External Exhibitions

Trystan Bates, mixed media collage 

Bates is constantly looking for and collecting moments, images and sounds that are inspiring enough to be developed into multidisciplinary bodies of work. He enjoys exploring the history and behavior of human beings and often incorporate aspects of storytelling, social behavior, global mythology and ritual in his work. 

By limiting the elements he employs in his pieces to shapes and gestural marks, the compositions provide just enough information to suggest a narrative but not enough to force a meaning upon the viewer. This creates a situation in which one can gain a clearer understanding of the image and its meaning the longer they spend in meditation, looking and bonding with it. 

The process of collecting, abstracting and rearranging information into visual symbolic forms is where his process starts. These forms are then utilized to translate aspects of the human experience into poetic compositions that engage with the public in a playful, optimistic way. 

Jay Ashman, watercolors 

After retiring from teaching at UVM and with plans to travel frequently, Ashman found himself looking for a creative outlet that was more portable than the stained glass work he had done off and on over the years. When visiting art galleries he found himself drawn to watercolor paintings. The first time he mixed pigment with water and watched the color flow and blend with other colors on the paper, he was hooked. 

Ashman considers himself fortunate to have found some excellent instructors here in Vermont, and with the arrival of Covid in 2020, outstanding instructors from all over the world began offering online classes. For the past four years he has taken many Zoom classes and in each was able to pick up something that enhanced his skills. He considers himself still very much a work in progress, however, and knows that he always will be such. He has called Vermont home for 50 years and is still in awe of its natural beauty. He is drawn to try to capture something of that beauty in his paintings. He finds the barns that dot our valleys and hillsides irresistible. Having grown up near the ocean and had a boat on Lake Champlain for the past 17 years, waterscapes, boats, and lighthouses are among his favorite subjects.

Casey Blanchard (pictured)

Primarily a self-taught artist, Casey explores her experiences through the engaging and often unpredictable print medium of monoprinting. She is most interested in the spiritual aspects that emerge in the image, particularly relating to how we live in the world and how the world lives in us. In the beginning, the work may be a search for answers, but in the end it's more about being here without them.

Casey Blanchard was born in Greenwich, CT in 1953. She lives in Shelburne, VT with her husband, Dan Cox, and their daughter, Julia Cox. Her artwork is found on the walls of health care facilities, private residential collections, corporate offices, the hospitality industry, on web designs, and various published materials.

Johanne Durocher Yordan    

Johanne is a Burlington based artist who works out of her studio on Pine Street. She was born in Quebec, Canada, but has lived most of her life in Vermont. It was not until 1998 that Johanne began committing herself to her artwork and finding her own voice. She studied at the University of Vermont and has since developed a diverse body of work that is a testament to her ability to succeed as an independent artist. Creating work that fits a variety of audiences, while always building upon her unique self-taught style, is the secret to her success. Johanne has always been the type of person who explores on her own, tapping into the unknown and developing her own fashion and techniques. Many of her paintings include found or collected items which add depth and meaning to combine form and function to her work. Her abstract work captures her emotions and represents her unique style and expression. Johanne has exhibited her work extensively throughout Vermont in both solo and group exhibitions over the past 12 years.

Cameron Schmitz

Cameron Schmitz grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut and spent idle time in her youth drawing. Encouraged by two artistic parents, including her mother who is also a painter, she learned at a very early age the joy and satisfaction of participating in the visual arts. 
Schmitz holds a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting & Drawing from the University of New Hampshire, in addition to studying Art and Art History at Studio Arts Center International in Florence, Italy. 

Following a month-long artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2006, Schmitz moved to Vermont after discovering Vermont's rugged landscape to be uniquely inspirational. Now located in the Brattleboro area, Schmitz actively exhibits her work regionally and nationally. Her work has been featured at Fitchburg Art Museum's biannual exhibition, Ne England/New Talent, Green Mountain College, Kyoto Seika University in Japan, Emory University, Northern Arizona University Art Museum, and Rogue Space in Chelsea, New York. Her work is represented by The Drawing Room Art Gallery in Cos Cob, CT and Furchgott Sourdiffe in Shelburne, VT, and she is an artist member of the Copley Society of Art in Boston. In addition to her painting practice, Schmitz is also the Gallery Curator of The Drawing Room Art Gallery and teaches painting at the River Gallery School in Brattleboro, VT.

