Pemaquid Art Gallery featured artists: Brooke Pacy and Carol Wiley

This season’s two new guest artists at the Pemaquid Art Gallery, Brooke Pacy and Carol Wiley, are a study in contrasts in their approach to painting — Pacy mainly in oils and, to a lesser extent, watercolors, and Wiley in several different mediums including watercolor, pastel, oil, acrylic and encaustic.

They share an interest in wide-ranging subject matter, inspired by the beautiful natural world of Maine in all its aspects, also flowers and gardens, interiors, still lifes, people and animals. But Pacy paints often in a charming, lyrical and descriptive, generally realism-based style, often pastel-toned or with a deliberately limited color palette. She revels in and reveals the beauty she sees around her, the delicate color and value contrasts in the natural world, shadows on snow, reflections of light on flower petals, objects, windows, land and sea, viewed through mist or dramatically sunlit. Investigating lighting effects in the landscape is a major theme for her and can alter her style to a more dynamic contrast of values and shapes, back lit or stark, with Cezanne-like brush strokes and thicker paint application rather than her softer, more diffused application. There is often a domestic focus in her work and also a poetic sensibility. She also paints appealing and sensitive portraits of children and animals.

Wiley, on the other hand, seems to be a restless, dynamic artist. She grapples with the interaction of realism and abstraction and tries many different approaches and styles. She investigates a range of paint applications, including unexpected combinations of patterns, negative spaces, outlines, jagged paint edges, linear versus broad strokes, thick versus thin paint. Rich colors and strong value contrasts can play a major role in her images, ranging from a simple flower in a vase suffused with rich color, to her clothesline series where negative spaces and strong, flat shapes change a line of drying clothes into a dancing play on the roles of color and shape in abstraction. Her figure paintings are mainly of models but in constantly changing styles. They are versatile and dynamic.

Although she has an undergraduate degree in art history, Wiley’s advanced degrees were in special education and education leadership, supporting her career in special education. She is a self-taught, self-directed painter, having taken many classes and workshops. She moved with her husband to Jefferson in 2004 and has her studio there. She has shown in many venues in Maine since 2004 and is an active exhibitor in shows, both juried and not, both solo and group, in the Midcoast area. Her work can also be seen at www.carolwileystudio.com.

Pacy was raised in Chappaqua, New York, grew to love the Maine coast as a teen, studied classical drawing and painting with Elizabeth Byrd Mitchell in Baltimore, and, after a 20-year hiatus for raising a family and a teaching and writing career, started creating small watercolors to commemorate scenes while sailing with her husband along the Atlantic Coast. Since moving to the Midcoast, she has concentrated on “catching the beauty of local ephemera in oils,” as she says. She paints plein air as well as in the studio and currently paints with Katharina Keoughan’s class in Damariscotta.

She has also has published poems and a novel.

Examples of her work can be viewed at www.brookepacy.com.

The work of these two artists provides a feast for the eye and the spirit, challenging the viewer visually and spiritually.

Pemaquid Art Gallery is open every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Columbus Day. COVID safety precautions will be in place, and masks are encouraged for guests who are not fully vaccinated. For more information, visit www.pemaquidartgallery.com.