Please join us iin celebrating the bew works by
Stephanie Danforth, Charles Gibbs & Jean Jack:
Artists' Reception Sunday, July 22nd from 5-7pm.
Artist Stephanie Danforth returns to the Field Gallery with her stunning oil paintings. Following a career in pediatrics, Stephanie now paints full time and every dollar she makes with her art goes directly to help provide education for children in need in Kenya. Stephanie says: "The desire to create lies within me. I am an exceptionally visual person and I love to paint my subjects close up and larger than life. I feel like it mimics my relationship with the world, light and dark, hard and soft, serious and playful. My passion for art resembles a quilt, each patch different. Textures, dimensions and bold colors, oil, gold leaf, watercolor, collage, metal, wood and found objects."
Sculptor Charles Gibbs returns to the Field Gallery with his collection of unique assemblages of mixed materials. Charles's sculptures bring wonder and delight to seemingly mundane materials. Charles is a self-taught artist, and has worked with metal since he was five years old. He has made sculpture for forty-five years, since he was in high school, and continues to explore new forms and techniques, with an emphasis on recycling junk metal. Charles has shown his work since 1993 and it is now in private collections throughout North America.
Painter Jean Jack debuts at the Field Gallery. A resident New Englander, Jean's oil paintings focus on the architecture of barns and other structures. In her new series of paintings, Jean Jack again takes the relationship between landscape and buildings as the initial departure point for the formal investigations of her paintings. The buildings fit themselves into the landscape, and the sky fills in the spaces between the two. In the traditional regionalist parlance, the way this triangle of specifics interrelates is called a 'sense of place'.
There is a poignant sense of unease and even loneliness in the places Jack paints, however, which is underscored by her dramatic contrasts of complementary colors, and her equally dramatic transitions between reality and unreality. Despite Jack's use of very real houses and churches as models, these are realistic paintings only in a sense. 'Idealistic' is perhaps a better word for the convincing power of the very simplified forms and colors. These bright, sensitive paintings are more of an exquisite arrangement of elements that express an essential feeling about houses in the country from California to Maine rather than a view out of a window.