FOREST BATHING | A Group Exhibition About Nature

Katie DeGroot: Katie DeGroot’s watercolors are odes to woodlands and flora.  Gnarled branches, twisting twigs, and shaggy moss are among her favorite subjects.  Discoveries on walks along property in upstate New York and from hikes through unkept forests allow Katie to observe the beauty in ordinarily unnoticed fallen limbs or to study fungi growing within a decomposing trunk.  These are the treasures DeGroot uncovers and paints.  Sometimes she hauls something special or particularly captivating home, bringing it into her studio to paint from life. Whether from memory or on-hand, she captures nature's beauty, decay, and all the peculiarities in her work.

Gabriella Kirby: Gabriella Kirby holds a BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as an AA with High Distinction in Design from the Art Institute of Portland. Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries throughout the Hudson Valley and NYC, as well as Portland, OR; Vancouver, WA; Laguna Beach, CA; London, England; and projects include a public art earthwork in Ashland, OR; and installation artist contributor at The Museum of Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA. Her paintings have been featured in Vanity Fair London. Her work is held in the private collection at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She lives and works in upstate New York.

Anne Leith: Anne Leith is a painter of places, both plein-air and imaginary. The landscape is integral to her practice, and the personal immersion into a greater whole is her overarching aesthetic.  There is a curious vibrating balance between the recognizable image, its abstraction, and that moment of achieving a beautiful painted surface. Often incorporating metallic leaf into the rich, gestural, oil-painted surface, Leith creates a dynamic other-worldly dimension.  Reflecting color and light, shifting from light to dark the gold or silver metal evokes traditional religious icons and a futuristic ever-shifting fourth dimension as rivers appear to flow and clouds rise and unfurl. This balance between the outer and inner worlds and the passion channeled through the powerful, gestural brushwork dissolves any separation between the self and the world.

Robin McClintock: A native New Yorker who moved to rural West Virginia halfway through her career, Robin McClintock conjures intricate, elegant yet heavily wrought works on paper that weave the chaos of spatial memory, vestigial industrial architecture, and nature into an uncanny personal order from that dichotomy.

Laura Von Rosk: Laura Von Rosk creates small-scale paintings constructed by mixing elements of landscape and natural forms with memory and imagination. Forms are repeated, emphasized, and manipulated to create tension between the “imagined” and the real world. The natural forms and phenomena in Von Rosk’s work come from what she sees and from a deep visual memory system of all the places she has traveled to or visited throughout her life. These particular landscapes are places for reflection and solitude where the artist has filtered out many of the physical realities of a place, emphasizing instead the emotional connection she feels to a space. These works don’t show where Von Rosk has been, but represent a new place to go.

Martin Weinstein: Martin Weinstein's paintings reference the earth and the cosmos in perfect harmony. This balanced meeting of the inner and outer worlds are due to Weinstein’s technique of painting on 3-5 interlocking sheets of clear acrylic panels over a period of months to years. The clarity of these layered paintings only becomes apparent with the joinery of each incomplete translucent layer that records only a part of the visual story. Seen together as overlapping panels, the optical illusion of reality is perfect; yet, slid away from one another, each panel holds only a titillating fragment of the whole.