PEOPLE

Artist illustrates beauty of birth

The News Tribune, 1990

By ELIAS HOLTZMAN News Tribune Staff Writer

Once, when Vivien Cohen of Woodbridge was exhibiting in a library her drawings on childbirth and labor, a woman about her age approached her and said: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!"

“It’s just about having a baby,” Cohen responded. “Didn’t you ever have a baby?”

“Yes,’ the woman said, “But I didn’t let other people see."

Cohen — 70-plus and 5 feet tall— thinks it’s important to let people see. And it is her special talent for seeing that has made her one of the most sought-after illus­trators of books on sex and sex education.

Her work has appeared in dozens of books and publications. She stays in demand because her illustrations, in addition to being anatomically correct, are also tasteful and establish mood.

Peggy Siegel, a specialist in family life education, who has written two books for use in schools about changes in puberty, says of Cohen:

“She’s wonderful! The most amazing thing, I gave a one-sentence description and she was able to do an illustration that included emotions in an appropriate set­ting.”

Cohen has just finished working on a text for Bantam Books, “Love, Sex and Growing Up,” by Eric Johnson.

Cohen’s illustrations also appear in “The Family Book on Sexuality,” published by Harper & Row, by Mary Steichen Calderone, M.D. and Eric W. Johnson, both well known teachers of sex education.

Among the texts Cohen has illustrated are “Labor and Birth,” a series of books by the Inter­national Childbirth Association. Cohen describes them as “large books written on a sixth-grade level and are given out by hospitals to instruct young mothers-to-be.”

Cohen illustrated her first book on sex education about 25 years ago through an affiliation with Dr. Sol Gordon, a nationally known clinical psychologist, then of High­land Park, whose areas of interest include children with disabilities and sexuality education.

Gordon, now professor emeritus at Syracuse University, has writ­ten a number of other books about sexuality and children in which Cohen has done the illustrations,

When Calderone was interviewed on TV by Phil Donohue, Cohen said, Donohue thumbed through the book and announced:

“The illustrations are gorgeous.”

"I almost fell through the tele­vision set,” Cohen says.

 Cohen generally reads the manuscript she is to illustrate. The author will mark it where he or she thinks an appropriate illustration should go.

But Cohen has become so knowledgeable that “Sol Gordon and one or two others send me a manuscript and tell me to mark it where I think it should go.”

Cohen has developed strong opinions about the need for sex education.

“I really feel that we could do so much good if a youngster was given the knowledge, the true knowledge, rather than hearing it from his peers in a distorted manner.

“I’m angry to this day at the way I wasn't taught. My mother was very shy about telling me anything. And it’s terrible not to have know­ledge — even until after you’re married. It’s a dreadful thing.”

Cohen also worked on the movie, “Strong Kids, Safe Kids,” with Henry Winkler and Marietta Hartley. The script was by Sol Gordon and dealt with children resisting sexual advances.

Cohen tells a story about the current generation and her own grandson, Samuel, who was taught about sex from the time he was 4.

Now, at age 10, he has grown a good deal, and it seemed to Cohen that she had to stand on her toes to kiss her grandchild Sam.

When she remarked how tall he was getting, her grandson replied:

"Oh grandma, it's only the pre-pubescent surge of growth.”

Cohen has been “drawing pic­tures” since she was 3½ years old, she says. At school she drew in the margins of her books.

“And all through school they would give me time off to do the scenery for the Christmas pageants.”

Cohen, a native of Derby, Conn., graduated from Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn in 1939. She also studied scenery design at Yale.

Although she studied anatomy as part of her art courses at Pratt, her ability was enhanced when she worked at Bellevue Hospital and Memorial Cancer Hospital in New York as artist, making anatomical drawings for the doctors.

At Bellevue, she worked near the area where bodies remained on gurneys in the hallway, awaiting transfer to the autopsy room or the morgue.

“I was always scared I’d run into one of them and have a body fall on me,” she says. “I still have night­mares.”

Cohen visits the Rutgers Medi­cal Library in New Brunswick to maintain her expertise.

“I have to know my anatomy,” she says. “I spend time at the medical library, and I have doctor friends who will draw me rough diagrams of what happens in cer­tain procedures.”

But her drawings are not limited to graphic sexual depictions.

She does illustrations for health-related groups such as the Health Education Associates and for The American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing.

She has done pamphlets on such “life skills” as discipline with young children, a woman’s guide for staying healthy during the middle years, toilet training, and eating more fiber.

In all her work, Cohen says, “I use different ethnic mixes and the handicapped.

“I’m very conscious of the ethnic mix,” she said. “Now more than ever, I put in Orientals.’

Many of her friends know that she sometimes uses real people’s photographs as models for an illustration.

“I have a pile of snapshots that friends and relatives gave me. They want their kids in an illustration. And I’m delighted.”

“I give orders,” she says, "I tell them ‘I want a baby crying. What­ever happens that first day after birth.’

“Some of the work can be very depressing," Cohen says, and she described an illustration for the American Journal of Maternal/ Child Nursing which accompanied

an article on helping parents cope with an infant’s death.

It showed a nurse holding a dead infant and talking to the grieving parents.

“Seeing and touching their dead baby can help parents attach to the infant and ultimately facilitates their grieving,” the caption under the illustration says.

Another article deals with a child being treated for shock. The illustration depicts the child, three nurses, and monitoring machinery next to his bed.

“I had to get all the manufacturer’s diagrams to make sure the details of the machinery were accurate,” Cohen says.

“I go to Perth Amboy General Hospital to get the feel of a critical care area,” she says. “They put me in a robe and mask and let me look around.”

Cohen does all her illustrations in shades of pencil, and works in her living room, where corner win­dows let in daylight.

And when she is not drawing as a profession, she paints as a hobby. She likes to work in oils.

“I took the best of show in the last senior citizen exhibit in Woodbridge,” she says.

Cohen feels she is still learning and takes art lessons every week at the Woodbridge Adult School. Said Cohen: “We’re so fortunate in Woodbridge to have a good adult school with such good teachers, specifically Jo Ann Frandano.”

Cohen’s walls are covered with her art work. Her kitchen has a mural of a pastoral scene, and her bathroom has a South Seas theme.

Her art career was interrupted from 1942 to 1964 when she and her husband operated Vivien’s Kiddie Shop on Main Street in Woodbridge.

She also has been a substitute teacher in the Woodbridge school system, teaching art and classes of handicapped children.

She and her husband, Alexander, 75, will be married 50 years next June. They have two sons.

Cohen credits her own success with her husband’s willingness to share in responsibilities. “When I’m really working he does the food shopping and cooking. It's team work.”

Her husband served 3 1/2 years in the Signal Corps in World War II, and now works in customer relations at the Brooks Brothers Mail Order Division in Raritan Center.