January 31 - March 7, 2020

Opening Reception: January 31,  6:00 - 8:30 p.m.
​Artists' Panel Discussion: Friday, February 21, 6:30 p.m. | Moderated by: Sydney Morris

Kindly Sponsored by:
CVS Health Foundation

EAST GALLERY
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Joseph Fucigna| Discharge
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Burning Bush
Plastic Fencing | 68" x 58" x 63"
Artist Statement

Joseph Fucigna is a multi-media artist whose work is rooted in process, play and the innate qualities of the materials used. Through experimentation, play and innovation he creates sculptures, paintings and drawings that are known for their power to transform materials, inventiveness and odd but suggestive subject matter. The ultimate goal is to create an artwork that is a perfect balance between suggestive content and the formal qualities of the materials that allow both to be active participants. 
 
With his sculptures he enjoys taking modest industrial materials and transforming them into elegant yet provocative abstractions that speak about the inherent qualities of the material, process, and craft.  At first the process creates the product. The inspiration for a series usually begins with the discovery of a common industrial material. It could be the soft bends and folds of recycled scrap steeI, the sensual shape of a sliced open rubber truck tire inner tube, the vibrant colors of plastic barrier fencing or soft dripping and flowing qualities of silicone putty that spark a series.  Through play, trial and error, and vision Fucigna alters the materials into new and unexpected formal abstractions that speak about the materials intrinsic characteristics. As the work progresses and he gains a deeper understanding of a medium and its processes, Fucigna tries to move beyond the physical and formal characteristics. He does not want the sculptures to be just about the material, they also need to have an underlying theme or concept that carries it beyond the superficial.  Creating an object of possibilities that balances suggestive content and the formal qualities of the material is the ultimate goal. 
WEST & TDP GALLERIES
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"If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes." -Mark Twain
                       
Wiping the Slate
Mixed Media | 43" x 108"
Leila Daw
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Concerns about how we inhabit our Earth lead me to map making and aerial views, to visions of environmental disasters, and to materials that refer to the physicality of our world. Many of my images are of familiar places such as the Connecticut River, the city of New Haven, my neighborhood -- but existing as if they’ve been disrupted by cataclysms or aberrations in the natural order.
 
My disaster visions are as intricate and beautiful as I can make them, to reflect the complex beauty of the Earth. I’m fascinated with both the physics and the mythology of our connections to the planet: the underlying structure of landscape, geological phenomena, weather patterns, the archaeological uncovering of the hidden past, the concept of sacred places, and the selection of sites for settlements.
 
The mixed media acrylic paintings incorporate a variety of recycled materials: foil and plastic packaging (which I stain and paint), scraps of paper and cloth, broken pottery. I also use natural materials such as sand,  mud, and mica. I choose substances with rich texture and seductive sparkle, suggesting active water, changing earth, and environmental phenomena
October Morning
Archival Pigment Print | 15.5" x 23.5"
Charles Dmytriw
 
After teaching for over thirty years and sharing my knowledge with my students, I now am deeply involved with challenging my abilities and exploring every day with the two main media I use, photography and painting. For me there is a connection since I find myself being inspired by both as I create.
 
My major inspiration is my relationship with nature. Photography and painting allow me to attempt to visually describe my intimate feelings of the place where I live in northwest Connecticut and to other locations that I visit. Near my home the sense of place is reinforced by walking, canoeing, building stone cairns, and just seeing as I photograph. Indoors I print my photographs and paint in my studio. My immediate intimate feelings are captured by my photography, both color and black and white. Often personal journals and sketches are also used to describe my interactions with nature.
 
Personally, photography is not just pointing and shooting at an object or scene, but “seeing” to capture an inner emotion that made me stop and aim the camera. I don’t believe a person hides behind the camera. What you photograph is who you are.
 
Although I have photographed a wide variety of subject matter thru the years, nature is what inspires me most often today. As Aristotle said, “In all things nature, there is something of the marvelous.”
 
Marvelous indeed.
Misquamicut
Watercolor, acrylic, paste, cut and torn paper 35" x 24" | 2018
Mary Janacek

Investigating ideas of perception, I cut, tear, and layer pads of paper to make them unrecognizable. On closer inspection, these images reveal themselves: a cloudy sky or body of water made of watercolor washes, colored paper, and sketchbooks.


What surrounds us is often what is hardest to see. My work examines the most ephemeral pieces of landscapes. The vastness of a Texas thunderstorm, however fleeting, remains an icon of that landscape, as does the thick smoke of forest fires in California, or a whiteout in Vermont. While constantly shifting, weather patterns, skies, waterways, retain specificity.


Each piece in this body of work begins with a sketchbook. I cut or tear the sheets of paper into layers, and then other papers are interlaced between the sheets. Some of these additional layers are cut by hand. Others, I design on the computer and cut with a plotting cutter. 
Turmoil Threatens
Oil on Panel |  24" x 18"
Linda Pearlman Karlsberg


My work is about light: about the conflicts of light and shadow, desolation and beauty, and the emotional responses light provokes.

