39 Spring Street
Williamstown MA 01267
413-458-1700
Hours:
Wednesday - Saturday 10-5:30pm
Sunday 11:00am - 4:00pm

Artists

Carol Aust
Aust's figurative paintings are emotionally-charged narrative fragments infused with mysterious tension and secrecy. She often places her figures in precarious environments where anything could happen. The combination of whimsical scenes and serious emotional depth asks viewers to stop and appreciate the subtle yet deep power in all her works. Sometimes celebratory, sometimes lonely and disturbing, her paintings express a wide range of human desire and yearning. Aust’s work consistently features strong and vibrant colors along with figures that are both engaging and vulnerable. Aust's paintings are emotionally charged parables of ordinary people moving through the landscapes of their lives, often at critical turning points that reflect how the choices we make every day take on a huge magnitude when multiplied over a life time.
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Brother Thomas Bezanson
Bezanson's works are created of porcelain with basic glazes derived from copper and iron. His forms relate to both Japanese and Chinese traditions. His work is best known for it's incredible control of the glazing and firing process -- particularly for his work with reds, oranges and yellows. Brother Thomas' works are attempts at perfections rooted in spirituality and reflect decades of experimentation and experience.
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Stanley Bielen
Stanley Bielen's small still life paintings have been compared to the slightly abstracted still life's of Edouard Manet. The works are loose, brushy interpretations of the subject matter rather than attempts at photographic realism.
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Jane Bloodgood Abrams
Her paintings are powerful compositions of earth, sky and cloud. Radiant, in the tradition of the Hudson River school and the luminists, Bloodgood-Abrams’ work successfully participates in the canon of American art in a way that few other contemporary contributions can claim to do. The pieces are essentially emotional, revealing the artist’s personal engagement with the mystery and power of nature. The paintings are worked over a period of time in a very intuitive manner, with layers of paint, applied, wiped away, and allowed to dry between sessions and be worked over again. This push-pull process allows an evocative image to emerge.
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Paul Caponigro
Caponigro uses traditional photographic materials and darkroom techniques: film and darkroom. He develops his own negative and prints using the silver gelatin process. “I believe the process should involve not just the chemicals but also the alchemical.” Caponigro mixes different types of chemicals and paper to achieve his velvety blacks, crisp details of light or its atmospheric effects. “Fineness of the tonal values in the black and white photographic image, for me, is much more than producing technically excellent prints.
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Susan Read Cronin
Of Cronin's work, New York art critic John Mendelsohn writes:
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Dori Csengeri
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Mark Davis
Davis' work was initially inspired by Alexander Calder. He began making mobiles while he was still a teenager, and copied jewelry created by Calder for his friends. His work also shows the influence of Joan Miro, with its light curved forms often painted bright colors.
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Gracia Dayton
Dayton works in various media, from watercolor to collage to a mixed media, depicting landscapes and scenes incorporating elements of her life, journeys, and interests. Unlike many artists, Dayton’s watercolors begin without an underdrawing, which allows Dayton to fully explore freedom of movement. Referencing photographs for their patterns, Dayton then masks the white areas for the birch trunks, and applies her watercolors with virtuosic control. Vivian Raynor, of The New York Times, celebrates Dayton as “the chromatic champion with paintings and monotypes rich in saturated reds and blazing yellows as well as blues and greens. Each picture is a tour de force: patterned, stippled, laid on horizontal bands or applied to a wet ground in rhythmic strokes.” Her symphony of colors blend and bleed, contrasting the stark outlines of the birch. Her landscapes waver between abstract and recognizable, simultaneously soothing in their repetitiveness and stimulating in their vibrant, intense colors. Inspired by changes in weather, her paintings emit a radiance, a warmth, a heat. Using large, calligraphic brushstrokes, her watercolors are complete with a few strokes, even integrating the watercolor paper into the painting as patches of white. In addition to her watercolor landscapes, Dayton transcends this genre with her mixed media—bold images inspired by signs and symbols seen on her travels. In these smaller paintings on panel, the color dominates and gesture overrides precision. The image appears from large dabs of paint, sporadic and simplified yet delicately applied. Additionally, the image becomes three-dimensional and tactile with grooved layers of gel that rise from the panel, allowing the paint to undulate in the ridges. In a third style, Dayton’s collages merge texture, color, material, and pattern into a vibrant entity. The works are symbolic and personal, expressive and complex. In each of these three styles, Dayton imbues the self into the work of art, as a traveled, intelligent, confident artist.
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Kim Denise
A healer and intuitive, Kim infuses her paintings with a deep restorative energy. She is fascinated with the play of light and the sacredness it imparts to the humblest of objects.  Her vibrant still life paintings oftenfeature glass, with a focus on reflected light and color.
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Carol Gobin
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Paul Cary Goldberg
Goldberg's photographs are a blend of an old master painterly calm and contemporary practices. He sets up his still lifes with a single light source and a black background, in the tradition of a Dutch master painter. He then uses a 4 x 5 camera to shoot the photos, and a state of the art Iris printer to digitally print them onto a mat cotton paper. The effect has an incredible smoothneess of tone and saturation of color.
