“Visions and Reflections: Diverse Journeys”
PRESS RELEASE
Mill Brook Gallery & Sculpture Garden
236 Hopkinton Road, Concord, NH 03301
603-226-2046
Contact person: Pam Tarbell
“Visions and Reflections: Diverse Journeys”
Nine Contemporary Painters and Sculptors from New Hampshire October 28th-December 24th
Reception: Sunday, November 6th 3-6
Maureen Ahern, Barbara Danser, Marsha Hewitt, Charles P. Goodwin, Patrick McCay, James Rappa, Gail Smuda, James K. Wolcott, and Soo Rye Yoo
“Visions and Reflections: Diverse Journeys,” is about the many choices we face in our lives, the roads we walk down, and our reflections on those decisions. Being an artist is not an easy choice: one has to continually turn on the creative juices by producing new work. An artist is driven by creative improvement: never quite satisfied, making new challenges, and rising to another level.
Maureen Ahern (Dublin) is the Director of the Thorne Sagendorf Gallery at Keene University. Her paintings have been featured in numerous exhibits.
Ahern say, “My work does not describe a particular place or scene; rather it attempts to share the experience of seeing over time. I want the viewer to feel the effect the blink of an eye can have on their perception of what is real around them.”
Barbara Danser (Jaffrey) creates bronze sculpture and has taught painting in New Mexico and Italy. Danser say, “My art focuses on the joyful energy of life in nature and on the continuum of time: beginnings and endings, rejuvenation, connections between Earth and universe and the mystery of the spirit.”
Marsha Hewitt (Harrisville) recently retired from Head of the Art Department at Keene University. She now spends her time creating encaustics (layers of images and wax). Hewitt say, ” My vision is of the plains of East Africa:
the magnificent beauty of the endangered African wildlife and the fragility of the ancient indigenous Maasai culture. Can either continue to survive?”
Charles P. Goodwin (Warner) constructs his paintings with thick impasto, building up layers of paint until the shadows on the colorful painting become part of the design. Goodwin says, “These paintings are an exploration of paint and its glorious vocabulary of color, surface, physicality, texture and mass. They invoke scale and sculptural depth…surface relief and tonal contrast weave intertwined paths for the eye to travel the surface.”
Patrick McCay (Bedford) is an Irish born-Scottish painter, Dean of the Fine Art Department at New Hampshire Institute of Art. McKay has exhibited at London’s Royal Academy and The Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts. McKay says, “The nostalgic imagery appears to facilitate the clarity I seek and the landscape, its people, geography, vegetation, animal life and places that appear to contain a bounty. The new work represents the first few chapters of my engagement to my new surroundings.”
James Rappa (Deerfield) creates mixed media works on paper and exquisite scluptures in steel and stone. Rappa says of his new series “I have created work that speaks of growth and harmony. My compositions are a call to rise above the past and move in a new and positive direction to the future. The abstract forms invite the viewer to consider their own vision and reflections through each pieces.”
Gail Smuda (Concord) teaches at Southern New Hampshire University, where a retrospective of her art work will be shown in November, 2011. Smuda is a nationally recognized book artist; her topics often deal with domestic women’s issues. Smuda says, “My Vision and Reflections always revolve around history and women’s place in the narrative. I seem to see more similarities, as I age, between the lives of women in the past and my own life, but with very subtle variations in the way those similarities play out. The play between the past and the present are where my work usually seems to fall.”
James K. Wolcott (Concord) is a retired doctor who has returned to his first love of art. Wolcott paints on layered fabric with non-objective patterns, transforming a variety of natural and plastic woven fabrics into richly layered surfaces.
Soo Rye Yoo (Rye) was born in South Korea, and studied art E-hwa Art School, Korea, and the New Hampshire Institute of Art. She is owner/director of the Soo Rye Gallery in Rye, NH. Yoo says, “My paintings are metaphors: stories of nature and expressed in a formative beauty. The bird and the moon that often appear in my paintings are messengers, conveying our lives. It is my goal to paint life: soft, warm, peaceful images in a way that soothe the viewer’s mind and body.”
Curator: Pamela R. Tarbell
