Featured Artists, 2022
Patty Matthews: BOTANICAL PORTRAITS
Sunday, July 10 - October 10, 2022
My subject matter for this particular series of paintings is mostly flowers and plants, close-up, personal and intimate.
My two major influences for this set have been Georgia O'Keeffe and the New York City artist, Jimmy Wright.
The predominant medium used is pastel, with smatterings of graphite, charcoal, watercolor and colored pencil. Whatever medium I happen to be working in at the time is my favorite.
I really haven't worked for money or recognition; art, for me, is more of a creative, meditative outlet. I do art simply because it brings me joy.
--Patty Matthews
Sunday, July 10 - October 10, 2022
The alvar is a rare bio-environment that exists where glaciers scoured the land, leaving behind
thin or no soil on a limestone base. This land is flooded in spring, subject to drought in summer,
and frozen solid in winter. The vegetation, highly specialized and hardy, include sphagnum
moss, lichens, sedges, sumac, Prairie Smoke, Wild Asters, Wild Columbine, varieties of Juniper
and several species of cherry and berry bushes.
The spirit of the land manifests itself in the people who live here. Many people visit the St.
Lawrence River valley but only a few reside here. They are resolute, resourceful, rugged, and
right minded. In the long winter months, they do not hibernate, as local lore might suggest; they
draw, paint, write, make music, broker, build and rebuild, and contemplate. In spring they
blossom and in summer they thrive.
The St. Lawrence River Valley is still a frontier in many ways. It has its own distinctive culture
that makes its own unique brand of art that reveals its long history. As a practitioner of the arts, I
feel this place in my bones and see its influence on all the many gifted artists who live and work
on and along this majestic north running river.
--Greg Lago
Paul Saphier: Love Songs to our Northern Lands & Waters
Memorial Day - October 10, 2022
A luminous grouping of northern scenes in egg tempera, pencil & pastel and watercolor from the Gallery's collection. This year's exhibition of works by Paul Saphier provides a panorama of his love affair with the ideal and the reality of the North as he lived it. Works done spontaneously on site in pencil and pastel or watercolor, and months-long labors of love realized in egg tempera back at his studio in Queens, New York City.
This year we are sharing once again the beatific watercolors done at the foot of the Sri Arunachala Mountain in South India... A time of peace in which Paul's artistic and spiritual focus became as one.
All of these works reveal the essentially contemplative nature of the artist and his ever-fresh perspective characterized by an amazing gift for the use of color and a reverence for our Northern lands and waters.
"Gradually, I have come to realize that the purpose of art is linked with the purpose of life. Through focused attention transmitted to the image, a spiritual energy is generated, dwelling within, animating the image so that both artist and viewer become aware of connecting links between spiritual truth and the rhythms and forms expressing that truth. In this way, art becomes a portal to the divine generating a sense of the sacred in the midst of a reality otherwise considered commonplace." --Paul Saphier