Farm on Intervale Road, wood engraving





September 4th Lineup for Stonington Galleries First Friday Open Gallery Night

Stonington. The galleries and studios of Stonington will once again hang their orange banners for September’s First Friday Open Gallery Night, from 4 to 7 on September 4th. The public is invited to see artist demonstrations and meet the artists at opening receptions for shows featuring new work.

Book artist Anne-Claude Cotty will give a demo on pinhole cameras in her studio gallery at 65 N Main Street at 5 p.m. Currently on the faculty at Haystack teaching a workshop entitled, "Poetry through a Pinhole", she will discuss some of the joys and secrets of low-tech photography in a digital age. Pinhole mementos will be offered to all visiting the gallery on Friday.

Anne-Claude Cotty, Pier, artist book with letterpress poem & pinhole photographs

Continuing south on Route 15, visitors to the Geoffrey Warner Studio can check-out finely-crafted furniture and paintings of local scenes, along with slides on the craft of restoring Willow, a 50 year-old classic sailboat.

The Seasons of Stonington features ceramics, paintings, photography and metals by ten artists, inclucing locals Marcia Kola, Lorraine Lans and Herman Kidder. Just up North Seabreeze Avenue, the Lorraine Lans Studio will feature “Docks and Rocks,” plein aire paintings of Stonington Harbor docks and ledges. At the east end of Main Street, Hoy Gallery’s new show is called “Waterfront: Working & Wild”.

On Main Street, the gWatson Gallery will have an opening reception for a show of new paintings by Nancy Morgan Barnes, while Isalos Fine Art has an opening for new paintings by Barbara Brady, Carolyn Caldwell and Rebecca Daugherty.

Brochures with maps are available at all participating galleries and studios. For more information, go to stoningtongalleries.com, or call 367-2699 or 367-2700.

Eugene Koch, Sweet Sea, scored acrylic, oil, 24" x 24"

Eugene Koch’s Lines of Sight at Isalos

Lines of Sight, new work by Eugene Koch will show at Isalos Fine Art through September 3rd.

In his studio atop Russ Hill in Stonington, Eugene Koch has created art for over twenty years. During that time, his work has taken various forms, but his improvisational and intuitive process has been a constant, as has his preoccupation with using lines as mantra, a repetition intended to clear the mind as one passes into a contemplative state. In this show, Koch created lines either by scratching into acrylic panels or wrapping fishing line around panels, creating varying degrees of translucency that suggest water surfaces and fog. The largest, “Fogbound #2” uses over three miles of fishing line.

Isalos Hosts Opera House Arts 10th Anniversary Show

An exhibition celebrating Opera House Arts’ tenth anniversary will be on display at Isalos Fine Art in Stonington from August 7th through 20th. An artist’s reception will take place in conjunction with Stonington Galleries First Friday Open Gallery Night on August 7, from 4 to 7 p.m.

The show features work by 21 artists, offering meditations on the Opera House and its place in the community. The artists took widely different approaches, suggesting not only their diverse talents, but also the varied role of the Opera House in their lives. Some pieces celebrate particular performances, like the Shakespearean plays or Quarryography, while the more conceptual works explore the network of community activity inspired by those performances. The show is accompanied by a 28-page catalog, featuring a monograph by Alicia Anstead.

Isalos Fine Art is at 26 Main Street in Stonington, and is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 - 5.

Stanley Bielen, 2009, Forsythia Sprigs, 8x5.5"

Oil on prepared paper

Stanley Bielen’s small still life paintings have been compared to the slightly abstracted still life’s of Edouard Manet. The paintings are loose, brush interpretations of the subject matter rather than attempts at photographic realism. Bielen is masterful in capturing the dramatic half-light, while employing loose strokes of translucent color from his simple yet seductive palette.

Bielen’s work is part of the collections of the Hirshorn Museum, CBS Television and Goldman Sachs. He has exhibited his work in galleries in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

An opening reception for the artist will be held on Friday, August 7 from 5 to 7 PM.
Gallery hours: Monday – Saturday, 10 AM to 5 PM, Sunday – 1 to 5 PM.

Siri Beckman, Bobolinks, wood engraving

At 4 p.m., printmaker Siri Beckman (banner #8) will demonstrate the art of wood engraving in her studio at 115 Airport Road. She is long known for her prints depicting Maine life. But her work also reflects the western splendor of national parks where she worked as artist-in-residence. She has been on the faculty at Haystack and the University of Maine.

