Your Art Gallery for Home & Business Artworks
Read about what the artists have to say about their show.
The twenty one artists of the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, will begin 2023 with a group show entitled MELTING. One word, Melting, can evoke so many different responses in creative people.
For the gallery’s newest member, Catharine Carter, it evoked images of flooded homes and rising water which are frequently in the news and weather forecasts these days. Says Catharine “I worry about the future of our planet and the kind of world we are leaving to future generations.”
For painter Jude Lobe “Melting” also evoked ideas of climate change. “As an environmentalist, I immediately envisioned a lone Polar Bear standing on a broken piece of ice with the sun setting in the background. Of course, that image has been burned in our mind as climate change is an important topic these days. This time I used Encaustic as a medium for a subtle inference as in creating with encaustic, you are ‘melting’ the wax on a hard surface. ”
Figurative sculptor, Lynn Wartski, was also thinking about arctic climates with her piece “So Many Questions” which features a male emperor penguin with his penguin chick. “I anthropomorphize the chick in this sculpture to be about the stage of a human 2 or 3 year old, when questions starting with ‘why?’ are frequently asked. I picture this young chick asking why it is taking mommy so long to walk back to the ice from the shore.”
Abstract painter Marcy Lansman wasn’t thinking about “melting” when she created her painting. “I was playing with paint, hoping to create a pleasing composition. Now when I look at what I created, I see melting arctic islands, and I can give the painting an environmental interpretation related to climate change.”
Painters Nancy Smith and Chris Graebner weren’t thinking about climate change either, with their pieces for the show. Nancy’s painting “Melting into Spring” refers to that time of year when winter begins to give way. I tried to capture the winter chill, bare trees, and the contrasting soft beginnings of new leaves sprouting. Botanical artist Chris Graebner’s painting “Winter Kale” is of snow melting on a head of bright pink ornamental kale.