The skies offer widely divergent forms and light, and infinitely variable color expression. I enjoy the challenge of describing forms that appear three dimensional but also porous, often translucent and reflective at turns. In addition these scenes evoke life’s fragility inherent in this perpetual reshaping and reordering. A bittersweet sadness holds a dialogue with the pleasure this natural beauty first engender, and a poignant aching sits directly behind the pleasurable sensation felt on viewing these scenes at moments of transcendence. These paintings, so dependent on the light of the moment depicted, are also about the temporality and all it implies in nature and in our lives. My profound delight and engagement, a catalyst for the paintings, soon summons an all too relevant awareness of temporal changes in ourselves, the world and all those around us. The turmoil and ongoing metamorphosis witnessed in the clouds mimic the tumultuous forces and inevitable, unstoppable sea of change we ride in life. And every attribute from fearsome power, brutal force, grandness, stunning beauty, grace, optimism, lightness, sadness, brooding darkness, subtlety, quiet, sublimity and more has it moment reflected across the sky, and then disappears. I find the emotional resonance confirming and profound.

In each painting the challenge is to render the beauty, and ambivalence of these moments: to hold the melancholy engendered by this perpetual, metaphorical play of birth to death: to impart the compositional magic of this random intersection of light, color, texture and form: to celebrate this elusive earthly moment when condensation and weather artistically create something so humanly resonate. 
Coltsfoot Valley
Watercolor | 5.5" x 7.5"
Ellen Moon

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has it’s own beauty, and, in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
For the many years I was a fairly serious Sunday and vacation painter of landscapes in watercolor, but never had an easy time dealing with the local landscape. In 2004 so set myself the task of making a painting a day of the countryside of Cornwall and its surrounding area. I work plein air—outdoors in all but the most extreme weather.
 
For me, painting has become a form of meditation, and hour in the day when I have to concentrate on one thing and one thing only. Even in January, when the watercolors began to freeze inside the car, I have always been happy to spend that hour painting what was in front of me.
 
I am in love with the fields of this corner of the world. Many of my paintings were made in the field in front of the house where I grew up. This field is, without doubt, my favourite place in the world.
Zephyr's Gentle Breeze
Oil on Linen | 48" x 36"
Juan Moreno

Departing from a strictly representational depiction of nature, I develop and revisit my paintings until I feel a "yes". I seek to explore the dynamics of color and the illusion of space within the limited two-dimensional canvas and invite the viewer to interpret my work and become part of the creative process.
 
 
 
www.ArtJMoreno.com
Summer Sky 1
Oil on Canvas | 20" x 20"
Ken Rush

New York City has been an important inspiration from my work since 1971. I have worked both above  and below ground, from life and from imagination, often returning to the same type of subject. The Gowanus Canal,for example, has been one of the constants in my work since 1974. For an artist who grew up in the well manicured suburbs of New York, the canal provides an intriguing contrast. It is not only as content, but also the experience of setting up and working there.

I also have a lifelong attachment to the Vermont landscape. The gabled house is a place and a form that has special meaning. It is a shape that is both familiar and abstract, and a locale that is mysterious yet familiar. Like the canyons of the city, it has provided me with an artistic rubric, one where I am able to explore and look for different outcomes. The shape of the house, its angled roof and shadowed side, have become an imbedded gesture in the physical creation of my work as well as the psychological icon which propels it.

Creating poured landscapes provides me with a particular freedom and forces me to consider surprising outcomes. When I pour a landscape I feel that the work is in essence painting itself. This provides a counterpoint to the Literal and symbolic landscapes that I do plein air and from imagination.
Winter Meadow
Oil on Canvas | 14" x 11"
John Wheat

My work could be characterized as “realistic” or even in some cases “photographic”, but something less exact is very much behind the work you see in the gallery. A lot of art is about capturing a moment in time, often just a glance, something that catches your eye for a split second.
 
The world we look at changes all the time.  Something can look different because of different light or a different angle due to a different point of view (two people can look at the same thing even if they are only a couple of feet apart and see something quite different.)  This is particularly true in New England where seasonal changes transform our landscapes every year, often in unexpected ways.
 
I use photography as a time-efficient sketchbook to capture that eye-catching image. But the camera is only a tool for me and an imperfect one at that.  As I develop a painting, the photo is often a reference point for lights, darks and at least basic colors.  However, somewhere in the course of that process I begin to change things because I remember the scene differently from what the photograph “says”.  The photographic image doesn’t “feel” right.  I remember the colors of the foliage as more vibrant or the shadows as deeper. I want the painting to be “true” to my experience of seeing the subject beyond mere photographic accuracy. Perhaps nostalgia creeps in because it triggered another memory of a similar place or time.  Perhaps turmoil from a stormy sky or the wonder at the intricacy of a flower.  Consciously or unconsciously, this all finds its way onto the canvas.
 
Beyond these physical phenomena, what a viewer might be feeling and its sense of what it means to them at that moment can also change how the work is perceived. Remembering the object, scene or person adds yet another layer when we view something with overlays of emotion and associated memories. 
 
And sometimes the artist goes back and looks at a work only to see something he or she never realized they were thinking or remembering at the time it was created. Happens to me all the time!