Caldbeck Gallery opens new gallery show “Three Person Show”

On First Friday June 7, the Caldbeck Gallery, 12 Elm Street in Rockland, will open 2 new exhibits, with a reception from 5-8 pm for the 6 gallery artists and their work.

In Three Person Show, artists Kathleen Florance of South Thomaston, Stew Henderson of Northport, and Tim Van Campen of Thomaston, will share the downstairs gallery space in an installation of selections from their recent work.   Florance’s 7 large and colorful paintings are part of a body of work titled Continuum.   They are created through stenciling, drawing, and masking out shapes and lines with rolled on relief ink, sometimes with pencil and litho crayon added.  Her approach to bringing these visual elements together is intuitive, based on the experiences derived from years of working from nature and with nature.  Of her work, the artist says, “No right, no wrong.  A flurry of marks, molded shapes of color, analogies to fragments of life around.  A conversation, as dialogue…between you, me, and the work.  Curiosity piqued, time spent, and space to struggle”.   Her work has been included in exhibits throughout the U.S., as well as in international exhibits, mostly focused on the environment and women’s issues.  She has shown with the Caldbeck since 1989.  Stew Henderson titles his new body of work  Patriarcheology .  In it, he explores how both his maternal and paternal grandfathers influenced his creative life.  Visual memories include the drawings in the patent books that remain from one grandfather’s career as a patent lawyer.  In the series “Manual for Dual Memories”, Henderson prints the patent drawings on mylar, layers them, and then includes colorful geometric shapes. Other works refer to his memory of his other grandfather who was a scholar and worked as head of the main reading room at the New York Public Library.  The patent lawyer grandfather also designed a family crest and had a stamp made.  Henderson designs certain pieces that depict family members  with this crest stamp.  One piece, “Black Sheep” is about…well…the black sheep in the family history.  As he says, “every family has one, or more”.  One might wonder if he is referring to the artists in the family tree.  Henderson has been represented by the Caldbeck since 1987.   Tim Van Campen’s crisp and intellectual design work is represented by a number of small scale digital prints, as well as an oil on panel, and an oil on aluminum, a more recent approach of his to presenting his work.   “My hard edge works blend color, form, and pattern. They are often minimal, sometimes complex. Intuitively constructed, striving for a pleasing color field with unique balance. I strive to be a bit outside of the box.  I have always mixed painting and print mediums. As of late the digital becomes the sketch for paintings on canvas or larger works on aluminum. Often one idea becomes a series of variations on a theme.  Represented here are mostly smaller paper work. The inspiration derived from a reexamined archived past. Sometimes less is more sometimes it’s not”.   Van Campen has exhibited widely in Maine, as well as Pennsylvania, California, and internationally in Tapei, China.  Corporate, museum, and private collections, as well as numerous design and other awards, honor his work.  His first solo show with the Caldbeck was in 1987.

In the upstairs galleries is a 3 person show called Landscape in Oil.  David Dewey writes about this show’s selection of oil n panel paintings: “My small townscape-landscape oils on masonite were painted during the years 1975 to 1979. They coincide with my lifelong friendship with Lois Dodd and my family’s move in 1975 to Dodd’s Blairstown New Jersey house. Our move to Blairstown was an important early period for me as a painter. At the beginning of our friendly living arrangement in Lois’s beautiful, white, early 20thCentury Victorian house, I began obsessively painting, in the out of doors, small oils on Masonite, setting up my easel out around the house, the town, and the nearby farms. Painting out doors then, often with Lois painting nearby, formed an aesthetic foundation that has fed my development as a painter throughout my life.  A small group of the oils on masonite from 1975 and 1976 were included in my first solo exhibition in 1977 at Green Mountain Gallery in Soho. The majority of them were painted after that exhibition and have been stored away ever since, until now.”   Dewey also explained that it was on one of the painting outings with Lois that he got hooked on watercolor, the medium he is now known for nation wide.  That one day, Dodd was working with watercolors instead of oils.  She asked him if he wanted to try out her watercolor paints.  He did, and his artistic future was forever changed.   Dewey has been with the Caldbeck since 2004.

When Jeff Epstein bought a farm house in Cushing, Maine, his artistic future was also forever changed.  Where he had always been a visitor to Cushing and other parts of Maine, he now had a permanent studio and ambiance that he could settle into and paint accumulated visual knowledge and experiences.   The oil on panel paintings in this show are about his new home in Cushing.  He says, “The intersection of the natural and constructed worlds is a space where moments of natural beauty are interrupted by human intrusions, where disruption and harmony coexist, sometimes uneasily. “  In these paintings, telephone poles and signposts stand in contrast to the surrounding vegetation, and echo the verticals of neighboring trees.  Telephone wires above, and hoses on the ground below, connect buildings with the landscape.  On the country roads, tire rubber “burnouts” swirl on the pavement, leaving a calligraphic “road graffiti”, delighting the artist’s eye and brush.  He has shown with the Caldbeck since 2003.

Nancy Glassman’s oil on canvas and on panel as well as on aluminum paintings are filled with nature’s bounty.  She says, “We all need intimacy with the natural world.  Painting is my way of getting to know a particular place.  When the thing I’m looking at grabs me, I have learned to accept the call to action!  Vibrating in a personal dance with the scene before me, I pick up on the movement of the clouds and wind, the revelations of color, the patterns of plant growth, the effects of the fauna.  I paint to apprehend the Life Force.  I paint to see and understand what matters the most to me, which is nature”.   Glassman has shown widely in Maine and beyond, and has been with the Caldbeck since 1982, participating in the gallery’s inaugural exhibit in June of that year.

Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday 12 – 4, and Sunday 1 – 4.  For information please call 207 594 5935, or email [email protected]