BRATTLEBORO-C.X. Silver Gallery, 814 Western Ave., presents an exhibit by artist Karen Becker through Dec. 27.
Becker's journey from earning a bachelor of fine arts in graphics at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to Brattleboro has been a varied evolution, she says. It includes employment creating on-air graphics and photography for public television in New York City, being a typographer on Madison Avenue, working at Rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco and assisting with decorative murals for Diana Ross in Greenwich, Connecticut.
After moving to Vermont, she joined the roster of the Vermont Arts Council as an Artist-in-Education working as a muralist in schools throughout New England. Her art has been exhibited in galleries in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and throughout New England.
During the last 45 years, Becker has experimented with abstraction and realism using water soluble oils, pastels, transparent watercolor, acrylics, and mixed media monoprints.
"My purely acrylic Geometric Paintings, of the mid-1980s, were my reaction to living in busy NYC," she wrote in her artist statement. "After moving to Vermont in 1983, nature became my muse and exquisite European pastels were my preferred medium. Switching to watercolors, I achieved portability and durable surfaces, unlike pastels which require special handling.
"I began my mixed media monoprints in the early 1990s. These monoprints incorporate careful drafting and pay tribute to birds and animals that are presently witness to the global climate crisis. My experiments with water-soluble oil paints on sheets of Japanese Yupo - an archival synthetic paper - led to purely abstract paintings that 'compress time,' as observed by a visiting critic who I met at the Vermont Studio Center."
For more information on the exhibit, call 802-257-7898 or visit cxsilvergallery.com.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.