Androscoggin River
First Place, Mixed Media: This piece, entitled Androscoggin River, was selected for a first place ribbon for work in Mixed Media in Topsham Public Library’s first annual art show entitled Joy of Art. The show will be up through Friday February 13, 2009. It is wonderful to see the town library taking an interest in the world of visual art. The library was built with a gallery space but this show utilizes both the Crooker Gallery, a corridor that functions as the gallery space, and the community meeting room.
In selecting Androscoggin River, My sense is that the jurors, who chose to remain anonymous, were responding both to the specificity of place in this landscape as well as to the inventive nature of my collage technique.
A comment about my collage work: In my painted paper collages, one color meets another color in ways that are simultaneously abstract–you see the colors as shapes–yet spatially evocative as imagery–in this case, evoking a local landscape. It is this delicate balance between abstraction of form and the interpretation of visual phenomena that makes my collage process playful and engaging.
On Specificity of Place: Rather than being just any river, this image depicts the bold Androscoggin River which forms a significant town boundary for Topsham. The bridge depicted is a one lane steel trestle bridge with wooden planking. The bridge connects the Heights neighborhood of Topsham with Route One which runs through Brunswick and up and down the coast of Maine. Town residents would be familiar with this sight. My work, rather than striving for the literal, transforms the familiar through the use of color shapes and rhythmic linear movement that takes the viewer’s eye through the space of the picture plane.
In the Woods: In the Woods, my second entry in Joy of Art, is more general in it’s interpretation of the Maine landscape. This piece is bolder and more simplified in it’s use of color and shape. There is no overpainting–just bold pieces of painted paper juxtaposed and layered to create the contrast of dark tree trunks, branches and filtered light from the barely visible sky down to the forest floor.
