Maine’s coast and wildlife on display at Pemaquid Art Gallery

Works by two artists, Gwendolyn Evans and Sherrie York, on view at the Pemaquid Art Gallery in Bristol, provide full evidence of long professional art careers.

Evans works in many mediums, but watercolor is her favorite and that for which she has won the most awards. Her subject matter is as diverse as the 35 places she’s called home — portraiture, figurative, landscape, seascape, still life, abstracts — but at the gallery, she is showing watercolors inspired by coastal Maine, depicting the moving dynamics of water, rocks, surf, sky and clouds in broad, restless, impressionistic and fluid strokes.

She has taught art courses extensively and has owned four public galleries, including her present one in Walpole. She has worked on an MS in spiritual direction and says: “There’s one process to creativity and it’s your life … Some beauty … seeking to be expressed and shared. My task is to be the listening servant of ideas.” Read more about her at https://gwendolynevans.com.

York, in contrast, is a self-taught printmaker, who has focused on reductive linocuts as her medium, a technique in which the skills of a draughtsman, painter and sculptor are all involved. She explains the technique very clearly in a note at the gallery.

Her present subject matter is birds in their most characteristic habitats, with strong patterns of rolling, flowing waves, seaweed and trees providing abstraction to complement her forms.

She has won many awards for her work, while her career has encompassed environmental education, birding, and natural history illustration. She is a popular instructor locally and internationally, as well as serving on the boards of many nature organizations.

“I am especially interested in strong rhythms and patterns between subject and environment,” she says. “I find it’s the shapes around the objects, rather than the object itself, that are often the most compelling … I strive to represent (the interactions of living things) both as a moment in time and as a story of the wider experience of life on earth.” Learn more at www.sherrieyork.com.

Pemaquid Art Gallery is at Lighthouse Park in Bristol. For more information, visit www.pemaquidartgallery.com.