PUTNEY-The NXT Gallery presents "Landscapes," an exhibition of paintings by artist Hannah Harvester. The exhibit runs Saturday, Aug. 17, through Nov. 10.
Harvester is known both for her rural landscapes and portraits of children and families. She is also a teacher of drawing, pastel painting, and printmaking for adults and children.
"I paint in oils and soft pastels, en plein air in rural western Massachusetts or in my studio by the South River," she writes in her artist statement. "I do whatever it takes to make the painting sing as beautifully as what's before me - to do justice to nature's glory, or the unique beauty of a human face."
While Harvester can't include the sensory input of her environs as she paints - the sound of birds, the feel of a passing breeze - instead, she says, "I reach for colors a little brighter, a little more saturated than what I see, layering thicker and softer pigments over translucent washes to show all the hints of color in a shadow or a sunlit plane."
Harvester says she loves painting on gessoed paper because "the uneven surface captures pigment strokes and breaks up color, contributing to a feeling of life, air, and light. I scribble and scrub in my underpainting, staying fast and loose to get some of the world's living energy onto my surface." She works in oils, using spatulas and palette knives with thick paint.
She also says she likes to emphasize the color temperature she sees "because I've found it to be the best way to capture time of day, light conditions, even the heat or coolness in the air. Cooler colors become just a bit cooler; warms become warmer, often in the underpainting phase, to establish the importance of light and shadow to the piece."
Harvester says she paints in the tradition of Hans Hoffman, prioritizing color over line and drawing, and finds this brings the finished work closer to the experience of being in the world. "I paint what I see and find beautiful as an act of love for the world, for the very fact that we see in color, that we have the capacity to apprehend beauty at all. It might have been otherwise. We might not have evolved to see and respond to beauty in nature, or even in one another. That we do is a gift, a miracle."
Educated at Swarthmore College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harvester's earlier life as an academic, theater artist, public folklorist, and teacher took her to New Mexico, Poland, Guatemala, North Carolina, and New York's North Country. At 28, she answered a lifelong calling to paint and began studying under Kasarian Dane at St. Lawrence University.
The exhibition will continue through Nov. 10. The Next Stage Gallery, at 15 Kimball Hill in Putney, is open during events and by appointment with the artist or by contacting Next Stage at [email protected] or 802-451-0053.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.