January 1 - 31, 2021

Opening Reception: Friday, January 1, 6-8:30 pm

SOLO 2021 WINNERS

Juror: Meg White, Director, Gallery Naga, Boston

Emily Leonard Trenholm
”Painting in the Woods”

Liz Doles
”The Midnight Caller and Other Stories”

Emily Leonard Trenholm
”Painting in the Woods”

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about who I am as an artist and a woman after becoming a mother. In the spring of 2020, I began painting again, seven years after my first son was born. I felt a surging energy of unrest as I worked to personally confront the pandemic, longstanding racial injustice and the global climate crisis. With lockdown in place, I worked in the woods behind my home, a place where my boys and I spend most days exploring.

After months of attempting to make the oil paintings of my past and failing, I started asking myself, “Can I paint the landscape and respond to my present emotional energy at the same time?” I began drawing from moving water which runs through an abandoned feldspar quarry behind my home in Maine. I let go of oil paint, drew on paper with graphite and painted using water based media.

The union of drawing and painting in my new work has created a freedom for me to ask new questions and experiment with the duality of expressionism and landscape painting. I am working to record my visual language more specifically to who I am as an artist, woman and a mother.

Liz Doles
”The Midnight Caller and Other Stories”

“The Midnight Caller and Other Stories” are part of a body of work that is a culmination or collision of painterly instincts, colorist proclivities, affinity with Art Brut and the comfort of old clothes. The color energizes and the juxtaposition of disparate elements such as labels, souvenir tchotchkes, painted bits et al. slap the imagination into alertness and yield joy.  

I was seduced in Sri Lanka, first by the Indic culture of color, used intuitively to frame experience and define reality and then by the universe of textiles I found there. Based in Colombo for two years, I traversed the island and created a portfolio of pinhole photographs of Sri Lanka’s architectural heritage and a suite of photographic portraits of ordinary but extraordinary Lankans as a Fulbright grantee after which I stayed to teach and continue these projects. When I returned to the States, I delved into a new method for me of expression, using clothing labels, remnants, findings and scraps as painterly elements in picture making. As this work evolved it has grown in scale, intentionality, materials, subject matter and scope of vision.