BELLOWS FALLS — Canal Street Art Gallery, 23 Canal St., presents the gallery's first solo show, “Listen to the Wind,” by artist and social anthropologist Charles Norris-Brown. The show will be up through June 15.
All are invited to attend the opening reception with the artist on Bellows Falls 3rd Friday Gallery Night, May 17, from 5 to 8 p.m.
“Listen to the Wind” features Norris-Brown's original paintings and drawings from two of his illustrated books, Did Tiger Take the Rain? and Thunder Basin.
Did Tiger Take the Rain? was first published by Green Writers Press in 2016, and is now offered on Creative Commons license by Pratham Books, India's largest nonprofit children's book publishing house.
According to a news release, Norris-Brown's concerns for the endangered tigers and the villagers who live between the densely-populated plains of Uttar Pradesh, India, and the hills of Nepal, is what led him to create Tiger.
Inspired by several journeys to India to do fieldwork, Norris-Brown created the book to explain how their shared plight was caused by human-wrought ecological changes. The original watercolor illustrations are in the exhibit.
The artist's second book, Thunder Basin, a graphic novel geared toward older children, is a work in progress. Studies and finished work, along with a selection of draft pages, will reveal the artist's process.
In Thunder Basin, an American girl loses her beloved cell phone in the forest. Trickster Coyote picks it up and runs away with it - leading her to explore the forest and ultimately herself. This quest unfolds in the Thunder Basin along the west flank of Mount Mansfield in northern Vermont.
In his artist statement, Norris-Brown says his passion and mission is “to produce something that could have a lasting effect on the people who will become the caretakers of our world - perhaps our most important audience: the children.”