First Friday at Cynthia Winings Gallery

 

First Friday at Cynthia Winings Gallery in Blue Hill presents a group show of outstanding local art. Seen at the End of the World began with a conversation about atmosphere—not simply as a quality of light or air, but as a condition of seeing. We were interested in the way atmosphere can alter our sense of distance and depth, soften the edges of things, and obscure and reveal at the same time. The painters in this exhibition share a longstanding relationship with landscape, rooted in observation and often in painting from life, yet their works are not straightforward accounts of what has been seen. Landscape is filtered through memory, time, and process: forms become distilled, space becomes ambiguous, color is muted or softened, and an experience of place is in the mind’s eye.

Christine Lafuente writes, “The visual experiences of these artists are deeply etched in their inner vision. Compositions are as likely to be found in reverie, conjured up months or years later, as they are to be found painting en plein air. And so it is with poetic moments: we live them once in the world, and then they take a transmuted form as we re-create them in quiet privacy.” The paintings in Seen at the End of the World inhabit this space between looking and remembering, between the physical world and the image that remains after we have left it.

It is especially meaningful to me to have co-curated this exhibition with Christine. I have exhibited her work at the gallery for ten years, but our friendship goes back much further, to our days as graduate students at Brooklyn College, when we were both painters and began exhibiting our work together in group exhibitions around New York City. After all these years, our conversations about painting, seeing, and landscape have continued to evolve. Seen at the End of the World is, in part, an extension of those conversations.

– Christine Lafuente and Cynthia Winings

 

Unchartered Seas: Kate Emlen in the Project Space

Kate Emlen is a landscape and still life painter who spends her time between Norwich, Vermont, and the Blue Hill Peninsula. Kate writes, “the interplay of materials and thought — articulated by my hand —  has always intrigued me. Some days I paint in oil on canvas. Others, I paint on a plate to print onto dampened paper. Alternating between these two processes stimulates new ideas.” Her motifs are informed by lifelong summers in Brooksville where her earliest and deepest attachments were made to friends, family, and the rhythms of the sea. She continues to be excited and inspired by all that is yet to be discovered in this landscape that is so familiar.