A show to linger with you through the Fall

Join us for our final exhibition of the season, featuring some of our most popular artists as well as new faces.

Tjasa Owen’s work is inspired by her global travels, her love for coastal and inland landscapes and by her colorful sketchbooks and written correspondence. During her foreign travels and time away from the studio, she photographs, sketches and captures landscape details and textures to bring home to the studio. She is interested in creating views that feel shared and remembered, as though torn from the pages of a scrapbook. She sometimes writes postscripts and incomplete phrases from her journals or sketchbooks on the canvas, to imbue these new places with a sense of time and history. She likens her process to conjuring a landscape postcard in her head and  reproducing it on canvas. By adding a thought in words on the bottom of the canvas and sometimes an ink stamp, she is sending it back into the world. By making paintings that feel like correspondence, Tjasa invites viewers to invent their own stories about the places she creates in her work.

Jeff Schaller defines his oeuvre with uniquely sophisticated compositions. Provocative and whimsical, Schaller propels the viewer into scenes of seemingly unrelated subjects, his own captivating and complex sonatas. Simultaneously, they are pop and edgy, esoteric and direct. Using encaustic paints, a combinations of hot beeswax and pigment, Schaller uses lost and found images, words and language, to paint with a precision and intricacy not normally found in encaustic paintings. His approach is expressionistic, contemporary, and painterly, with powerful brush strokes that are set instantaneously. 

Olga Antonova’s skill in portraiture is applied to her still life paintings. Beneath her brush, technically “inanimate” objects come alive with a vibrancy and depth of character that make a viewer want to know their history. Each curve of kettle or teacup rounds the bend, just out of sight, beckoning us nearer. In many of her paintings, Antonova employs the old masters’ technique of curved reflections. Light bounces off rounded metal and glazed porcelain capturing and distorting reflections of nearby surfaces and distant windows. This interplay of matte and gloss surfaces, direct views and bowed reflections make every painting a charming opportunity for new discoveries.

Elizabeth Washburn, another artist working in encaustic, takes a more abstract approach to her subject matter. Thickly developed surfaces blend realism and abstracted elements to create a painting alive with spontaneity and texture. Trees and mailboxes literally melt into geometric blocks of color. Sections of transparent wax reveal the under-painting in a way impossible with more traditional oil painting techniques.

Please join us Saturday, September 3th from 6 - 8 pm. Music will be provided by Mike Benjamin.

Featuring the paintings of Carol Bennet, Jylian Gustlin, and Sherri Belassen, this exhibition will feature brightly colored figurative painting.

Carol Bennett paints the world below the surface.  Through the extensive use of multiple layers of paint and varnish, she illuminates a view of the swimmer below the picture plane and out of sight. Her paintings capture the fluid, weightless feeling we all experience when we are swimming. As onlookers and not the subject, we can relish in the swirls and eddies created by the body moving through the water and admire the light as it dances across the form and catches the reflections.

Figures strike a pose in the mixed media paintings of Jylian Gustlin.  A blend of paint, metal leaf, crayon, and other mediums, lies just below a surface of crystal clear epoxy resin.  The apparent looseness and randomness of her paintings belie her fascination with mathematics.  Using the Fibonacci sequence: 1,2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on, she envisions a world of figures built out of rectangles and shell spirals. Bright reds, yellows, blues, and oranges are used to create her forms.

Sherri Bellasen’s painting may have a slightly aboriginal feel, but the paintings are all California.  Mosaics of bright color and pattern collide against a backdrop of simple geometry. Surfers stand at the end of the canvas pointing out to the sea.  Figures lounge in a hammock, their abstracted forms slicing the canvas in two.  Flowers flatten against the picture plane, their petals collaged into being.


Please join us Thursday, August 11th from 6-8 pm. Music will be provided by Afro Beat Project with Tom Major and Yvan Agbo.

The second Edgartown Gallery stroll will be a one-man exhibition for marine painter Michel Brosseau.  His exquisite paintings draw on the Vineyard’s nautical heritage and culture. He captures the folds of the sail cloth and the sway and dart of the rigging as wind billows topsails and passes shadows back and forth.  Oyster boats sit, patiently waiting for their owners to push them off the beach and back into the water. Tub boats idle in the harbor, slowly rusting, yearning to be returned to service. Furrowed sails are drenched in warm summer light, which infuses the canvas from behind and renders it almost translucent. Buoys stack up against a Menemsha fishing shack, drying in the sun, their distinct markings a tapestry of color.
 
Please join us Thursday July 28th, from 6-8 pm for this remarkable show.  Music will be provided by Jeremy Berlin.

This exhibition will be about the joy and humor in everyday life.

Cheri’s paintings have often been described as juicy and  spontaneous.  She is inspired by the simple, everyday interaction of animals in their environment; the way that light dances across the form, the harmony of color relationships, and the shapes of light and shadow.” As if illuminated from behind, the animals she paints leap from the canvas and inhabit our world.

 From an early fascination with horses to career spent painting them, Jill Soukup’s work is defined by lush surfaces and an expressive painterly style.  With an eye for color and composition, her paintings have a fluid organic quality reflective of the nature around her.

 It’s not the “farm” “but the “fresh” that inhabit the paintings of Fred Calleri. The characters in his paintings revel in the lighter side of life. Luminous surfaces and saturated colors are the tools he uses to make his paintings sparkle with wit and humor.

 Please join us Thursday, July 14th from 6-8 pm. Music will be provided by Mike Benjamin, and our cocktail of choice is a surprise…

11th Annual Memorial Day Gala!

Rebecca’s paintings featured lush textures and vibrant colors.  Working with a palette knife she layers her canvas’ with joyous paint.  Her subject matter often includes children in various states of activity and play.  They speak to the small events,  feelings, and triumphs which are part of our daily world .

Jonathan paintings feature architectural references from around the world.  In the presence of these, often larger than life spaces, he looks for confined, intriguing perspectives that best represent the physical and ethereal aspects of a space.  

Eric’s paintings a rich nuanced perspective to his subject matter, the landscape. Drawing on life’s experiences, he allows the subject of each painting to evolve as he works on the canvas.

The opening will feature the music of local bluegrass band "Ballyhoo".