Simple & Simply Beautiful

By next week, you can catch in Kent lovely and fascinating work from six women artists.

    From Sept. 19 through Oct. 25, the Ober Gallery will present paintings and sculpture by Sally Vigliano Pettus. This will be Pettus’s first show away from the Peter Findlay Gallery in New York City, where she showed exclusively for 20 years.

   The paintings are landscapes or pieces of  landscapes caught, the artist says, in a moment of time. So the interplay of light and shadow on land and tree trunks and leaves and flowers is crucial.  Her colors are unusual mixes of greens, browns, rusts with lots of white.  Sometimes the images are almost slick, sometimes vaguely impressionistic. I especially like “Freezing,â€� in which the snow is nearly palpable, and “Shadowsâ€� on a birch tree.

   Until Sept. 27, the Bachelier Cardonsky Gallery is showing fine work by four splendid artists.  Kathryn Frund creates gorgeous landscapes — some only  6 inches  square, some 4 feet high — in oil, and collages them with old letters or maps or scraps of cloth.  They achieve the difficult balance of power and intimacy that have earned her positive reviews in The New York Times.

   Another artist who collages her paintings is Suzanne Howes-Stevens.  A dedicated traveler, Howes-Stevens paints gentle, warm landscapes with a feeling of great space and depth, then embeds old maps from the place she is depicting.  This may seem a bit trite, but it works.

    Mary Armstrong’s suite of works on paper in the show is  rather grandly titled “Memory of Desire:  Mapping the Venetian Lagoon,â€�  an odd juxtaposition of the sensory and the prosaic. But if you love Venice — or the idea of Venice — these works will get you with their cobalts and greens and golds and the odd effect of reddish rivers flowing into the blue-green lagoon.

   And then there is Judith Wyer, who paints quiet solitary figures amid the commotion of the city. A little hazy with subdued, washed-out colors, these people do ordinary things — walk, cross streets, ride trains — but they are intensely, individually human.

   They will remind you of Hopper.

   Finally, through Oct. 14, Robin Alexander Ltd. is presenting “Metamorphosis,â€� a multi-media show from Suzanne Benton. (Yes, I too wish artists and gallery owners came up with more imaginative titles.) There are metal sculptured masks, mono prints and works she calls Seated Sculpture and Secret Future Works.  All fascinating, if somewhat recherché.  But go to the gallery to see the fascinating art and artisan furniture that is its raison d’etre.  Much of it is simple and simply beautiful.

   

                                     Galleries are in Kent

    Ober Gallery at 14 Old Barn Road is open Friday and Saturday, noon to 5 p.m., and Sunday 1 to 4 p.m. 860 927-5030

   Bachelier Cardonsky Gallery, open weekends only from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., is at 10 North Main St. 860 927-3129

   Robin Alexander Ltd., located in The Village Barns at 5 Fulling Lane, is open Wednesday-Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Sunday from noon to 4:30 p.m. 203-376-7602

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