BRATTLEBORO-Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts, 181–183 Main St., welcomes everyone to "Painter's Ethos," a group exhibit featuring paintings by David Brewster, Jim Giddings, Petria Mitchell, David Rohn, Donald Saaf, Joseph Salerno, James Urbaska, and Dan Welden. The exhibit opens with an artist reception Saturday, April 19, from 5 to 7 p.m. The exhibition continues through June 15.
The eight artists in "Painter's Ethos," in spite of obvious differences, share the ethos - the culture, the joy of painting - as they search for beauty through gesture, memory, observation and intuition, said organizers in a news release.
"As I work, I am looking at abstract arrangements in the overlapping puddles that have their own flow and assertions," writes watercolorist Rohn.
Mitchell's landscapes are of places not visited but invented, created from observation and visual memory. Writer Edward Lucie-Smith describes Brewster's plein air paintings as "a record of one man's exhilarated dialogue with the natural world, and his spontaneous record of his own presence within it."
For artists, "painting represents liberation from a world of expectation and judgement," wrote organizers.
Painting is an effective way of condensing events and emotions over time into a single moment, writes Saaf. He approaches his compositions "like a quilt, or even a stained glass window (fashioned with) luminous forms and shapes."
For Giddings and Welden, they say, the pleasure is found in the physicality of working the surface with ink, pencil, or collage, pushing paint around.
For more information about the exhibit, call 802-251-8290 or visit mitchellgiddingsfinearts.com. The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.