BRATTLEBORO-During the month of December, a pair of group exhibitions — “About The Size of It” and “Holiday Windows: All Under One Sky” will be featured at 118 Elliot Gallery.
“About the Size of It” features the work of six painters who make up the 118 collective of artists: Tina Olsen, Ellen Cone Maddrey, Gayle Robertson, John Loggia, Liza Cassidy, and Mary Therese Wright. The exhibit explores the notion of size in painting — the miniature and the monumental.
Also on exhibit is the window display, “All Under One Sky,” the collective’s contribution to the Brattleboro Festival of Miniatures.
The artists contemplated the miniature and the monumental in painting, and how it is expressed in their individual work. In most representational painting, the image is exactly that — a representation of a (usually) much larger scene.
The landscape paintings of Bierstadt and Church are miniature when compared to the scenes they represent. But any painter, whether the work is representational or abstract, faces the question of how large to make the image.
Queries arise for the artist and the viewer: How does the size or shape of a painting relate to what the painter expresses, or what the viewer sees and feels? This exhibit allows both the artists and the viewers to “try out” different sized works, discover how the eye reacts to each, and form new ways of seeing.
The 118 artists “tend to create art from their physical interaction with the materials, rather than starting with specific ideas that are translated onto a visual medium,” organizers wrote in a news release. “They used this process to work together in an improvisational mode, creating the universal sky that connects us all. The colors and shapes, and the light they create, remind us of the vastness of the natural beauty that surrounds our daily lives.”
Moving from “monumental” to “miniature,” the artists added miniature scenes of life under the sky.
The exhibition will be on view at Gallery Walk on Friday, Dec. 5, and during 118 Elliot open gallery hours, Thursdays from 3 to 6 p.m., as well as during all 118 Elliot events and by appointment; contact 118elliot@gmail.com or 917-239-8743.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.