Gallery 34

A contemporary art gallery at 34 Main Street in Brattleboro, Vermont. A new show opens on the first of every month for Gallery Walk. Enjoy the artwork in person or here online. 

December 2021: Orly Hasbani

Orly Hasbani is an elementary school teacher in Brattleboro. She grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Vermont for most of her adult life. Her first job ever was helping a sculptor to cover chicken wire sculptures with papier mâché. Orly enjoyed art as a child, drawing and painting through high school, but didn’t do much other than doodling after that. Ten years ago, she forced her two children to share a bedroom in order to free up room to paint. She began painting more when she started taking studio classes at River Gallery School five years ago.

Orly paints still lifes, landscapes, and figures in oils. She takes inspiration from the hills and rivers of Vermont and the salt marshes and ocean of Martha’s Vineyard. She tries to capture the shapes made by everyday objects, noticing patterns, and how light and shadow play upon those objects. Her paintings are an exploration of mark-making and color.

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See more of Orly's work

November 2021: Eileen McVay-Lively

Lying in the cool grass, clouds floating by. As certain as the sky is blue, Eileen McVay-Lively knew that she would always need to be creative.

McVay-Lively’s work spans a range of media, with sewing as the creative thread. Her artistic pursuits are guided by what moves her in the moment. For the artist, the exhilaration of each new project is palpable and presents an opportunity to push creative boundaries beyond the finished piece before.

McVay-Lively served as Director of Fiber Arts for the Long Island Craft Guild in New York, where she curated gallery exhibitions, produced fashion shows and developed programs in the textile arts. An invitation to be the first Artist in Residence at Rowe Conference Center brought her to western Massachusetts. Her work has been featured in many gallery exhibitions in New York and New England.

The artist’s journey continues to be an adventurous one, taking winding roads in many different directions. Still, McVay-Lively marvels that she always seems to land where she needs to be—right here in the moment.

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October 2021: Amanda Barrow

Amanda Barrow was raised in the Mid-west by a social worker and an Episcopalian priest, in an environment conducive to creativity and abstract thinking. In 1992, a Fulbright research grant provided an opportunity for her to live and work in India for 13 months. She has returned to India many times since then, funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Boston Cultural Council, and a host of other institutions. At present, she lives/works in Massachusetts, New York and Maine. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Boston and New York Public Libraries, and the Museum of the Book in the Netherlands, among numerous other places around the world.

Recent travels in Asia, Europe, and New Zealand have enhanced my personal vision, leading me to dig deeper into the indigenous spiritual ambiance of the East in my artwork. Synthesizing these Eastern concepts with the Western visual language of my upbringing is my intention. I experiment with transparency and explore the inherent structure of my chosen medium. The resulting work presents a broad range of abstractions that utilize nature, architecture and the human body as my primary sources of inspiration.

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See more of Amanda's work

 

September 2021: David Graham

David Graham is a farmer, educator, and artist in Orange, Massachusetts. His art is inspired by the scenes of animals, children, and nature at The Farm School where he has worked for 10 years.

David creates mixed media two-dimensional work with vibrant color, often depicting real moments from his life on the farm. Art making deepens his experience of his farm work and is also a daily, necessary respite. Mark-making, creating patterns, and color-play all come into his exploration of interactions with fellow farmers, young visiting students, and his beloved farm animals.

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See more of David's work

 

 

 

 

August 2021: Greg Moschetti

I came to painting relatively late in life and find significant joy in the creative process and its outcomes. I feel that painting is a spiritual process and that the role of the artist is to elicit the same sense of spirit in the viewer as was felt by the artist in creating a work. This is not a new notion. George Inness and the tonalist painters of the late 19th century clearly painted in this context.

Few of my paintings are of places that exist in real life. Rather, they are created from atmospheric landscapes remembered or imagined. However, they often have a sense of familiarity about them and, when successful, draw the viewer into a spiritual feeling of peaceful solitude. Initially, these most often involved landscapes with nearby water with sky reflections and distant horizon views. Many are at day’s beginning or end and at change of seasons.

More recently, I’ve turned to simpler paintings of land masses at sea, some quite colorful and others using a primarily gray palette. For me these paintings still have the feel of solitude and spiritual portent although they are visually quite different. This series started in the studio, but was later inspired by trips to Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and Newfoundland where the stark contrasts of stone, water and sky captured my imagination.

I am primarily self-taught. I’ve studied with Dennis Sheehan, America’s foremost tonalist painter, and with Jason Alden at the River Gallery School and The Drawing Studio in Brattleboro. I’ve been most strongly influenced by the 19th century tonalist painters, especially Inness, Crane, Murphy, Twachtman and Wyant.

My work has been exhibited at various venues in the greater Brattleboro area including Vermont Artisans, Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, Windham Wines, Cooley-Dickinson Hospital, and others. I’m a member of Brattleboro West Arts—a group of artists living and practicing in and around West Brattleboro.

I hope these paintings evoke the joy in you that I found in making them.

 

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July 2021: Cindy Glover

Cindy Glover grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, spending long childhood summers and many winter weekends in her family’s tiny cabin on Ames Hill in Marlboro, Vermont. Cindy earned a BFA in Furniture Design from Rhode Island School of Design, and several years after her graduation, took up oil painting. In 2013, after eight years of living and working overseas, Cindy permanently relocated to Vermont. She is a regular participant in the Adult Studio classes at RGS, and completed her first residency at the Vermont Studio Center last summer, focusing on the series of paintings for this show.

Her position with an international architectural firm took her to live and work in cities in Europe and Asia. Her first, and perhaps most significant, overseas assignment sent her to Macau, China in 2006. While she lived in the former Portuguese colony for less than a year, its mark on her has been indelible. This show, “Memories of Macau,” is a visual journal of her experience there –- a personal record of an unforgettable place and time.

