Neighbors and friends, fellow artists James Secor and Glen Coburn Hutcheson both live on Montpelier’s Prospect Street — two doors apart. Both are members of Front Gallery. Both are bold with color in their multi-layered works. Both draw inspiration from their local surroundings including streets and buildings of Montpelier, Hubbard Park, views from their homes.
“View From Prospect Street,” a two-person show featuring paintings by Secor and Hutcheson, is on exhibit through in the Nuquist Gallery at T.W. Wood Gallery in Montpelier. In their separate and combined pieces, viewers will recognize local places.
The Hallway Gallery features “Reflections and Shadows,” the Art Resource Association’s annual members’ exhibition at the T.W. Wood. The exhibition, also up through March 23 with work by some 30 artists, includes terrific diversity of media — paintings, photographs, paper pulp sculpture, textile art and more. T.W. Wood and ARA have a long history of collaboration. This show continues that tradition and again shows off the range and depth of this vital central Vermont artists’ organization.
In a new collaboration between the T.W. Wood and Montpelier’s Kellogg Hubbard Library, a mini-exhibition of six paintings by Secor and Hutcheson is also presented at the library.
“I dearly love the title ‘View from Prospect Street’ because Glen and James are neighbors there. The show feels like it is all about community,” said Sabrina Fadial, the T.W. Wood’s executive director.
“It feels warm, inviting, and welcoming when you come into the gallery. With its purples and pinks, greens and blues, it is very vibrant and really is fun. Both James and Glen have incredible movement in their paintings — they’re very alive,” said Fadial.
Hutcheson, a founder of the cooperative The Front Gallery in Montpelier, draws, paints and sculpts, and works as a picture framer. He studied at the New York Studio School, at Haverford College, and at the International School of Art in Umbria, Italy, and holds degrees in painting and sculpture.
Painter, musician and software engineer, Secor grew up in Kentucky and graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, with a focus on art. He moved to Vermont in 2012 and has been drawing and painting and showing his art consistently ever since.
Figures in motion populate several of Hutcheson’s works — a pair of runners in “Footrace” a frolicking canine in “Me, the Dog, the Statehouse, and the Sky.” In “Adirondack Boy,” a man strides across a flagstone like surface, holding an upside-down white Adirondack chair on his head. The painting was inspired by Hutcheson’s weekly lawn mowing ritual and the relief of re-positioning the chairs.
“Carrying the chairs was always a pleasure because I was done with the lawnmower … and I like the humor of walking around with a chair on my head like a superhero or an Egyptian god with a jackal headdress,” Hutcheson said.
Two abstracts, “Earth” and “Sky,” came about from Hutcheson’s Tai Chi practice.
For these, he said, “I was trying to practice the form … trying to center that mind state and make a painting of that mind state without any imagery or any other content.”
Patterns of lines, dabs of color, irregular shapes energize Secor’s paintings — blocks of light blue and peach pave State Street, pale yellow and light green seem to drape like a necklace around Montpelier’s Union Elementary School.
“I like repetitive line to fill a space. It’s almost a challenge,” Secor said. “I’ve drawn the shape, but there’s negative space available. Pattern solves that for me. I use the tools of line and pattern to make something interesting to me.”
In “Cloud,” a view from Secor’s home, the square-cut wooden railing in pink with patches of light blue contrasts with the street — orange with patches of turquoise. The street and railing seem to almost vibrate.
The show includes two paintings Secor and Hutcheson created in collaboration. Each artist started a painting connected to the view from his home. They then traded — each one adding or altering the work, completely without comment from the other. Canvases exchanged multiple times in this process. Viewers may recognize the hand of each artist in elements of the paintings.
“Reflections and Shadows,” the Art Resource Association Members’ Show, stretches the length of the T.W. Wood Hallway Gallery.
Founded in the mid-1970s, ARA is dedicated to promoting and supporting local artists in their creative endeavors and sharing their art with the central Vermont community. ARA welcomes artists of all experiences — membership includes well known professional artists, artists earlier in their creative explorations. “Reflections and Shadows” shows off the diversity of members’ work.
Sunlight illuminates sharp edged geologic contours in Gail Carrigan’s oil painting, “One Thousand Mountains.” Twisted stems, thin leaves, and ripening fruit cast delicate gray shadows in Fiona Sullivan’s watercolor “Portugal Avo.” Water churns with swirling fish as a figure in a rowboat reaches with bare arms into the water, perhaps luring the small-fry, as an interested white dog watches the action in Delia Robinson’s acrylic on canvas, “Tickling Minnows.”
Lian Brehm’s “Desert Flower: Ode to Georgia,” with its organic form of sculpted Abaca paper pulp, pigments and shifu, references Georgia O’Keefe. The paper pulp — molded atop a sizable pumpkin — is punctuated with oval openings, the shifu almost floating around it.
