Upcoming Show • April 2 to May 2, 2020
VISION
Hand-made Books by Laura Holland
Prints and Paintings by Janet Walerstein Winston
Opening / Amherst Arts Night Plus: First Thursday, April 2, 5-8:00 pm
Forum / Artists In Community: Third Thursday, April 16, 7:30 pm
In VISION, at Gallery A3 in April, Laura Holland makes unfolding accordion books with photographs to capture and convey visual effects of deteriorating eyesight, while Janet Walerstein Winston looks up, down, and across the horizon to interpret beauty in the land and in constantly changing colors, weather, and movement in oil paintings and monotype prints.
“The horizontal sequences of images in hand-made accordion books are ideal for story-telling,” says Holland. “My current story reflects coming to terms, in artwork, with challenges posed by new limitations in my vision.” Sight After Surgery traces her rediscovery of color after cataract surgery, starting with the shadowy double vision of overlapping gray silhouettes and ending with a burst of brilliant hues. In Unexpected, joy in rediscovered color perception is tempered by the loss of peripheral vision due to glaucoma. “With severely reduced peripheral vision, things seem to pop out of nowhere,” Holland says. “I am surprised, and sometimes un-nerved, by what suddenly surrounds me.” And in Mushroom Landscapes, she recreates some of the visual effects of astigmatism with central panels that flip back and forth from side to side within the accordion book structure.
Turning her gaze up to the sky and down into the earth, Winston makes large paintings and monotypes based on water holes in the Yucatan, views along the Connecticut River, and distant thunder clouds in the Southwest of the United States. “The importance of the sun and stars in the Mayan culture and cosmology influenced some of my monotypes. The Yucatan geology of porous limestone earth, which has beautiful, clear aqua water-filled sinkholes, piqued my interest for the paintings Cenote I and Cenote II,” she explains. Light, shadow, shifting colors, and the beauty in unusual geography are major inspirations for her art. “From an intimate miniature scale to the far view of magnificent mountains, Nature can swell my heart,” Winston says. “I combine organic shapes from nature with geometric lines from architecture, using loose brushstrokes and mark making in my paintings.”
At an Artists in Community Forum on Thursday, April 16, at 7:30 pm, Holland and Winston will talk about their work in the gallery and invite conversation and questions. This program is supported in part by a grant from the Amherst Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
“The horizontal sequences of images in hand-made accordion books are ideal for story-telling,” says Holland. “My current story reflects coming to terms, in artwork, with challenges posed by new limitations in my vision.” Sight After Surgery traces her rediscovery of color after cataract surgery, starting with the shadowy double vision of overlapping gray silhouettes and ending with a burst of brilliant hues. In Unexpected, joy in rediscovered color perception is tempered by the loss of peripheral vision due to glaucoma. “With severely reduced peripheral vision, things seem to pop out of nowhere,” Holland says. “I am surprised, and sometimes un-nerved, by what suddenly surrounds me.” And in Mushroom Landscapes, she recreates some of the visual effects of astigmatism with central panels that flip back and forth from side to side within the accordion book structure.
Turning her gaze up to the sky and down into the earth, Winston makes large paintings and monotypes based on water holes in the Yucatan, views along the Connecticut River, and distant thunder clouds in the Southwest of the United States. “The importance of the sun and stars in the Mayan culture and cosmology influenced some of my monotypes. The Yucatan geology of porous limestone earth, which has beautiful, clear aqua water-filled sinkholes, piqued my interest for the paintings Cenote I and Cenote II,” she explains. Light, shadow, shifting colors, and the beauty in unusual geography are major inspirations for her art. “From an intimate miniature scale to the far view of magnificent mountains, Nature can swell my heart,” Winston says. “I combine organic shapes from nature with geometric lines from architecture, using loose brushstrokes and mark making in my paintings.”
At an Artists in Community Forum on Thursday, April 16, at 7:30 pm, Holland and Winston will talk about their work in the gallery and invite conversation and questions. This program is supported in part by a grant from the Amherst Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
Click for larger images (from top left):
Diminution, oil on panel, Janet Walerstein Winston
Cenote 2, oil on canvas, Janet Walerstein Winston
Unexpected (detail), photograph, Laura Holland
Sight After Surgery, accordion book with photographs, Laura Holland
Diminution, oil on panel, Janet Walerstein Winston
Cenote 2, oil on canvas, Janet Walerstein Winston
Unexpected (detail), photograph, Laura Holland
Sight After Surgery, accordion book with photographs, Laura Holland