BELLOWS FALLS, Vt. – Canal Street Art Gallery presents the Edward Kingsbury III solo show, the MC Noyes solo show, and the gallery’s newest working artist, Debbie A. Barton, all open June 19 – Aug. 9. Join the gallery on June 19, from 5-7 p.m., for Bellows Falls Third Friday and an opening reception for the artists. All gallery events are free and open to the public. For wheelchair accessibility, call 802-289-0104.
Canal Street Art Gallery welcomes Barton, its newest working artist with a studio within the gallery. Barton, based in Springfield, Vt., uses collage, quilting, and journaling to reflect the artist’s love of rural New England, nature, train travel, vintage fabrics, and untold stories. Many of the materials have “imperfections” which become an integral part of those stories, inviting the viewer to imagine their previous makers, owners, and histories. The artist prefers to use thrifted, dead stock, or otherwise unwanted papers, textiles, and other materials that were headed to landfills but have stories yet to be told beyond the tragedy of waste.
Kingsbury, based in Keene, N.H., is a self-taught artist making large abstract acrylic paintings, intricate drawings, and printed digital work of abstract studies in color and pattern. For Kingsbury, making art is an expression of the artist’s practice of prayer while he works. The resulting painting is Kingsbury’s abstract representation of God. Kingsbury’s drawings are done by pen in India ink on watercolor paper, as well as other surfaces, such as canvas paper. The tiny, interlocking lines create shapes while leaving much white paper, then making the drawing itself into negative space. The artist’s acrylic paintings reflect a similar, intricate, line-made structure, now layered with opaque and transparent color in an all-over application, creating a luminous woven surface. Kingsbury’s digital art often starts without a photograph – simply colors, shapes, and lines manipulated with tools and filters, layer upon layer, flattened in photo-editing software.
MC Noyes, based in Bellows Falls, Vt., presents paintings utilizing watercolor paints the artist makes himself, in a continuation of the artist’s series called “Water Way.” The abstract work is a daily observation of the Bellows Falls Canal, relying heavily on spontaneous-seeming brushstrokes, using carefully contemplated colors, of which there are usually only a handful in each painting. This show features works made with the artist’s own handmade watercolor paints. Noyes uses a palette of more than fifty colors, each made with multiple powdered pigments, and a honey/gum arabic solution.
Canal Street Art Gallery is located at 23 Canal Street, in historic downtown Bellows Falls, Vt., and is open Tuesday – Saturday, from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.; Sunday, from 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.; and the third Friday of every month until 7 p.m. For more information about the MC Noyes solo show, the Edward Kingsbury III solo show, or Debbie A. Barton and the working artist program, visit www.canalstreetartgallery.com, call 802-289-0104, or email artinfo@canalstreetartgallery.com.