November 4 - 19, 2023 | Reception: Saturday, November 11, 3 - 5 pm
Morpeth Contemporary presents an exhibition featuring the work of Tracy Everly and Carol Pelletier, two artists inspired to capture fleeting visions.
Tracy Everly’s paintings, including Pennsylvania landscapes, building façades, and still lives of flowers and fruit, are born of deep observation but rendered in an impressionist manner. As she puts it, “I don't aim to capture one static moment or every detail. Instead, I observe, paint, and distill different moments into a simplified form that is ultimately meant to capture the remains or accumulation of an experience as it slips away.”
Like the New Hope Impressionists that inspired her, each piece begins by finding something that attracts her and brings a feeling of excitement. Though a plein air painter by nature, she sometimes uses drawings and photos; even still, her work is about the art of observation. “What I enjoy most about making art is that it invites me to pay attention to the world around me deeply and personally. Painting requires deep focus and being in the moment, which I find enjoyable.”
Everly, who left a corporate job as an editor to focus on her own art, is largely self-taught. She received an Award of Distinction from the American Impressionist Society and two Bucks County Resident Artist Awards from the Bucks County Plein Air Festival, among others. She lives and works in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Carol Pelletier draws inspiration from a specific moment: twilight. As she describes it, twilight “is a time of reflection and transition; it is where the light greets the darkness, with a short pause. Color becomes intensified, and the structure of the sky and ground are in flux, creating visual and emotional depth. Twilight holds in it a feeling of two worlds - a beginning and an end."
Pelletier describes a daily ritual of visiting and revisiting environments that are open and hold reflective light on Cape Ann (on the north shore of Boston) and coastal Maine. As she says, “This practice helps to embed emotional space within a place I love. These places hold memories and emotions within the light and structure of the land, every time I visit.”
To capture the color and light, her primary medium is oil paint mixed with a cold wax that she makes by bleaching the beeswax — given to her by a local beekeeper — and suspending it in refined linseed oil. The cold wax medium holds the light beautifully and when mixed with oil paint provides a distinct luminosity that helps capture this time of day. “We live in a world in which we have perceived the fleeting comings and goings, the days, weeks, months and years,” Pelletier reflects. “We also have had moments that are frozen, and our recall of those moments help to magically recycle our relationship to time and space.”
Carol Pelletier currently lives and works on the Northshore of Boston and a small island on mid coast, Maine. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally, including Speedwell Contemporary in Maine, the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in NYC, Boecker Contemporary in Germany, Centre d'Art Contemporain in Metz France, Saint-Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Julie Heller East, Provincetown, and Soren Christensen in New Orleans. Her work has earned support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center; she is a Salzburg Global Fellow.
