Confluence ends its second season with the “2017 Painting Invitational,” composed of nine artists, local and not-so-local. This show has been put together from a personal vantage point by John Walker, the gallery's main curator.
Colin Cochran, Steve Perkins, and Wendy Ide Williams have created work that ranges from haunting figurative paintings (Cochran's animals and birds exist in a kind of primal ectoplasm) to Williams' playful abstractions, according to a news release.
Perkins was in the gallery's botanical art show earlier this season. He'll show a plein air oil painting, one painted especially for the Invitational, and the first of a new series of studies in oil. Allen Grindle paints in watercolor and oils, spirit-laden works of earthly creatures and sky.
Just out of art school, Walker opened Crusader Gallery in the Albany, N.Y., area. He sees this show as a coming back around and a nod in gratitude to his mentor from those days, seasoned arts administrator and entrepreneur Leon Fried.
Besides these four artists - Williams and Grindle still based in the Albany area, Perkins now in Maine, and Cochran in Santa Fe - the five other artists included in the Invitational are painters whose work in some cases is well known and loved locally: Caryn King will show an animal portrait; Jen Violette, who has proved to be a favorite at Confluence, is expected to show new paintings with a cloud theme.
Ann Coleman is a master pastel artist. She was both a painter and gallery owner before her gallery got swept away by Tropical Storm Irene. She now shows her pastel still lifes, landscapes, and portraits at Southern Vermont Deerfield Gallery and with the Vermont Pastel Society.
The show includes as well Shirley LeQuier's watercolors (she's the 90-year-old mother of Bill LeQuier, glass sculptor and Readsboro resident) and Cheri Moran, also a watercolorist, whose abstracts are constructed from floral elements.