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Artscope Magazine | July/August 2025

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Features

A STRONG, DREAMLIKE INTENSITY

// Features, March/April 2023

by Marjorie Kaye

Kelly Slater is an artist that I have known for a number of years, mostly from my years at Atlantic Works Gallery in East Boston, when our memberships overlapped. I have watched Slater’s work go from tender, timid renderings to powerful, contrasted, energetic and unselfconscious telepathic conversations with trees and wooded environments. When I asked her what contributed to her outburst of confidence, she stated that over time she had connected to a vortex of inner awakenings, spawned by honing her skills and interacting with a greater artistic collective community. Community came in the form of studying printmaking with Selma Bromberg at the Center for Adult Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, Slater was encouraged to explore and experiment. Within our conversation, it occurred to me that she opened to the intensity of the natural world, strangely, by abandoning it … [Read more...] about A STRONG, DREAMLIKE INTENSITY

ROBIN REYNOLDS

// Features, March/April 2023

by Brain Goslow

While most of New England waits for spring, few are more eager for the first blossoms of the season as Robin Reynolds, whose floral paintings of her North Brookfield, Massachusetts garden can be seen in upcoming months at galleries throughout the region, including The Legacy Collection at Bryan Memorial Gallery in Jeffersonville, Vermont, The Cynthia Winings, G. Watson and George Marshall Store galleries in Maine, group shows at Soprafina Gallery in Boston, CUSP Gallery in Newport, Rhode Island, and ArtsWorcester and The White Room in Worcester, Massachusetts, where her work can be seen on an ongoing basis at BirchTree Bread Company in the city’s Canal District. Artscope Magazine’s managing editor Brian Goslow talked with Reynolds at the opening reception for her “Interlaced” exhibition she shared with Emily Sandagata at the Worcester Center for Crafts (which closes on March 4) and … [Read more...] about ROBIN REYNOLDS

AN INVESTIGATION OF COLOR AND LIGHT

// Artscope Issues, Features, January/February 2023

by Rachel Flood Page

Sky Painter, Nadia Parsons, has been an artist from a young age. When her mother recognized her dyslexia, she introduced her daughter to creating art, hoping that it was a place where she would flourish. Parsons immediately took to painting, and her high school and college years brought her to explore drawing, acting, photography and printmaking. After college, she returned to her childhood passion for painting, working with acrylics when her children were born (they dried faster), and after taking workshops at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Museum School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, finally returning to oils to paint the sky. In 2019, Parsons found a home in the SoWa Art District, where she works and displays her dynamic paintings of skyscapes and connects with visitors to her studio. “I’ve really loved it,” she said. “I get to talk about the art with people, … [Read more...] about AN INVESTIGATION OF COLOR AND LIGHT

HEIGHTENED SENSE OF COMMUNITY

// Artscope Issues, Features, January/February 2023, Uncategorized

by Brain Goslow

In a year that we reached for normal — new normal, old normal, what exactly is normal, anyways — the show introducing the Copley Society of Art’s latest members won’t necessarily take you anywhere new, but they’ll take you back to the places you’ve missed visiting over the past three years. “This group of artists represents people coming from a variety of backgrounds that share a united focus of representing their everyday surroundings,” said gallery coordinator Paige Roehrig. “Whether it be through figurative or still-life, artists are pulling from familiarity to showcase their unique artistic vision. “One thing that they all have in common is that they are all professionally ambitious - becoming an accepted member of the Copley Society of Art provides an important credential and a rewarding achievement for them to celebrate while also providing a heightened sense of … [Read more...] about HEIGHTENED SENSE OF COMMUNITY

BELOVED PORTRAITS

// Features, January/February 2023

by Lee Roscoe

As I was about to interview Andrea (Andi) Sawyer, Provincetown artist, about her dozen oil on canvas, 18 by 24-inch paintings memorializing beloved portraiture artist Ilona Royce Smithkin (who passed away in 2021 at the age of 101) in her Provincetown atelier, I saw a sweatshirt logo, “Be Who You Want to Be,” and then read a line about one’s presentation of self as “the curated performance of identity.” “That fits Ilona perfectly!” Sawyer said with a smile. Both bits seem to fit Sawyer and Smithkin, alike. Both are late bloomers with unique styles. Sawyer was a wife, mother of four and career woman who designed kitchens and sold real estate for many years until her four kids were grown, before returning to art. “I always loved to make stuff — as a weaver, spinner, sewer and knitter.” Growing up in Maine (born in her aunt’s farmhouse) and from generations of Mainers on her … [Read more...] about BELOVED PORTRAITS

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

// Artscope Issues, Features, January/February 2023

by Elayne Clift

Rachel Portesi was nine years old when she took her first Polaroid of a Sunday morning cartoon on the television screen. At 16, she began taking photographs of people and places with a Pentax K1000. Nearly three decades later, she continues refining photography in her Vermont studio as a uniquely personal art form while adding new techniques such as wet plate collodion tintypes, film and 3D imagery to her multimedia art forms. Portesi’s work in various media is featured in the exhibition, “Rachel Portesi: Looking Glass,” on view from January 15 through March 1 at The von Auersperg Gallery at Deerfield Academy, in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Among her most notable, and now recognized work, are her hair portraits that use the early photographic method of collodion tintype, which she discovered after Polaroid film was no longer available. “It’s finicky, slow and time-consuming,” … [Read more...] about THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS