Price
If you are a member of the SaddleBrooke Fine Arts Guild (SBFAG) and attend any meetings, you are fortunate to be greeted at the door by Vincent Biase and his lovely wife Dona. They are newlyweds who moved to SaddleBrooke in 2019 from Hudson Valley. Although married just a few years, they have a history together and have known each other for 27 years! Their parents were actually friends as well, back in the day, and lived in the same neighborhood.
Vincent recalls when he was very young, his dad would encourage him to do something “creative” if he complained of nothing to do. As a teen, he attended a performing arts high school where he was an accomplished music student. Most of his classmates studied more traditional art forms. “Art has always been around me-it’s from my roots, and I’ve always appreciated anyone’s creativity,” Biase states. His inspiration also came from his parents. He fondly remembers his father, who had a wartime assignment as a welder of bomber airplanes. “He would come home, change out of his work coveralls, and turn around and put on his tuxedo. He would leave the house with his violin case for his ‘other’ job with the Detroit Symphony or the Detroit Athletic Club, as a professional violinist.”
Just as his father was a performer, at one time Biase was also a professional musician himself, with his own music studio. An instrumentalist, he played the piano, accordion, and the vibraphone. He still plays, and he’s even entertained local SaddleBrooke members of Senior Village with piano concerts. His musical talents were how he put himself through university. Learning discipline through music helped him focus on his studies.
Biase earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in both psychotherapy and family therapy, and he worked as a licensed Ph.D. psychologist in New York State. He has decades of research and clinical work under his belt. He supported the first East Coast endeavor where New York City addicts could be part of a treatment community of people with addictions helping other people with similar problems, while the therapists were on the outer rings. He stated, “People who know each other’s reality are more helpful to others in their own healing.” He also helped create a program for transit workers struggling with addictions to help them reform and prevent their own job loss.
So, with decades of helping others, Biase can now relax a bit and start to enjoy art with new friends in the community. He views art as a “psycho-motor activity without an end product in view. It brings a degree of satisfaction and a new alternative of creative expression to life.” Vincent has taken some classes at the SBFAG, such as the Art Sampler, Alcohol Ink, and Collage classes. He enjoys taking part in the “Art Salon” discussion groups with his wife as well and has found his group of creatives to be around. “Everyone’s involvement in art is so different,” he states. He shared his sketchbooks with pen and ink scenes from some of the symphonies he’s been involved in, from his perspective … his creative expression of a world that most have never experienced, filled with truly special moments.
If you would like to learn a new art form or meet other creative people, consider joining the SaddleBrooke Fine Arts Guild. You can find their calendar of classes and activities available at saddlebrookefinearts.org.