Connections!

The Arts Collective’s First Ever, Virtual Art Exhibition!

As the title suggests, this exhibition acknowledges the challenges we face in overcoming isolation and staying connected during a pandemic that has affected so many aspects of our lives. Just as importantly, it celebrates our creative efforts to strengthen and nurture the connections between one another as a community of artists; and to broaden our ‘collective’ connections with the wider community by sharing our artwork with you here.

We invite you to put aside some time to dive in deeply, enjoy, and reflect on the work of each artist. We also invite you to join us on Thursday, January 7, 2021 at 12 noon, for an on-line, Virtual Reception (Meeting ID: 939 8220 8847; Passcode: 143572) where you will hear from the artists themselves and have an opportunity to ask questions.

Finally, we anticipate that in ‘going virtual’, this show by the Arts Collective will have the potential to connect us with a larger audience than ever before, and we hope that you will help by sharing this exhibition with your friends and families.

You can do this by sending them this link: https://howardcenter.org/art-show/  and encouraging them to join us for the virtual reception on January 7, 2021 at 12 noon, where you can meet and speak to the artists. If you are interested in purchasing any of the artwork shown below, please contact us at artscollective@howardcenter.org

Visit the Arts Collective Watch the Video January 7 Artists Reception

Meet the Artists

Susanna Jaeger: I was drawing, painting, and using other artistic mediums as far back as I can recall, starting with watercolors, charcoal, and oils. With oils taking so long to dry, I switched to acrylics in the early 80’s while living along the High Arctic Coast of Alaska. When I had a life change around 1986, my art changed as well from abstract design and yachts, to landscapes and airplanes, as I was doing a lot of flying. I enjoy acrylics because one can slow down or speed up drying time; they’re flexible, and like watercolors can be rinsed off.

Kara Greenblott: Watercolor is my favorite medium; I just love watching how they create their own splendor by bursting and bleeding into one another unexpectedly on the page. Over the past two years, I’ve also fallen in love with ‘mark making’ using pen and ink layered on top of watercolors. I get inspiration from patterns on my baskets, wall hangings, jewelry, and other fixtures throughout my home, mostly imported from my time living in southern Africa.

Carolyn Wendell: I have a routine where I get up every morning and make my potholders, almost every day of the week. It’s like mindfulness. I feel happy and productive.

Sarah Robinson: All of my sensory pathways are involved in my creative process, and I am inspired by experience, memory, emotions, thought and understanding, but in creating my work I strive to stop thinking and feel and trust my work. Central to my work is the understanding that time is not linear, space is curved, and memory is lost and found.  There is truth and meaning in our dreams, memories, myths, and experiences.

Sarah Smith: Flowers remind me of the seasons as they come and go. Daffodils and Crocus in the Spring; and Lilies all summer and even in the Fall. Tulips let me know that Spring is here! I use watercolors, acrylics and oil pastels to paint my flowers.

Travis Nutting: By exploring humanity’s self-righteous dreamscape world, I can observe its tragic impact on the natural universe. I do not try to recreate nature in my work necessarily. The only desire is to flow alongside it, mimicking the silent chaos.

Jacob Weber: Art has been many things throughout my life: safety, self-esteem, identity, pathway to self-discovery, pride, ambition, confusion, loss, a way of giving back, a light at the end of the tunnel, a faithful friend. Currently, art is my way to meditate.

Heather Foster: I enjoy painting because of all the colors. I paint flowers and animals because I learned to draw them when I was young, and I still enjoy painting them now.

Nicholas McKennitt: My father gave me a pen and ink nearly 30 years ago, and since then, I have been working primarily in that medium. When I look at the sky and mountains, I see shapes — triangles, squares and rectangles. My art reflects how I think and how my mind works. I hope that anyone who looks at my art will take as much time to think about it as I do to draw it.

Thomas Stetson: The medium I primarily use is pen and ink. I consider myself an outsider artist, self-taught focusing on the raw and hyper detailed. The obsessive quality of my work provides me with much catharsis from the anxieties of the world, i.e. focus and the expulsion of inner demons.

Colleen Murphy: My interest is in exploring and creating environments that evoke emotion, curiosity, and surprise. I enjoy using mixed media that incorporates photographic and painted elements. My intention is to surprise myself by what I create.

Adam Forguites: I am working primarily in oil on found material. These are part of a series of 19 paintings made during the shutdown.

Eryn Sheehan: “Grasping the Intangible” was inspired by the way that hands hold shadows, for this image one hand grasps a shadow, while the other holds the solid form the shadow came from. “Blacklight Macrame” came from my desire to make a pouch. While my preference is to have my art come from either a place of meaning or serve a function, sometimes the art is the function and meaning.

Rachel Rodi: I like to use mixed media with unique materials. I enjoy experimentation utilizing my natural environment as an artist. I garner inspiration through my experiences in life that have brought me to a stronger relationship with the natural world.

Stephen Tall: The way I approach a piece is to consider that it’s already complete — just waiting for me to discover. With no specific portrait in mind, my initial applications of a medium are akin to my first conversations with a new person; they may be cautious and seem not to add up to start with, but like getting to know someone, a portrait remarkably coalesces from these seemingly random marks. When I’m through, what I have is familiar to me like someone I’d known all along.

Anne Averyt: Despite the ravages of a global pandemic, life pulsates.  In Vermont that means apple orchards are open for business — with the reminder of covid protocol.  In my photos I have tried to capture this small slice of “life as usual” during a time when nothing is really “usual”.