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Mary Sipp Green
Mary Sipp Green's paintings are art to live with. Restrained and blurred, with minimum edge, they quietly draw you in, enveloping you as in a dream. In each painting, there are forms enough to suggest a landscape, a seascape, or trees nestled by a stream. The time of day seems to be twilight, or just before dawn. Over all there is light - light as radiance, light emerging from shadow. Mary Sipp-Green has brought her art via expert training to its present day stage over a quarter-century of painting. Its dependable quality will not escape you. Most remarkable, for me, is a special sense of emergence. Put another way, her visions seem to find their path out from within, rather than forms applied to a surface. Sipp-Green's horizons do not exist. Limitless space is her continuum, while objects lose their mass as they pause momentarily to mark an accent. All depends on distance, created be ever so subtle nuances of color. Her paintings offer a delicate serenity and peace. 2002 S. Lane Faison, Jr. Director Emeritus Williams College Museum of Art Williamstown, Massachusetts Emeritus Professor (History of Art) Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts Former Art Critic for The Nation
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Gurhan
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Curt Hanson
Hanson's paintings overflow with his connection, not just to the landscapes in focus, but to the entire natural world. For Hanson, painting and meditation are really one in the same. Mediation is about being completely aware, awake in the present moment; it is about observing what is happening right now. His meditation practice provides him with insight when working directly from nature or using photographic reference. He works using his memory, remembering the important details that he experienced while looking, which is a very different process than recreating a copy of the landscape.
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Tracy Helgeson
Tracy uses a combination of transparent and opaque layers of paint to create a sense of luminosity and visual glow. Large areas of pure color much define the simplified forms of structure, land, and tree. However, closer inspection reveals many subtleties and variations within the color field. Pink is never just pink, green is never just green. Fiery orange and reds may be undercurrents, while deep blues and greens are subtle overtones. Tracy is entranced by the texture of the surfaces she prepares, the softness of the brush, the smell of the paint, the color of the under painting and the excitement of laying down each subsequent layer of color. Each painting is a sensory experience for both Tracy and the viewer.
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Peter Hussey
Peter Hussey creates large scale watercolors that focus on architectural detail. His works are beautifully crisp images of doorways, rooftops, cupolas, etc. His work, though not photorealist, is firmly rooted in 20th century Realism.
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Hale Johnson
Hale Johnson is an oil landscapist of four decades and is established as a great American Realist painter akin to Andrew Wyeth and Eric Sloan. He is most noted for his stark yet emotive landscapes of iconic New England. Using oil against a medium grey ground which is applied to canvas or panel surface, Hale's large works are completed from on site studies. From his rural home he intentionally seeks locations that evoke strong response to the history of the land and the people who toil there. Often featuring weathered barns, boats, and well used farm equipment, Hale's paintings represent a quiet restrain and delicate sensitivity to detail. There is a fascination with texture - particularly that of old paint peeled woods, rugged grasses, and craggy rocks. Each composition balances his tight precision with areas of loosely brushed strokes, relieving the eye, providing relational distances, and allowing Hale to control focus. This technique has developed over the course of his career, becoming
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TD Kelsey
Their interests in promotion of Texas longhorn cattle, maintenance of a wild horse herd on their ranch, passion for Africa and its wildlife, and concern for conservation of wildlife worldwide have inspired many of his works.
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B.A. King
B.A. King's works capture fleeting moments in nature like the shadow of a fox as he runs along, a team of horses as they run down a steep slope, or the golden dust around a horse wrangler as he rides out on the range. King uses different printing processes for different images depending on their subject.
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John MacDonald
For lack of better term, John calls his prints
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John MacDonald Prints
For lack of a commonly accepted term, John MacDonald calls these pieces
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Ken Matsuzaki
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Petria Mitchell
If Petria Mitchell’s paintings were sound, we would hear blue ice cracking under spruce, purple thunder breaking, the sun waltzing through the warm vast cloudscape. Her paintings call us to use all our senses as she creates New England with broad, free, abstract brush work. Mitchell employs a full, rich palette of subtly contrasting colors: blues set against ochre, red emerging from purple. The tension is symphonic, not overwhelming. Her composition and brushwork provide the integration needed for the painting’s harmony. Mitchell allows herself freedom with the brush, as though the dance and experience of the brushwork were the purpose of the painting. At times Mitchell changes the vantage point of our perspective, as she brings us higher, up into the woods where the space feels more intimate. Then she shifts the focus to the horizon as she explores the relationship between land and sky. The landscape forms become more abstract, with less specific reference to the natural world. The forms are created from the rhythm of abstracted brushwork. The composition is arrived at through gesture and paint.
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Hideaki Miyamura
Miyamura's porcelain pieces reflect a fusion of Eastern and Western ceramic forms and traditions. His work is influenced by Scandinavian ceramic asethetics. The use of crystalline elements in the glazes is European, but the traditional Tenmoku black glaze is rooted in Chinese forms. The Yohen Tenmoku is aptly translated as
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Tjasa Owen
During Tjasa's foreign travels and time away from the studio, she photographs, sketches and captures landscape details and textures. Back in her San Francisco studio she integrates the themes of rural and coastal landscape as well as correspondance to create intimate collage envelopes and larger format paintings. She uses acrylic and oil pastel as well as collage media within her works on paper and canvas. Her subtle and whimsical notations on many of the pieces invite the viewer to create a personal relationship with the work of art open to their own interpretation.
