Time Amongst Trees

At THE PARSONAGE Contemporary Art • 8 Elm Street, Searsport, Maine

Reception on March 16, 2024 at 2pm

Saturday, March 16, 2024 11:00 AM through Sunday, April 28, 2024 6:00 PM

This exhibition weaves together two series of work, which each aim to explore my relationship with the Maine landscape through non-rectilinear paintings.  We live in a circle, not in a line, and I want to evoke both the winding paths we take through the forest and through life itself.  Through round and oblong forms, I seek to draw the viewer into the landscape and the wonderment I encounter within it.

Because I paint only in the studio, I find my work takes on an other-worldly quality, including multiple points of view and access routes within the painting itself.  I seek fidelity in my palette, but to feelings evoked for me by the landscape rather than colors as the camera would capture them.  I invite you to “Hear with your eyes, see with your ears,” as the jazz musician Charlie Parker put it.

 My tondos—a round format made famous by Renaissance painters—belong to my ongoing Shape of Land, Shape of Water series.  They are rooted in locations I have been to and continue to explore in Maine, but they have evolved and taken on new life in my imagination, and hopefully in yours.

 The abstract suspended pendants emerged from a recent installation created with Allegra Kuhn at The Stover Preserve in Belfast, Maine in 2023 where we adorned trees with these pieces for three weeks. We imagine these pendants as jewelry made in honor of the inhabitants of the preserve.  Together, I hope these works transform the gallery into a sacred, verdant space, inseparable from the landscape that surrounds us.