Second Sunday Demonstration
May 18, 2025 11:30am -1:00pm
(re-scheduled from May 11)
Pamela duLong Williams
First Impressions
Pamela duLong Williams began her lifetime study of art as a young girl in her father’s studio. Later she studied privately with various Boston based artists. After college Pamela worked in NYC as a designer /illustrator. The in 1974, she began to pursue her love for painting and developed her love for painting portraits in the Impressionist style. Over the years Pamela’s style has continued to develop and evolve and shows her love of the portrait, as well as the places and things she finds inspiring.
Pamela’s devotion to her craft is easily seen in her completed works. Additionally, her students provide creative motivation as she paints all over the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Italy as well as her weekly classes and workshops.
Her 2nd Sunday demonstration will begin with developing the best composition for her idea while laying out the drawing and pallet. She will then demonstrate how to “knock in” the painting while sharing her thought process as she proceed to execute the painting making decisions that strengthen her first impression.
This event is free and open to the public,
Body of Work Exhibit
May 2025
Bill Mensching
Subtlety of Light
A primary focus of these paintings is the subtle play of light on our natural world. They explore moments at the beginning or end of day when the sun illuminates landscapes and defines surfaces. This light may create gradual shifts of intensity and temperature, cast strong raking shadows, mirror off a water surface or reflect across a field of snow.
Painting landscapes connects me to a place and allows me to translate that experience into visual form. My chosen medium is primarily oil paint and canvas. My process begins with being in a place, gazing at a scene, and realizing it is one I want to stop at, understand, and engage with. I will often resolve a small painting in a few sessions in the field, while larger works take repeated trips to the same site, and often with further work in my studio.
From roughing out a drawing to the final strokes of paint, each step can be challenging but also joyful and fulfilling: finding the graceful curves of branches, the color complements of light and shadow on a stone, the overlapping color fields in water, the temperature and softness of the atmosphere, the dry cold stillness of snow on a frozen river as sunlight begins to slant across it. The more I look, the more I find contrast, balance, and harmony. I try to echo this awareness on my canvas.
Body of Work Exhibit
May 2025
Jane Zeeb McDonnell
Deconstructed Watercolors
I am a creative person. That means I paint, I draw, I design things. I always feel my best when I am creating something and sharing it with others. While I have worked in many mediums, I still find watercolor the most intriguing.
I mostly paint landscapes. Living in Maine, I am often rewarded with spectacular visions of nature, light and shadow. They became my watercolor challenges. But something was missing.I needed more.
Being a watercolor artist for quite a few years now, I’ve collected quite a pile of unfinished or unsatisfying paintings. While not frame worthy, many of these paintings have some part to them that makes them worth saving.
While trying to overcome a creative block, I came up with the idea to cut up, or, with the help of a variety of paper punches, cut out, pieces of these old, unsatisfying paintings. I then reposition them onto other, not frame worthy, paintings, creating a new, much more exciting version of the previous works.
Not quite being watercolor any more, nor traditional collage, I created the term reconstructed watercolor. This new process is generating an endless flow of ideas for me.
Theme Show
May 2025
In “Plein” Sight
“Just try going outside and painting things on the spot! All sorts of things happen then.”
– Vincent Van Gogh
Bring us what you have been working on as the weather warms or even something you created last year!
Monthly theme shows are open to all artists – see our SAA 2025 Theme Show brochure (PDF) and entry form (PDF).
Second Friday Receptions
May 9, 2025 4-6pm
Exeter Town Hall Gallery
For our Members Art Show, Primavera The Art of Spring.
Music by: Dacha and Sava Thurber
May 9, 2025 5-7pm
SAA Gallery
For our Body of Work and theme shows.
Music by: Ben Baldwin and Kent Allyn
Receptions are FREE and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. Meet your local artists!
2025 Plein Air Sessions
- May 13 Newcastle Commons –10 am to 1 pm
- May 19 Home of Judi Churchill, Durham – 1pm to 3 pm
- June 2 Odiorne State Park – 10am to 1pm
- June 10 Annick’s Garden, Exeter–10am to 1 pm, June 23 Home gardens of Terry Cook, Newfields – 10 to 1 pm
More venues to come.
Second Sunday Demo Videos
Past demo’s recorded by Exeter TV
- Jane McDonnell – October 2024 – The Painter’s Process ~ Overcoming Creative Block
- Dustan Knight – August 2024 – Lets paint some Big Loose and Easy Florals in Watercolor
- Bill Paarlberg – May 2024 – Watercolor