The experience of the annual Juried Exhibition at the Catamount Arts Center begins about an hour before you get there. Sure, you could take the highway for most of the route, but you would miss out on immersion into the desolate beauty of this northern life. If you opt for the back roads, unplug from your devices, and listen only to the white noise of your radiator fan, you’ll find yourself surrendering to the pleasures of quiet contemplation. You will be guided by the meandering curves of the road that offer up snow-encased hills and valleys, the occasional red barn leaning into the wind, signs of agrarian routine on winter’s hiatus, an old farmhouse with a 1950s fridge and life’s detritus relegated to the front porch and, of course, a satellite dish arching toward news of the outside world. Winter in this part of the country is harsh and living here requires a good bit of coping … [Read more...] about AN AFFIRMATION OF LIFE
Artscope Issues
BELOVED PORTRAITS
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
SMALL FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY
All the senses will trigger memory, but for many people, a visual image opens a locked door to personal history, often forgotten or detached from the routines and obligations of daily living. Gail Winbury’s extensive body of work currently at the Southern Vermont Arts Center is a powerhouse exhibit that explores the joys and struggles that we all experience as we add layer upon layer of history to the being that transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. The show, “The Girl Who Drew Memories,” invites the viewers to probe their own personal histories by interacting with the paintings, poetry and objects on display. Winbury was inspired by a close, immersive look into the details — the small fragments of memory — that have guided the events and choices of a narrative that is unique to her own life and yet capable of unlocking the repositories of the mind in her viewers. The … [Read more...] about SMALL FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
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
A CONTEMPORARY TAKE
Only 45 minutes beyond Portland, in Lewiston, Maine, a winter trekker will revel in two exhibitions at the Bates College Art Museum unique to its own holdings, on view through March 18. On the main floor, in conversation with Bates’s renowned Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection, Museum Director Dan Mills has brought together eight contemporary artists whose works illuminate the wide-ranging sensibility of this Modernist giant who styled himself the “Painter of Maine.” The lower gallery showcases the cream of a collection of contemporary photographic prints recently donated to Bates College by the well-known Maine photographer and philanthropist, Barbara Morris Goodbody. “And So Did Pleasure...” follows as an inspired second act to last year’s major Hartley exhibition at Bates. Each artist has selected one of Hartley’s drawings from the collection that speaks to their work and offers … [Read more...] about A CONTEMPORARY TAKE
WELCOME January/February 2023: FROM BRIAN GOSLOW
Welcome to our first issue of 2023! Our devoted Artscope Magazine staff have worked overtime throughout the holiday season to ensure we provided you with a strong selection of exhibitions for viewing over the next two months and artists to put on your must-investigate and must-see lists over the year ahead. We start with the Bates College Museum of Art that has two great exhibitions — “And So Did Pleasure Take the Hand of Sorrow and They Wandered Through the Land of Joy,” in which eight contemporary artists take the lead of Marsden Hartley and “Expressions of Compassion: Selections from the Barbara Morris Goodbody Photography Collection,” a show filling half the museum with photographs that, Elizabeth Michelman writes, was worth the trip up north to Lewiston, Maine from the Boston area. Rachel Portesi’s “Hair Portraits” have been making their way around New England — most recently at … [Read more...] about WELCOME January/February 2023: FROM BRIAN GOSLOW