 

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June 2021: Kate Spencer 

“The Valley and Beyond”

The painting finds me. Sometimes I see a new work when I’m walking; sometimes an interesting face must be put to the brush, sometimes colors explode in a dream. I am a wanderer as I mix up themes and subjects, eliminating detail and working toward the abstract. The feeling of heavy paint on a big brush fills me with excitement. I am bold and brash as I paint.

In the words of the Bard, all the world is my stage. Flowers from the garden and family crockery or duck decoys are set-ups for still lifes. A friend poses for me. Landscapes emerge from my imagination and from memories in my photos. I study the great artists in museums and books. Most recently I am discovering the Abstract Impressionist women — de Kooning, Mitchell, Hartigan, Krasner and Frankenthaler. Richard Diebenkorn and Tom Thompson are my current go-to’s for ideas and problem solving, and I continue to learn from my friends Eric Aho and Chris Benson.

Color comes to me naturally — I take lessons from what I see. I grew up in Montana, watching the ever-changing, never ending sky, the golden wheat fields, and yes, the purple mountains majesty. Sunsets filled with prairie dust radiated reds and yellows, pinks and oranges that if captured by a brush other than Charlie Russell’s seem false and garish. Looking sixty miles to the west to the Rockies, ochre and rich brown graduate into lavender and azure. These are the colors in my bones. New England is too green, so I search for shady mountain paths or deep cricks of black water. Then I wait for winter to come with her blue whites and luscious grays.

As a friend once wrote, “Spencer brings big skies and Western color schemes to her oil paintings. She is unromantic in her compositions, juxtaposing the wild elements of nature and the objects of civilization. Her paintings are at once real and dreamy, rendered by a loose brush and a keen observation of how the spirit of the land intersects with the material world she sees.”

I invite you to enter my vistas as I explore atmosphere and push the boundaries of the painting on my canvas.

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February 2021: Alyssa Schmidt

 

  

 

Alyssa Schmidt grew up in Northeast Ohio, and graduated with a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2003 where she majored in Painting. She was selected to attend the esteemed Yale/Norfolk summer painting program while still a student at CIA, and in 2004 she received a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA for Painting. She has had residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and the Outer Cape Artists-in-Residency Consortium in a dune shack in the National Seashore. Alyssa lives and works in Brookline, Vermont.

 

          

 

January 2021: Joshua Pincus

      

     

These paintings were made with acrylic paint on hand-stretched canvas. Each color is hand mixed, and glazes, gels, and pastes are heavily featured.

I am most interested in creating blocks of semi-translucent colors, in overlapping those blocks to develop a depth of color between them, and in the ratios of sizes among the color blocks and in relation to the canvas dimensions. I have not been depicting or representing any objects but rather aiming to develop a depth within the canvas that fosters an interesting relationship between fields of color, empty space, and color upon color. Though there are some brush textures apparent in the work, my goal is to produce a totally smooth surface under which color blocks float amongst each other.

This work is primarily focused on my interest in color, and to a lesser extent on shapes and size ratios. I have committed to using the simplest shapes, depicted with hard edges, to keep the attention on layers of color and depth. My focus has been on the foundational elements of the visual field, so my goal has been to work as closely as I can with only color, shape, and ratio.

I also conceive of these pieces as complete objects of art, so I strive to be conscious of every aspect of this work. This includes the construction of the frame, the stretching and preparation of the canvas, and the work itself.

 

December 2020: Rebecca Gembarowski

 

Dance was the art form that I had my first formal training in, however, I have always made things. As a young adult I studied ceramics and continued to be focused on dance. In my late twenties, I entered college with the intention of exploring and learning about painting and sculpture. After struggling for two and a half years, I realized I felt disconnected from the process, and returned to dance in my remaining time there. Interestingly, my study of visual art changed my experience of dance as I began to view dance through an external lens instead of solely as the medium for someone else’s choreography. I began to see the stage as a huge moving canvas with sets, lights, costumes, and dancers becoming my palette and medium. 

 

It wasn’t until several years later, in a sequencing workshop with Lydia Thompson, that I reconnected with my curiosity about and love for painting. I found River Gallery School’s philosophy and approach to making in tune with my own process, and soon enrolled in an encaustic class. Two years ago, I found a studio space where I can make and leave a mess, and work for a few uninterrupted hours a week. In that sanctuary of a space, I have been working in oil and cold wax, and encaustic. 

 

The “Lifelines #1-#4” paintings I started at the beginning of the covid19 lockdown. I was inspired by the idea that even though we were isolated from one another, we were still finding ways to stay connected. I painted these on one large sheet of paper, taped off into four separate sections but allowing mark making and lines to cross over. It was after an online workshop with Lisa Pressman, (another surprising outcome of the pandemic, I don’t think I would have had the courage to take an in-person class with her), that I cut the sections apart and went back into them, finishing them one at a time. 

 

The other six pieces were started during that workshop as well. Lisa’s approach felt very intuitive to me and inspired/reminded me to be curious about what was emerging as the painting developed. Her mantra as we were beginning was “You are not making a painting yet; you are building a surface.” It freed me from planning and allowed intuitive application of paint and medium to the surface over several days. Eventually, something would start to emerge that I was inclined to follow. Like the “Lifelines” series, these paintings are also informed by life during these strange times. During the process of painting, I am aware of feelings of stress, fear, and worry, but as I continue to add layers, something else begins to emerge as well; my sense of hope, my feeling of connection to others, and my immense gratitude. As difficult as this time has been, gratitude is the feeling I experience most often. Sometimes it is only for a moment, but I am awed that it appears in some way every day, and leaves no space for taking anything for granted.  

  

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