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The public is invited to join the artists at an opening reception on Saturday, June 1, from 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. in the Picker Room.
The Camden Public Library is pleased to show a group exhibit titled “Above Us Only Sky” in the Picker Room Gallery during the month of June*. In the spirit of “UMVA Members and Friends,” the exhibitors include three UMVA (Union of Visual Artists) member artists, Mary Brooking of Westbrook, Jane Gilbert of Orland and Key West, and Deb Vendetti of South Hope, along with invited guest Dee Peppe of Rockland.
The exhibition’s title, “Above Us Only Sky,” refers to collective dialogues with light and sky during the group’s stay at the Baldwin House on Monhegan Island. The exhibition also includes images collected in other locations, inspired by Monhegan as “muse.”
Mary Brooking uses many layers of paint, frequently obliterating certain elements as the paintings progress, “challenging myself always to distill and reduce my original reaction to its exact essence and nothing more, my paintings are spaces meant to test the balance between reality and abstraction”.
After a career as an Art Therapist and a Fine Art Photographer, Jane Gilbert returned to her first love, painting, and now paints full time in Key West and Maine. “For about twenty years, I’ve been meeting my friend and fellow artist Deb Vendetti on Monhegan Island for a week of painting, photographing, and simply enjoying nature. In recent years, we’ve been joined by other artists, and just last summer were able to experience the sweeping panorama of sky, ocean, Manana Island and the mainland from the Baldwin Cottage”.
Invited guest and UMVA ‘friend”, Photographer Dee Peppe will exhibit images that are inspired by the color of light after sunset, including both natural and artificial lights. Peppe is a longtime local, fine-art photographer and professor at various Maine colleges. She has led photographic travel workshops to France, Belize, and Guatemala and has been teaching photography in the workshop format since 1990.
UMVA member Deb Vendetti, who organized this exhibition, remarks, “The importance of quiet time, in a supported and unstructured format and in the fellowship of other artists, immersing oneself in a place, these are the moments of grace when one is removed from distraction and invited to enter the dialog”.
The Union of Maine Visual Artists is a non-profit organization that promotes and advocates for the visual arts, artists, and all arts supporters. Learn more about UMVA at www.theumva.org. To stay up to date with the Midcoast chapter, check out their Facebook page.
*The Picker Room hosts meetings and library events and is not always open for viewing. Please call ahead or check our website calendar to see what’s happening daily.