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Leslie Peck
Painting farm animals and still lifes of the products of her own region is a passion for Peck. She brings out the subtle beauty and simplicity of their nature. Using her extensive background in portrait painting, Peck is able to create classic, yet bold portraits and still lifes that capture the environment that surrounds her. Utilizing strong contrasts in light and shadow, her subjects come to life on the canvas.
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Janet Rickus
Rickus’s still lifes are painted actual size, at eye level, and are often arranged on a surface covered with crisply ironed or softly draped table linens. She always paints during the day in natural light. Whether she’s painting pears or squash, turnips or peppers, she precisely captures the color, shape, texture and shadow of her subjects. She is meticulous and unhurried, selecting just the right specimens, arranging them just so, and painting them with great concentration and precision, demonstrating expert technique comparable to the Dutch and French still life masters. Although carefully selected and arranged by the artist, Rickus’s fruits and vegetables seem to have developed relationships of their own. They interact in friendly harmony, sometimes leaning against one another, sometimes huddled together in a cluster.
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Phil Rogers
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Gail Sauter
Sauter strives to capture the extraordinary in the ordinary. Sauter is intrigued with memories, it is in her work that she seeks not to depict what she is seeing, but instead, the after image that stays with her. Memories and the passing of time are what provide the foundation of her work. The actual subject matter in Sauter's paintings are what the viewer may first notice, but they only serve as a vehicle for exploration, as the archetypal relationships and landscapes evoke a mood. Her paintings convey time and place with a strong impact that recreates the experience of being present in that moment.
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Tatsuzo Shimaoka
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Tom Slaughter
Tom Slaughter's painted cut outs are hand cut paper covered with velvety, opaque Flash Paint. The paintings are like a Pop Art version of Matisse's cut out work, slightly raised off the surface to give a sense of three dimensionality. Slaughter uses everyday objects that convey a sense of place and meaning -- like the Adirondack chair, restaurant matchbooks, a sailboat, or water tower. Called
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Judith Solomon
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Anda Styler
Styler started out painting en plein air but now enjoys the combination of on location and studio working. She continues to explore subject matter, but is especially drawn to the magic of the New England landscape, mainly “the hidden places that are not often seen”.
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Stan Taft
Taft’s extensive background in painting shows in his balance of using crisp angles, smooth backgrounds, and painterly abstract shapes.He finds the subject matter for his paintings during his many trips to Rome and other Italian cities. It is through close observation and personal experience that he is able to deliver unique architectural views that feel as though you could step right into the scene.
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Eng Tay
Tay's compositions are based on human figures, sometimes singly and sometimes in familial groupings. Children and parents with stylized faces are often shown with musical instruments. Tay's works are usually in warm color schemes that reinforce the quiet, warm surroundings of his figurative subjects.
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John Traynor
Mr. Traynors’ painting style is reminiscent of some 19th century painters. He uses what he knows about light and color to create mood and atmosphere. Using soft and hard edges selectively, he gives a feeling that there is air with moisture and particles surrounding the objects he is painting. Like master John Singer Sargent, Traynor is brilliant in his use of thick, lush strokes of paint. Painting outdoors on location is a prime source of inspiration and ideas for Traynor’s landscapes. Smaller paintings are often finished indoors or used as studies for larger works painted solely in his studio. Still life painting is done in his studio, as are his portrait commissions.
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George Van Hook
As a young artist, George Van Hook was interested in the early 20th century California Impressionists, as well as with artists such as Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and Andrew Wyeth. An artist for nearly his entire life, George Van Hook follows in the traditions of J. Alden Weir and William Merritt Chase with his integration of form, light, and color, to create rich, textured landscapes. As a plein air painter, Van Hook always paints in nature, yet he intentionally chooses his locations based on the structures of the site. His paintings are thus deliberately balanced in forms and light, carefully plotted without altering the sovereignty of nature. Van Hook’s landscapes focus on the process of seeing, as one’s sight captures what a camera can miss—visions, sensations, and experiences. Depicting familiar northeast locations, Van Hook translates the impressionist style to a contemporary subject, as he builds lights on darks with confident strokes
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Don Wilks
Wilks has sought to interpret the beauty of modern dance and classical ballet through sculptural form. In addition to portraying the traditional ballerina, Wilks captures the angularity of thrust limbs inspired by Cirque du Soleil’s acrobatic dancers. His bronze work is cast at the world-renowned Bronzart foundry in Sarasota, FL. The cast editions are rare, limited to quantities of 7 to 12, to assure that the detail of each piece is properly rendered.  Each sculpture has a unique patina as they are all done by hand. Wilks’ art stands above most contemporary sculptors as his work preserves the artistic integrity of Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas.
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Jamie Young
Jamie uses location sketches - often traveling through the backwoods to create these quick but powerful images - as the foundation for her oil work. For Jamie
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