BELLOWS FALLS-Canal Street Art Gallery (CSAG) presents solo shows by artists Edward Kingsbury III, MC Noyes, and Debbie A. Barton through Sunday, Aug. 9.
Barton, based in Springfield, Vermont, is CSAG’s current working artist with a studio within the gallery. Barton uses collage, quilting, and journaling to reflect her love of rural New England, nature, train travel, vintage fabrics, and untold stories. Many of the materials have “imperfections” which become an integral part of those stories, “inviting the viewer to imagine [the materials’] previous makers, owners, and histories,” wrote organizers in a news release.
Barton prefers to use thrifted, dead stock or otherwise unwanted papers, textiles, and other materials that were headed to landfills “but have stories yet to be told beyond the tragedy of waste.”
Kingsbury, based in Keene, New Hampshire, is a self-taught artist making large abstract acrylic paintings, intricate drawings, and printed digital work of abstract studies in color and pattern. Kingsbury says that making art is an expression of his practice of prayer while he works. The resulting painting is Kingsbury’s abstract representation of God.
Kingsbury’s drawings are done by pen in India ink on watercolor paper, as well as on other surfaces such as canvas paper. The tiny interlocking lines create shapes, while leaving much white paper, then making the drawing itself into negative space.
The artist’s acrylic paintings reflect a similar intricate line-made structure, layered with opaque and transparent color in an all-over application “creating a luminous woven surface,” said organizers. Kingsbury’s digital art often starts without a photograph; simply using colors, shapes, and lines manipulated with tools and filters, layer upon layer, flattened on photo editing software.
Noyes, based in Bellows Falls, presents paintings using watercolor paints the artist makes himself, in a continuation of the artist’s series called Water Way. The abstract work is a daily observation of the Bellows Falls Canal, “relying heavily on spontaneous-seeming brushstrokes, using carefully contemplated colors, of which there is usually only a handful in each painting.” Noyes uses a palette of more than 50 colors, each made with multiple powdered pigments, and a honey-gum arabic solution.
All gallery events are free and open to the public; for wheelchair accessibility call 802-289-0104.
Canal Street Art Gallery is at 23 Canal St., and is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the third Friday of every month until 7 p.m. For more information, go to canalstreetartgallery.com, call Mike at 802-289-0104, or email artinfo@canalstreetartgallery.com.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.