Carl Rubino
 
I strive to create unique interpretive, impressionistic and abstract images that relate my personal vision of or reaction to the subject matter before me.   Before I even pull out the camera I try to experience all that my subject reveals, or even what it makes illusive – not just the obvious, like the literal view, the colors, texture and patterns - but the less obvious sensual aspects, the energy and the “feeling” that it conveys. Whether in landscape, abstract, street photography, fine art nude or whatever else captures my interest, I seek to find and interpret life’s visual symphonies, one click at a time. 

I feel that to a large extent my photographs consist of three different points of view: the raw material that is the literal subject matter of the image that my camera captures; what I see, sense, and work to portray when I interpret that subject; and what the viewer sees when looking at the image on the wall.  Those may be three very distinct views of what is essentially rooted in the same thing.   That, to me, is stimulating art.  And that is a great part of what draws me to photography.

Jeff Schneiderman 

Jeff Schneiderman works as a wedding, portrait and fine art photographer in Williston, VT.  He has been taking photographs for over 35 years, traveled extensively throughout the U.S. and the world and has made Vermont his home for the last 27 years. Patterns are a major theme in Jeff’s work as he is fascinated with the designs in nature how they are reflected in things manmade.  More of Jeff's work can be seen at: www.jeffschneiderman.com."

Krista Cheney

Krista Cheney is a native Vermonter, currently living in St. George, Vermont. She studied English Literature and Agricultural Economics at the University of Vermont. She has studied photography since 2003, taking classes and workshops at local venues and the Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine.

Carolyn Enz-Hack

Carolyn Enz-Hack's work includes painting, sculpture, and scenery design. While she has spent most of her life on a farm she holds a degree in theatrical design from Rutgers University and has spent years designing for the theatre. Her rural sensibility is informed by themes explored in ancient theatrical and religious literature, and by developments in cross-disciplinary Science. Each piece is an attempt to process the exterior world through an internal lens. Her most recent solo exhibitions have been at the Castleton Downtown Gallery in Rutland, Vermont, and Creare Inc. and the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center both in Lebanon, New Hampshire. She is the recipient of a Vermont Arts Endowment Award, a painting merit award from the Chaffee Center for the Arts, a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and her work has been selected for exhibition in regional and nationally competitive shows.

Erinn Simon

Erinn Simon is a fiber artist and yarnbomber. She crochets tapestries, toys, baby mobiles, vegetables, baked goods, blankets, scarves for trees, and the occasional bloodthirsty zombie cupcake. Her work has appeared in group shows in Burlington, Seattle, and Australia and she ships her one of a kind creations to customers around the world. She lives in the Old North End of Burlington with her husband and three kids. You can find her on facebook as Callie Callie Jump Jump.

Erika Lawlor Schmidt, mixed media print chine colle (Blue Path & Mary Fletcher; pictured)

Schmidt’s work is about the assimilation of observation and experience of the body, psyche and spiritual life force, and finding connections the world around us. She most often works in 'series' arriving through a collage sensibility where fragments, images and symbolic elements are integrated fused layered in order to capture a momentary glimpse, thought or view. A view that originates in a belief she shares with Eastern philosophies, in that the world is made up of a complex web of interrelating parts, where the division of nature into separate objects is not fundamental, rather fluid and ever-changing in character, a view that contains time and change as essential features. Schmidt uses a variety of materials and sources in her work and creates time-based performance media as well. The integration of mediums is essential to expressing a search for balance within ambiguous and incongruent experience. Key visual elements are repletion, rhythm and pattern. Process and ritual are also important to reflecting upon the intrinsic circular nature of all things. Through her work, she locates and reveals wide-ranged yet fragile connections within co-existing systems. This becomes a means toward discovering that in order to achieve unity, one must avoid separating the elements.

