Exhibitions
Exhibiting July 23 - October 16, 2011
Sabra Field - Vermont Artist, World Vision
Sabra Field is considered one of Vermont's most recognizable artists and one of America's most accomplished printmakers. Her iconic landscapes quietly symbolize the harmony that can exist between humanity and nature. Since 1969, Sabra has maintained her home and studio in East Barnard, Vermont. For more than 30 years Sabra Field has refined her skills of observation and cultivated an astonishing ability to recall images "collective shared images," of the Green Mountain State. Prints by Sabra Field have been the subject of over 50 one-person exhibitions since 1960, and have been included in numerous national and international juried exhibitions. She is well-known as the designer of the 1991 Vermont Bicentennial stamp for the United States Postal Service. Sabra now prints using digital inkjet technology, typically called a gicle (g-clay). Gicles are printed digitally from her original woodblock images. Sabra has been named an Extraordinary Vermonter (1991) and received the 1999 Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. She has also been named a "Living Treasure" by the Shelburne Crafts School in 2000 and was one of two awarded the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum Medal for the Arts (2001). Middlebury College, Sabra's alma mater, has a collection of every piece that she has ever printed. She has been awarded Middlebury College's Alumni Achievement Award and an Honorary Doctorate.
Elizabeth Torak - The Feast of Venus I: An Exploration of the Artist's Process
One of the foremost figure painters of the day, Elizabeth Torak lives in Pawlet, Vermont, with her husband and fellow painter Thomas Torak. A multi-award-winning artist, her oil paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the country. "The Artist's Process" is an invitation to explore the mind of the artist at work. The exhibit centers around a large figure painting, "The Feast of Venus I" and includes most of the drawings and oil studies that went into its development. A common theme during the Renaissance, paintings of The Feast of Venus typically depict a voluptuous goddess, surrounded by dozens, sometimes hundreds, of frolicking infants. In her more contemporary interpretation, Torak's painting becomes a celebration of women, a consideration of the relationship between women and food, as well as a meditation on the mystery of creativity. The painting is also, in some important ways, a reflection of Torak's relationship to the history of painting, what she sees as the flow of life and time, and is inspired by many artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Velasquez, and Vermeer "who paint a quotidian world and yet you feel a mystical structure underlying it."
In the Museum Entry Gallery: The sculpture of Duncan Johnson, John Kemp Lee, and Gary Haven Smith
This exhibition features the work of three of the region's most accomplished contemporary sculptors working in predominantly abstract styles. Each of the artists has frequently exhibited throughout the region and nationally, and their work is represented in numerous private and public collections.Each artist is also featured separately in one person exhibitions in Yester House Galleries during the 2011 summer season. This is their first exhibit at the Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum.
Duncan Johnson is a Vermont artist whose work has evolved from the three dimensional to the two dimensional form. Taking discarded bits of wood found in landfills and construction sites in Vermont, he painstakingly prepares the boards by cutting them into thin strips taking care to preserve the patinas of the weathered surfaces before attaching them to panels with a series of fine nails laid along delicate grids like pencil lines. The grid like paintings that result contain aspects of sculpture, drawing and painting referencing many of the artist's interests from quilting to architecture.
John Kemp Lee is a Vermont artist who is Adjunct Professor of Art at Dartmouth College. Although predominantly abstract, his work contains elements that are more figurative and symbolic and that address aspects of the human condition . "The objects that I make, be they wall reliefs, drawings or free standing sculptures are always concerned with the Distance Between. How close do we hold our loved ones, how strongly do we embrace the philosophies that guide us, what separates us from true contentment, what exactly is that moment when life turns into death?"
Gary Haven Smith is a New Hampshire artist who creates both monumental free standing pieces, and smaller, lighter sculptures as well as wall pieces which combine elements of drawing, painting and sculpture. If the artist Kemp Lee is drawn by what he calls " The Distance Between" and Duncan Johnson is attracted to the combinations of imperfection that make the perfect whole, Gary Haven Smith's interest lies in the creation of a balance between " what is and what is not." He often chooses materials and designs that "are reflections on past cultures that continue to live for me" and which provide a vantage point for our present technological age.