Last Updated on August 17, 2022
A quiet warm summer afternoon is the perfect time to come to The Gallery. If it’s your first visit this month, you will want to see what Kay Buck, our Artist of the Month for August, has given us. Kay, whose work before she came to Charlestown was in the financial sector, mainly used her analytical left brain. Then she retired and set some new goals: start doing yoga, walk every day, learn to paint and, by doing so, activate the creative right brain. Here you will see the current results of those creative efforts in her delicate, lovely watercolors.
Lately, Kay has been experimenting with “negative painting,” a technique she has used on some of the paintings in this exhibit. In “negative painting,” the artist outlines a shape (such as a tree, a leaf, a mountain) and fades the paint around that shape into a darker color, working with negative space. Her challenge to viewers of this show – see if you can discover in which of the paintings she has used this technique. Whether you succeed or not, you will be repaid by the pleasure of looking deeply at these paintings.
And while you are contemplating Kay Buck’s exhibit, take a closer look at other work in The Gallery that you have perhaps already seen. You may have given each of them a glance, or walked on too rapidly without taking in all that they offered.
Look again, as I did the other day, at an intricate drawing in pencil by Carol Davidson called “A Space ODD-yssey.” It is full of tiny secrets that will make you smile to yourself and want to point them out to somebody else.
Other works full of fascinating details are nearby. For example ”Village Scenes,” an ink print and gouache by James Edward Jones; “Pow Wow,” a photograph by Lynn Kochis, and a collage constructed from color slides by Jackie Lipsky. All of them require more than a passing look.
All are waiting to be seen. Our Gallery, just across from the Fireside Restaurant, is open every day, a never-ending source of visual interest and delight.
Jody Primoff, for The Sunburst, August 2022