SAXTONS RIVER — The work of award-winning colored pencil artist Liz Guzynski will be on display at Main Street Arts from Nov. 15 through Dec. 28 in a show titled “Seeing It Through.”
An opening reception will be held Thursday, Nov. 15, from 5:30 to 7 p.m.
A resident of Bellows Falls, Guzynski is a latecomer to the medium.
“I began my art journey a bit late in life,” she said in a news release. “After finishing a Ph.D., I found that academic life was not going to satisfy my internal howling.”
Picking up an old box of colored pencils on a whim, she started messing around and found she loved not only the realistic effects, but also the meditative process of slowly building layers of color.
After pursuing pencils for several years, she entered the Colored Pencil Society of America International Exhibition in 2012 and won highest honors.
“Meanwhile, colored pencil spurred me to explore other art media,” she said. “While studying botanical illustration at UNC-Chapel Hill, I discovered new tools - including watercolor, acrylics, and inks - with which I could describe the exquisite life forms all around me.”
Guzynski says her job as an artist is to celebrate the world's variety, complexity, and fragility.
“I'm driven to combine the story-telling bias of illustration with the gestural language of painting and the pure emotion of colors in order to explore the kinship between all things and beings,” she said.
Her portraits of plants and animals try to capture the sense of personhood normally granted only to humans. Her “Chickens in the Parlor” series is a light-hearted way to “demonstrate the deep subjectivity of other animals.”
Conversely, when she paints people, she tries to lend them the same dignity and wisdom she sees in chickens and other critters.