RSBense
Isolation and Inspiration
These hauntingly familiar, otherworldly pieces were born out of the isolation experienced from the recent pandemic. The stay-at-home guidelines gave me lots of time to create. While I was cleaning and organizing my studio, I stumbled across some strangely sized ultra-high quality watercolor paper. In keeping with my New England roots, I just had to find a way to use it. Thus, this series of long and skinny landscapes was born.
As usual, I am engaged in the process and not really doing any deep thinking. I am just playing around. I taped off a section of the paper for the “real” art and used the sides to test my colors. I was being particular about the testing, making deliberate areas of color. I was taking a class with Doris Rice, and she saw it and said, “Those look like remarques.” I quipped “What is a remarque?” It turns out that artists will sometimes paint in the margins of the print, thereby creating a remarque. “Cool,” I thought, and I kept doing my color studies on the sides of the pieces. I then took the body of work to the framer, and I have to thank Rob at The Gilded Edge Frame Shop for telling me to keep these remarques in the framed piece. I am sure I would have covered them up!
Judy Arnold
For Granted
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. So Joni Mitchell told us, and as I age, those words ring even truer. Change is constant and inevitable. But what once progressed at a sluggish creep, now assaults us at an epic pace. The cost and availability of goods. The state of our union. Restaurant survival. Ease of travel. Sustainability of our planet. Shifting politics. The past few years have raised the curtain on so much that I once took for granted. It makes my head spin.
When a building and business that I loved and depended on was suddenly lost to fire, personal change was thrust upon me, leading to a new appreciation of the every day places in my world. I began to look at everything around me with fresh eyes, and questioned my assumptions that familiar sights would be everlasting. They won’t.
Basements of some Strawbery Banke Museum buildings are sustaining water damage from the rising sea and crumbling. Almost thirty 80-year old trees in a Portsmouth neighborhood are being removed to install new sidewalks. Large residential developments are rising like mushrooms all over Southern New Hampshire.
Each day I pass by pastoral scenes, antique barns, quirky shops and centuries old homes. I practice appreciation of those sights which bring me joy — and I take nothing for granted.
Judy Arnold is a proud lifelong NH resident and UNH graduate. Retired from an engineering career, she now pursues buying and selling antiques. Her photography journey began with some blurry B&W Instamatic snapshots in the 1960s.
During the 2020 Lockdown, Judy found the time and inspiration to begin more serious study and practice of photography. She enjoys capturing New England scenes, details of the nautical lifestyle and new takes on the mundane.
Combining her passions for antiques and photography has led to a growing collection of vintage camera lenses. Her favorite is a 1930s Russian collapsible Fed 50mm lens with a red star on the lens cap. The timeless images from Polaroid-style film are a growing area of interest. One of Judy’s images can be found in the Portsmouth 400th Anniversary 2023 calendar.
Writing about first prize winner Sydney Thomas’s oil painting, ‘At the Mirror II,’ Chris says, “Though I was initially taken with the unusual, deftly executed composition of the figure and her surroundings, it was the subtle touch of where the figure’s attention is anchored that charmed me the most. For although beauty is the central motif, it’s the beauty of the flowers the figure is admiring, rather than her own image, which adds a gentle lyrical twist and suggests a larger narrative outside the frame.”
Second prize winner, oil and cold wax painting “Purple Mountain” by Lynn Krumholz, “smolders with ominous intensity that activates the whole work,” he wrote. “The near monochrome stark contrasts and subtle gradations of dark and light have a direct, elemental quality that pulls the viewer further and further into contemplation.”
Kevin Talbot’s photograph on canvas ‘Mount Washington Observatory’ which won third prize “jumped off the wall at me because of its stark darkness, unusual color modulations and striking drama. The overall strangeness of the image rather than being off-putting, slowly reveals the unfamiliar character that our world assumes at its extremes.”
Honorable Mention winner oil painting “The Sheep” by Adele Buchwald “reflects the artist’s sensitive and intuitive ability to translate the life of animals into art,” says Chris. “These three amigos have an abundance of character that never becomes excessive, reminding us that the remarkable awaits under the surface of the everyday. Lovely rendering and tonalities in the rustic setting as well.”
All the leaves in the other Honorable Mention winner acrylic and watercolor monoprint, ‘Letting Go’ by Heather Crowley, are hand painted with acrylic directly on the actual leaf and then printed onto the watercolor paper. Chris says, “I felt a strong sense of spirituality in this mandala-like composition. The addition of fiery braids adds intriguing intensity to a subtle vision of the Tree of Life.”
