Beyond Boundaries: Exploring Different Worlds
Participating Artists: Mary Ann Glass, Amy Silberkleit, Regina Quinn, Lois Walsh
Mary Ann Glass
Mary Ann's work has been described as spiritual and sensual, serious and elegant. She enjoys experimenting with a wide range of medium from acrylic to watercolor. digital to infrared photography, manipulated Polaroids, solarized etching plates, encaustics, cyanotypes and other mixed media. Her focus now is on iPhoneography, and she has been teaching the phone apps to students for several years.
Amy Silberkleit
Amy's work explores the visible effects of natural forces on objects and scenes. Clouds form and reform, roads and fields recede into the distance. The sun’s light and heat change the look of our world dramatically between dawn and dusk, winter and summer. She selects an object or scene that will be interesting to draw. She then composes the subject and draws it, making hundreds of decisions regarding degree of detail, intensity of shading, what elements to emphasize and which to obscure or leave out entirely.
She feels at home in the woods. Forms in nature are beautiful, and when she comes across a scene that has some quality that makes it resonate with a deeper feeling, she wants to spend more time in it. A familiar trail is transformed by snow, or late afternoon sunlight, or dramatic clouds, into a scene that transcends the familiar and makes it worth celebrating. By drawing it she calls attention to the magic inherent in a prosaic scene when the light is just right. Drawing takes several weeks, during which time I’m reliving that moment and focusing on the elements that made it special.
The drawings are made with a sharpened lithography crayon on a prepared limestone block. Lithography stones are her favorite surface for drawing. The fine, even grain makes stone the perfect medium for highly detailed representational art. This texture allows her to produce a wide range of distinctly different tones. She can tone clouds to look heavy or light, and pick out details in bark that make its texture palpable.
The stones are reused: after an edition is printed, the image is ground off and the stone is ready for a new drawing.
Regina Quinn
The elegance of a fallen leaf on the forest floor, the eerie glow as morning fog lifts, the dynamic tension between abstraction and naturalism – these are the inspirations for Regina Quinn’s encaustic and oil paintings. A New York City native, Regina divides her time between New York’s Catskill Mountains and the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont where her work is influenced by the stark winters, lush springs, exuberant summers and vibrant autumns. Working in encaustics, she builds transparent and opaque layers, scrapes and scratches and incises to reveal and obscure, working towards the sense of awe and wonder she experiences daily in the natural world.
Regina holds a Special Studies in Fine Arts bachelor’s degree from Trinity College where she received the Peyser Art Award, first prize and a master’s degree in Educational Leadership from the University of Vermont. She has designed and painted sets for several Lyric Theater productions at Burlington, Vermont’s Flynn Theater for the Performing Arts and has worked as a muralist, graphic designer, and educator for 35 years. Regina is dedicated to sparking students’ creativity, innovation, and passion for environmental stewardship.
Lois Walsh
The beauty of the colors is what draws us at first into these pictures. Then, subtle compositions hold our attention while mysterious narratives invite lingering.
My work is inspired by specific 17th and 18th-century French paintings. The relationship between the figures and nature attracts me to these painters, as well as the representation of a dreamlike setting. In the 18th century, Watteau and Fragonard painted a world of pleasure and love but with the certainty that all pleasures are transient. My paintings address the mystery of the relationship between the figures and nature and the essence of this harmony – the narratives invite interpretation while the expressive painterly gestures evoke sensation. Sometimes there are hints of anxious energy bubbling up, and a surreal, dreamlike strangeness charges these Arcadian visions with a sense of mystery tinged with delight and foreboding.
Figures inhabiting interior spaces from the early modern period have inspired new series. Themes of meditative solitude and contemplation are represented, and the charm of intimate, personal spaces – dreamlike spaces of the imagination.
