We all do it, you know. Holiday time rolls around and those of us in the art business hope once again that people will consider the gift of art for their loved ones. And why not? No moving parts. No planned obsolescence. No expiration date.
There’s an intimacy in these small paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints you wont see in their larger forms. And there’s always room for them!
So come on in, tuck one under your arm, and prepare to present delight and joy in the form of art this year.
Jo Barry
Jo Barry was born in Kent where she studied art at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design. After teaching for a few years at Byam Shaw School of Art, she gave up teaching in 1981 to concentrate full time on her own work. Jo’s talents led her to etching as her principal means of artistic expression, although she also is proficient and talented at watercolors and pencil drawings.
Jo enjoys a considerable reputation in the art world and now ranks as one of the finest living etchers. Her skill led her to election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers. Her studio is at her home in the New Forest, Ringwood, where she lives with her husband and son as well as five cocker spaniels, sheep, chickens, ducks, and countless doves. Her environment provides Jo with a great deal of the inspiration for her work, which depicts nature and her beloved English countryside.
Richard Britell
Richard Britell, a career painter, studied at Pratt Institute with Philip Pearlstein and Walter Erlebacher. His first show in NYC at Staempfli Gallery was sold out, and reviewed in the New York Times. Britell’s new works revolve around large, dreamy cityscapes tending toward abstraction. The artist currently lives in Pittsfield, MA.
Abby DuBow
Abby DuBow received her BA from Bennington College and her MA from the Bank Street School of Education. She has been a working artist her entire life and an art educator who taught at the Lenox, Fieldston, Brooklyn Friends, and Columbia Grammar and Prep Schools for over 30 years. She has continued to pursue her own art education at such diverse venues as Atelier 17 in Paris, the Art Students League, the Brooklyn Museum, Parsons School of Design, Great River Arts Institute and the Contemporary Art Center. She has studied painting, drawing, and printmaking with a variety of instructors including Stanley William Hayter, Paul Feeley, Tony Smith, Edith Katz, Rueben Tam, Seong Moy, Joe Stapleton, John Hultberg, Janis Loeb, Catherine Farish, and Sarah Amos. Her work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the country and is in many private collections. She has received many awards for creativity and excellence.
David Eddy
David Eddy is a self taught artist living and working in New Lebanon, NY. A fiercely independent soul who has long been connected to the freelance sports of surfing and skateboarding, It’s no wonder his artwork has a raw and passionate persona. His acrylic paintings are honest and emotional like a child’s, but are sophisticated, manipulated imperceptibly by the hand of a true artist. The “naive” characters within the paintings speak to the viewer as emotional self portraits. The New York Times described Eddy’s paintings as “noticeably reminiscent of Paul Klee’s”.
Julio Granda
Artist Julio Granda was born in New York City and spent his high school years in Tampa, Florida. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1950, serving two tours of duty in Korea. He received his art training at the School of Visual Arts and Cooper Union in New York City, and his MFA at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Julio Granda has been painting in the Berkshires close to fifty years, since moving from New York City, where he was a successful art director and book cover designer. He settled in the town of Washington, MA, and later moved to Pittsfield, MA. Currently, Julio paints in his studio at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts in Pittsfield.
Julio was a fine arts faculty member at Berkshire Community College for seventeen years, becoming department chair during his tenure there. In 1983 he was appointed by Governor Dukakis to serve on the Massachusetts Council for the Arts and was a charter member of the newly-formed Massachusetts Arts Lottery Council. He has exhibited both nationally and regionally and has work in many private collections as well as in public collections such as those of Brown University, Smith College, Yale University and the Chapin Library at Williams College.
His Illuminated Broadsides are in the rare or fine print collections of libraries and museums as well as in private collections throughout the United States. Among the poets and translators with whom he has collaborated or whose work he has illuminated are Martin Espada, Frederico Garcia Lorca, W.S. Merwin, Paul Metcalf/Herman Melville, Pablo Neruda, Ranier Maria Rilke, Richard Wilbur, Grace Paley and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Trish Hurley
As a child, crayons were my love…using colors rich and vibrant, deep and dark. Now as an adult, each color evokes an emotion within me that I portray through my work. Each piece of art that I create has a special ambience. In creating monoprints, it’s a little more fun and serendipitous whereas painting is a more direct and controlled process often done with just palette knife and my fingers. There’s a lot of thought, exaggeration, and excitement as part of the process of my art making.