Ursprung is an expression for the source from where everything emerges, a term that aptly describes this series of monotypes. The process was a way for Schmidt to explore her visual interpretation for meditation practice with a mantra.


Todd Cummings, digital illustrations (Blue path)

As a native Vermonter, Cummings loves spending time outdoors during all seasons, hiking, paddling, camping, skiing, and exploring. When not working in his studio or sharing his work at an art show he can be found rambling the backcountry of his home state seeking inspiration in nature. His work celebrates the wild, natural places of Vermont and New England and all that nature offers the mind, body, and soul, and he loves sharing these places through his art.

Having studied illustration, graphic design, and art history at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, he discovered the possibilities of digital illustration while working as a graphic designer for the majority of his professional career. His technique is a fusion of photography and illustration. Using his camera, he gathers visual documentation of places he loves. Back in his studio, he uses these reference photos, digital drawing tools, and software to create modern illustrated, travel-style art prints that reveal the essence of a place through his unique vision and experience. He considers his style to be modern landscape realism inspired by nature first and foremost, American landscape painting, traditional Japanese printmaking, and the vintage travel poster genre.


Peter Given, oil on canvas (McClure 4)

Given finds that, though he considers himself an amateur painter, as a retiree he now has the time and inclination to create more serious artwork. He has a long history of exposure to art and painting through his mother, who was a professional watercolorist and whose classes he began attending at the age of 10. Watercolor was his go-to medium for many years, but he rarely painted and took a long hiatus as he focused on his family and professional life. He began painting again in 2018, taking lessons in watercolor and acrylic and attending workshops in oil landscape and plein air painting. He thoroughly enjoys the challenge of rendering a painting that captures the moment, especially light and shadows, and gets immense joy from capturing the emotional feeling of a place and a time.


Jordan Douglas, photographs (Shepard Patrick Hub 3 & Healing Garden)

The photographs in this exhibition are fragments, extracted from a storied city and its vibrant culture in January of 2015. Douglas was particularly inspired by the dense neighborhoods of Central Havana–with their crumbling layers of history and the boisterous rhythms of people, music, songbirds, and pre-Revolution car engines. He was graciously received by the Cubans he encountered in the sunny streets and mazes of apartments, alleys and courtyards.

All of the shots were captured on black-and-white film, of varying speeds, and lith-printed in the darkroom in limited batches. Lith printing is an alternative development technique that causes an explosion of the image grain and a shift in color toward warm brown tones. No two prints are the same. The images were printed on Forte Polywarmtone paper, last made in Hungary nearly 20 years ago.


Kathleen Fleming, mixed media on panel (Breast Care Center)

Fleming’s mixed media paintings are inspired by the Vermont landscape and celebrate both the wonder and complexity of life. For her, painting is the continual process of paying attention. When she remembers to slow down, she notices the beauty, laughter, and moments of simple joy that are all around her: the sun dipping over the horizon; crisp leaves under her feet; Mary Oliver’s wild geese overhead. These ordinary things inform her work and compel her to return again and again to the easel.

She loves the little joys and surprises that happen while she’s painting - the way a warm yellow pops next to a cool blue; the drips that can alter a whole composition. Working with the mistakes and the happenstance pushes her to find solutions. How can she create calm from chaos? Beauty from mud? It’s all a metaphor for life - to embrace the messy complicated world that is all around and turn it into something beautiful and true. And, hopefully, have some fun along the way.

Mike Sipe, photographs

The Lake Champlain region is Sipe’s unparalleled muse; the beauty of the lake, skies, mountains, valley and the people enjoying its splendor. He feels he doesn’t have to travel the world to find world-class beauty as it is here in his own back yard, and finding the area’s essence is exhilarating to him. He loves to capture vistas with just the right light accenting a center of interest, the effects of natural elements and motion, and a wide tonal range.

Sipe’s objective is to use natural light in capturing images, by being in the right place at the right time with the right equipment, evoking a magical light and an interesting confluence of elements. His goal is to reach out to an audience that is also captivated by the beauty of the region and the exquisiteness just outside our doorsteps.