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April 2-27, 2019
Nancy Meagher and Margaret Jean Taylor
WIND TREES WATER
OPENING / Amherst Arts Night Plus: First Thursday, April 2, 5-8 pm
Forum / Artists In Community: Third Thursday, April 25, 7:30 pm
Exhibiting artists will talk about their work, inviting questions and comments from the audience.
Free and open to the public.
The Forum, Artists In Community, is supported in part by a grant from the Amherst Cultural Council,
a local agency, supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
Puffers Pond in Snow, Nancy Meagher
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Shoal Creek, Margaret Jean Taylor
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Nancy Meagher: WIND TREES WATER
Armed with tubes of richly pigmented oil paints, sharp palette knives, and poetry, Amherst artist Nancy Meagher confronts a season of grief through her exploration of the internal and external environment surrounding two local ponds. Her paintings loom large, some spanning 48” x 36” on canvases scaled “large enough to step into," as the artist says.
Meagher’s paintings aim to envelop the viewer in a setting offering emotional osmosis between the internal and the external landscape. At Puffer’s Pond, she recalls, a thunderous crack in the sky above brought down a tree limb the size of a truck. To her right, she found further inspiration in a small stream that poured itself under the road bridge to reemerge as a frothy, larger, luminous green river.
At Leverett Pond, Meagher noted cream-colored reeds standing knee deep in the cold water, as if awaiting adventure, with leafless Sumacs lined up behind them. “I tucked myself amongst the thorny brambles and waited, too,” she explains. “It was a picture perfect day for grief – cold, desolate, the first snow, and with a wind determined to attract attention.”
Margaret Jean Taylor: FORM SHADOWS LIGHT
Amherst artist Margaret Jean Taylor will exhibit drawings, prints, and paintings focusing on images of tree forms defined by light and shadow, selected from her work over six decades.