Women's Work at Kent Art Association

The Kent Art Association on South Main Street in Kent is currently exhibiting its March Women’s Invitational Show featuring large portfolios of work from six female area artists — Theresa Bates, Deborah Chabrian, Erin Cordle, Charlotte Holden, Anda Styler, and Mary Terrizzi.

Kent Art Association is one Connecticut’s oldest art associations, founded in 1923 by a group of Kent painters, including George Laurence Nelson, an early 20th-century portrait painter who lived in Seven Hearths, a Pre-Revolutionary manor in Kent that now acts as a museum for the Kent Historical Society. The equally historic non-profit association's goal has been providing emerging artists in the area a venue so that they might gain audience recognition.

Highlights of the Women's Invitational included the realist watercolor botanicals by the recent Rhode Island School of Design graduate Charlotte Holden. With her use of open white space and free-floating composition, the young painter's work, which takes up the majority of the second floor of the exhibition, bears similarity to that of Rory McEwen, the 20th-century Scottish master of floral illustration, whose almost three-dimensional glowing tulips are held in museums across the U.K. Holden is certainly prolific at a young age, working directly with consumers through Etsy, an open-market e-commerce platform, where she sells her botanicals as cards, prints, and stickers.

The Women's Invitational Show is on view through April 2.