Flora & Fauna

Jan 7 to Feb 18, 2022
Reception: Sat, Jan 14, 2:00 to 4:00 PM (SNOW DATE JAN 15)

Join us for this small group of artists who have come together to interpret Flora & Fauna in unique ways using wax, pigments, and other media.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
After years of exploring many types of media, Kellie Weeks is now focused on painting with pigment sticks and encaustic. While using encaustics for their insurmountable quality, depth, and brilliancy, she also incorporates dry pigments metal leaf, shellac, and other mixed media as vehicles to develop a whole lexicon of imagery. She was exclusively an abstract painter until she was confronted with a life changing event that evoked a shift in her work, prompting her to include flowers as part of her creative repertoire. The dynamic compositions in her artwork tend to describe simple relationships and how they relate to human journeys and transformations. Kellie’s work has been exhibited nationally in both juried and group shows, and is included in many private and public collections. She received her BFA from Bradford College.

Charyl Weissbach explores nature’s vastness and the details found within it. These elements emit aesthetic sensations of harmony, expressions of timelessness, and feelings of inspiration that transcend space and time. The imagery of her work does not accurately represent nature; rather, she tries to unveil an abstraction of its character, capturing ethereal beauty to raise awareness for the preservation of our world. Charyl’s Baroque series depicts the details found within nature. With the use of hand-made stencils, tjaps, and gilding techniques, these ornamental arboreal based paintings have an abstract quality to them that aim to capture the beauty and harmony found within nature’s varied patterns.

Using paint sticks, encaustic, metal leaf, and disparate materials on various substrates, Patricia Gerkin challenges viewers to note that space where two worlds meet—outer and inner. Her process is intuitive, allowing the materials to lead the way. Forms and lines are organic, and surfaces are deeply textured as if hiding a mystery. Layer upon layer, her works exude a tactile quality and a sense of something beneath the surface. Ms. Gerkin uses the natural world as her metaphor, reflecting the paradox of constancy/change, static/shifting ground, and the unrelenting message of the passage of time. Her environmental concerns include vanishing species, increasingly violent weather patterns, the health of the oceans and their bleached corals and dying kelp forests, and the impact of human behaviors on the health of our planet.

Debra Claffey’s experience in horticulture and organic land care has led her to focus on the plant world and the assaults on the soil, biodiversity of plant species, and the protection of native flora. She celebrates plants: their great age and history on the planet, their intelligence and successful adaptions, their beauty of form, shape, and infinite color. Debra marvels in our new knowledge of their ways of communication, of making themselves attractive to us and other species, and the trading of “goods and services” that goes on between plants, fungi, bacteria, insects, birds, and even us mammals.

Images: Years Gone By, Kellie Weeks 16 x 16” encaustic
Breathe, Patricia Gerkin 24 x 24” encaustic, oil sticks, metal leaf on panel
Baroque, Balsam Poplar Series, bleu, Charyl Weissbach 16" x 16" encaustic, 12K white gold leaf on Belgian linen on panel with maple floater frame
Aster Bud, Debra Claffey 12 x 12 x 1” encaustic, oil, wax, monotype on panel

The Brush Art Gallery and Studios
256 Market Street, Lowell, MA 01852
(978) 459-7819

We are located in the building behind the Visitor Center on Market Street.
Parking is available in the HCID parking garage at 350.4 Dutton St, Lowell, MA 01852 (Head for the flagpole near the opening in the large mill building after parking)

HOURS:
April 1 to December 31:
(Tues - Sat) 11:00 am - 4:00 pm
(Sun) 12:00 noon - 4:00 pm

January 1 to March 31:
(Wed - Sat) 11:00 am - 4:00 pm
(Sun) 12:00 noon - 4:00 pm