Isalos Fine Art (banner #7), which faces the harbor on Main Street, will host the Opera House Arts' 10th Anniversary Exhibition featuring tributes to the life of Stonington's venerable cultural institution by 21 artists.

A few doors down the street at the gWatson Gallery (banner #6), a reception will also be held for Stanley Bielen, a still life painter from Philadelphia.

At 5 p.m., Jill Hoy (banner #5) will focus her talk on porches and pathways and how she uses them in her paintings.

Around the corner and up the N Seabreeze Avenue hill, Lorraine Lans (banner #4) will feature a group of plein air paintings of Monhegan Island this past spring "during and after the fog rolled in", as she puts it.

At The Seasons of Stonington (banner #3), the public will taste fine wines while enjoying the newly renovated gallery of fine art and crafts by Maine artists.

Half a mile north on Rt. 15, Geoffrey Warner Studio (banner #2) invites visitors to view innovative designs in handmade furniture (the owl stool, for example) and the restoration ofWillow, a classic wooden sailboat soon to be launched and chartered.

Next door (almost), at banner #1 you will find Anne-Claude Cotty's shadow boxes where pinhole photographs serve as backdrops for tiny figures in scenes of daily life along the Maine coast...clamdigging, plein air painting, flying kites.

Stonington Galleries First Fridays are held through October. A map and full-color brochure is available at area businesses and by visiting stoningtongalleries.com where you will find news of events and links to the individual galleries. For more information, call 367-2699 or 367-2700.

Lorraine Lans, Monhegan Headland, oil

For the August 7th Gallery Walk, plein aire painter Lorraine Lans presents over a dozen landscape paintings of Monhegan Island seen in sun, fog, cloudy and hazy days. She has painted on Monhegan every year for the last 15 years studying the light effects of the headlands.

The gWatson Gallery is presenting the Greg Abate Quartet in concert on Wednesday, August 19, 2009 in the Gallery at 68 Main Street, Stonington, Maine.

Greg Abate will be playing in Stonington following a summer tour of European jazz festivals. Abate is a saxophonist, flutist, composer and educator who performs 150 days a year in concerts and clubs around the globe. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, Abate played lead alto in the Ray Charles Orchestra after Berklee. Leaving the Charles band, he formed his own group, Channel One. He later played tenor sax in the revived Artie Shaw Orchestra under the leadership of Dick Johnson.

Abate recorded his first CD live at Birdland in New York City in 1991. Since then he has been a leader on fourteen recordings including EVOLUTION, which was nominated for a Grammy in 2004. Abate is most frequently described as a post hard bop musician but his music transverses a wide spectrum of modern jazz. His musical style is a distillation of swing’s easygoing vibe and bop’s more animated groove; his voice is unique.

Greg Abate is a professor of Jazz Studies at Rhode Island College and conducts workshops and master classes in the U.S. and abroad.

Local musicians will form the rhythm section of Abate’s quartet at the Gallery with Peter Dembski on piano, John Gallagher on bass and Seth Kearns on drums.

Music will begin at 7:30 PM. Seating will be open with a limited number of tables available. Coffee, ice cream and deserts will be served. Tickets can be purchased at the gWatson Gallery and the Stonington Ice Cream Company. Telephone reservations are accepted, 367-2900.

Siri Beckman has won a prize in the juried print exhibit at the National Small Print Exhibition sponsored by the Creede Arts Council in Creede, CO. The print will be part of a traveling exhibit and will go next to Ventero Open Press gallery in San Luis, CO.

Emily Brown, Thicket, ink on paper, 22" x 30"

Paper Holds Water, an exhibition of recent work by Emily Brown, will hang at Isalos Fine Art, Stonington from July 3rd through July 16th, with an artist’s reception on July 3rd from 4 to 7 p.m., coinciding with Stonington Galleries First Friday Open Gallery Night.

Emily Brown creates large-scale black and white images on paper, often derived from a closely-observed piece of landscape, whether a water surface or tangle of branches. She uses traditional Asian techniques in a loose, contemporary style to explore the rythms and patterns of nature. The result is work that feels quiet & contemplative, sometimes minimal, sometimes overwhelmingly detailed.

Brown, a former Pew Fellow, has lectured and taught at both the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts and the Graduate Program of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. The exhibition coincides with her term on the faculty at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft. Isalos featured her work in the gallery’s first one-artist show, in 2003.

Isalos Fine Art is located at 26 Main Street, Stonington, and is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 to 5.