The evolution of my artwork comes from a fascination of the outdoors, whether it’s walking down a wooded path, a city street or sitting long a river. From there I take my attraction to abstract shapes of colors- lights and darks and execute my palette knife visual studies rather quickly, trying to capture the moment by mimicking the scene and transpiring the sensual qualities of sound and temperature. After bringing these paintings inside to the studio, another painting, generally a more abstract, larger painting is born more loose and freeing.
Trish Hurley received her BFA in Painting from Swain School of Design and her MFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
As a native New Englander, she now resides in Newport, R.I. and instructs at Community College of Rhode Island and the Westport Art Group in Westport MA, as well as privately.
Leslie Klein
Leslie Klein is a clay artist and sculptor, whose work has been shown in juried exhibitions, as well as, commissioned and collected by various organizations and private clients.
She created the sculpture for The Boston Freedom Award, presented by Coretta Scott King and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, to Dr. Charles Jacobs, Founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group.
Her contemporary artifacts express the ancient quality of clay: often created for ceremony, ritual and in tribute to nature.
She teaches the art of clay to elders, children and special needs students at her Clay Forms Studio, and is a faculty artist for Community Access to the Arts.
Her op-ed, feature articles, and poetry have been published in various newspapers and magazines.
Douglass Truth
Truth was born in 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana, into a family famous for its lawyers. Attempts at remedial education throughout the years have met with uncertain results, leaving him with a reputation as mixed as his media.
He has worked as a civil engineering designer and surveyor during the pipeline years in Alaska, as a dishwasher, a waiter, a chef, a building dismantler, an English teacher, and as a software salesman in Taiwan. He once owned and operated a graphic design and silkscreen company called Flying Turtle Graphics. After a serious illness, Truth closed his T-shirt business in order to devote himself entirely to painting and writing, and as an artist has been represented by galleries from California to New York with many places in between.
Truth has written and published three books. “I Am a Dog”, “Revolution of Flowers”, and “Everything I Know About Death (Subject to Verification)” — all of which will be available for sale at the gallery during his exhibition.
“In my paintings, writings and performances,” he says, “The harlequin, the clown, the watchers, giant stone heads, the flower people and the black dogs show up to point out, in ways difficult or impossible to articulate or modulate in our normal signaling fashion, from which directions we might be coming from, and what choices we might have going forward. I certainly believe in otherworlds, underworlds, multiworlds, and so on, but I also think we’re there now and have never been anywhere else. Our vision lapses into a routine. The real mystery — one of them, at least! —is what’s really going on all the time all around us. Here in a gallery, in the corner grocery store, our kitchen, our places of work, the cities and towns and countrysides in which we somehow, miraculously, find ourselves living right now. It’s all alive and it never ceases to speak to us.”
Terry Wise
Terry Wise was born in upstate New York in 1953 into a family transplanted from the midwest. Creative endeavors were always encouraged, and from an early age, she felt she would be an artist. This was profoundly confirmed while on a high school art class field trip to New York City, when she found herself surrounded by Georgia O’Keeffe paintings at a retrospective exhibit, Sky Above the Clouds, filling an entire gallery wall. She spent a year in the Netherlands as an exchange student, then began studying art at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana,
graduating in 1976 with a BFA in Textile Design.
Being raised in a suburban household in the 1960s had firmly planted in her two deep, and often conflicting, imperatives: to pursue a professional career and to raise a family. For the past two plus decades, she has dedicated herself to maintaining
a nurturing household and raising three children, while always endeavoring to keep the love and the practice of art alive. This took many forms over the years: surface design and tapestry weaving, graphic and liturgical design, children’s fashions and
printmaking studies in the early 90s. In the mid-90s she began to study oil painting in the studio of painter Joan Griswold in Great Barrington, MA. Class work included several painting trips to Italy and Ireland. Terry currently maintains a studio in
Great Barrington and exhibits widely in solo and group shows and open studios.
The long and winding road has brought many elements into her current work. She gravitates toward still life subject matter as a format for experimentation in composition, color and texture. Repeated prints and richly colored textures have increasingly found their way into her work and bring it full circle to her textile
design training and passion for beautiful fabrics.