Each winter Featherstone Center for the Arts, the Vineyard’s only year-round art center, undergoes a rebirth.
While students register for art classes, the gallery is refurbished. This year a new track has been installed around the perimeter of the gallery to better display works of art. And the gallery floor has been sanded down to bare wood and sealed for a gleaming new surface.
The original art and music from a book about the true adventures of a little Vineyard girl who lived aboard her father’s whaling ship will be featured at a West Tisbury gallery opening in July.
Susan Convery Foltz, whose watercolors brought to life the story of Laura Jernegan in Thirty Dirty Sailors and the Little Girl Who Went a-Whaling, will host the opening Saturday, July 5, from 5 to 7:30 p.m., at M.M. Stone Gallery at 671 North Tisbury Road.
Carrie Mae Smith will showcase her exhibit Historic Houses on the Vineyard, plein air paintings of familiar landmarks and Vineyard history, for the month of August at West Tisbury Library. All are welcome to meet the artist at a free reception Wednesday, August 13, at 4 p.m.
Refreshments served. For details, call 508-693-3366.
Cheri Christensen’s No Country for Old Cows sits on a wall in Eisenhauer Gallery in Edgartown. True to the name, it’s a painting of cattle. But the artist’s use of light, a faint yellow outline around her subjects, gives the cows an aura of majesty, as if rays of the setting sun chose only to fall on them.
This past winter Eisenhauer Gallery owner Elizabeth Eisenhauer and Kaitlyn Ruitenberg went to Brussels, Belgium to visit French artist Michel Brosseau; in Mr. Brosseau’s studio they felt as if they had entered a 19th century European atelier. Canvases are everywhere, filled with colored buoys and sailboat linens bright as if sunlight were pouring out from the canvases. Long drapes hang on tall sunny windows that fill the studio with a warm yellow glow while the murmur of Brussels traffic comes through an open window.
Featherstone Center for the Arts announces the opening of a retrospective of the work of Dorothy Burnham, an artist who flourished both in New York and on the Vineyard.
Ms. Burnham began her artistic career in oil and acrylic with some watercolor. In the 1980s she became intrigued with collage and continues to work in that medium today. This retrospective of her work is primarily examples of her collage efforts and includes work inspired by her travels to Mali, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Kenya and Nigeria.
Louisa Gould Gallery opens the Vineyard Painting show today with an artists’ reception from 5 to 7 p.m. at its Main street, Vineyard Haven location. The exhibition features Lynette Goric with seascapes, Christopher Pendergast’s portraits of buoys, seashell paintings on masonite by Donna Blackburn, and, reminding us of inland Island moments, Caryn King’s farm animals
Carol Craven Gallery welcomes the public to an artists’ reception on Sunday, August 3, for exhibitions of the following gallery artists:
Christie Scheele’s show Changing Winds, her fifth with the gallery, is a selection of atmospheric landscape paintings of Martha’s Vineyard and New York.
Island artist Peg Thayer opens an exhibition of her recent paintings at the Chilmark Library on Saturday, March 1, with a reception from 3 to 5 p.m.
The show continues during library hours through March 27.
Peggy Thayer has been a practicing painter for more than 30 years, working in a variety of media including acrylics, watercolors, pastels and oils. Her recent landscapes portray her intuitive relationship with nature.
Around the Farm Neck links, Don Wilks likes when fellow golfers find out he’s an artist. “They always say, ‘You’re not the kind of guy I expect . . .’ ” This may be, Mr. Wilks points out, because he is neatly turned out and he does not have long hair.
