As a gallerist I strive, like most museum curators, to encourage art appreciation and enable the aesthetic experience. Yes, I used the word experience: contact with, and personally observed. Photos on a website will never, ever, do justice to engaging a work of art in person. This is particularly true with our Bastille Day exhibit, now in its 9th iteration. Our Bastille Day artists have evolved through years of experimentation until one day a clear separation from influences has happened. Something new has been born or is being born, and deserves to be experienced.

Last year's exhibition of Mark Drury's sculptures served as an idea for Kathleen George, who saw in Drury's work an inspiration to begin a series of paintings exploring the shapes, arrangements, textures, and colors of stones on Cape Ann.  A trip to Death Valley started her on the journey of creating stonescapes.  "This naturally morphed into painting the local stones.  What I love about these paintings are the decisive and bold lines, the subtle and intricate layers created by paint over copper leaf.  Far from being still and quiet, these stones crack.  They shift.  They balance and fall atop one another.  They reveal that objects of great strength and ancient symbols of immovability are also broken and changed over time."

Utilizing ubiquitous stone and found materials, Drury has created new sculptures.  "My work draws attention to the rough natural beauty of this place. I've been roaming around the Headlands, Andrews Point and hiking the trails in Dogtown throughout my life.  All over Cape Ann are glacial erratics, stone walls, granite blocks cut from the local quarries protecting the harbors, outcroppings of granite and basalt ledges.  They have names, hold energy and memories.  I'm drawn to their shapes as abstractions.    Magic is all around us.  As Einstein said, 'There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is a miracle."

Kathleen and Mark’s combined effort culminates in an exhibition entitled Touch Stone.   Works sold will benefit the LawStroud Foundation, a 501 c 3 public charity dedicated to increasing compassion in medicine and helping people living longer realize full, meaningful lives.

Kathleen and Mark have been friends for twelve years, with similar histories.  Both had artists in their families.  Both went to art school, and work at jobs that provide steady incomes to support their families: Mark a designer, Kathleen a nurse serving the homeless in Boston.  They walk together. She shares, "Mark is like an adventurer and bloodhound, seeking beautiful places along the coastline and in the forests. He often sends photographs accompanied by a text, 'You have to see this amazing place I found.'  When we hike, our spouses often walk ahead as we get caught up in exclaiming the details of rock formations or the way light causes dramatic cracks or shadows."

Both are experimental and strive to create work that is ambitious and imbued with meaning.  Kathleen explains, "My studio is a place of great freedom to me.  The ability to celebrate my aloneness is a gift I receive from art.  Creating art winds in and out of all my experiences of life, giving voice and image to all the things I need to say.   Instruments in hand, I make decisions, experience the sublime and tolerate failure, always moving onward."

Mark has two studios, "One for design where I iterate freely in drawings, and another known as "the shed" that holds tools and materials.  One engages imagination and mind, and the other is about execution and is physically demanding.  Both are places of freedom, meaning all decisions are mine."

Kathleen's biggest evolution came in 2015 through experimentation with copper leaf.  "I knew artists that used metal leaf squares.  I was also familiar with gold leaf in icons and illuminated pages.  Still, adding copper leaf, a liquid adhesive and sealer to my shopping cart at a local art supply store was an impulse buy that led to a profound and surprising transformation in my art.  The experimentation began: applied, painted over, then scratched out.  This is particularly effective in my stone paintings because examined closely one can always discover a metallic quality in rocks or stones, precious earth materials glued together through a natural process.

"I'm evolving continually," Mark adds.  Engaging the abstract was a major evolution in the past.  Recently, I made an entry in my sketchbook, "You do a lot with what you have."  For the first time, I'm thinking that my efforts are sufficient and I'm less plagued by comparisons of one sort or another.  Exhibitions have that effect and I hope people will feel my growth as an artist in these new works."

 "I really love this series of paintings," Kathleen says, "Stones, yes, but they are in shadow.  They are in light.  Someone recently commented, 'But how is it that you make stones speak?'  My answer:  Art does what it always does. It beckons and murmurs.  It tells a story, leaves mind-bending beauty within us that rattles around long after we move away from it.  It provides a place of rest and stillness.  It cracks and changes us."

They await your discovery.

Note from the gallery: We strive to create an opening that is safe and that will foster an aesthetic experience, an engagement of art for the potential it has to connect with the viewer’s emotions. Be prepared for surprises. Yes, It might rain. Bring an umbrella. It might be hot and humid. We wait until 7pm when it tends to be cooler. It is summer. Allow yourself the pleasure of heat and humidity. There will be food, water, wine, places to sit, conversations on the sidewalk. Viewers will enter, one or two at a time. Music will be playing. You will be alone with art. There will be no conversation inside. Just looking, touching and thinking. A book will be open for you to express interest in a particular work, if you are so moved. You’ll need to leave an email address. We will contact you. Such is our small revolution. Dare to be a part of it.