Exhibit

September & October 2020

Gallery hours

Friday & Saturday 3-6 pm 

Gallery Walk Fridays (1st Friday of every month) 3-7 pm

Four Local Artists 

Tina Olsen, Jillian Farwell, Roxcell Bartholomew and Lauren Watrous  

Ongoing Show Will Feature New Works and a Selection of Artist’s Reproductions for Sale

All the artists met through the River Gallery School in Brattleboro.

Tina K. Olsen lives locally and grew up in Springfield, MA. She traveled widely and eventually moved to New York where she taught art at the Walden School and worked therapeutically with the arts at the South Beach Psychiatric Center on Staten Island for many years. Tina found a creative community at the River Gallery School and began to work in oils after moving to Brattleboro to live near her daughter. “I paint the wildness of things,” Olson said. “the land and people and what lives freely beneath the surface of things. When I paint I feel like my real self. I don’t like to know what it is at first glance. I just want it to look alive – as if it just happened.”

Roxcell Bartholomew is a self-taught artist living and working in Brattleboro. He grew up in the Caribbean and moved to the United States in his teens. Roxcell rediscovered his interest in painting while in the military. He says: “I realized that creating has always been a tool for acknowledging and processing the indescribable elements of my experience. Whenever I am creating, there is no choice but to be present within the space called me. I simply try my best to breathe life into the surreal colorscapes, geometric shapes and human forms that arise within my stream of consciousness.” 

Jillian Farwell has spent most of her life in West Dummerston where her family has lived for more than 100 years. She says: “I was born into a philosophical, very verbal intellectual heritage, but I was always more comfortable in the natural world. I found meaning through art making. It is the process of clarifying as you work – a whole-body way of knowing. I began with clay, which brought me into my body, and now I work in oil paint. I don’t know how that unfolds. I understand my life better when I paint and look at my paintings.”

Lauren Watrous grew up in Brattleboro and teaches studio arts at The River Gallery School and The Community College of Vermont. Lauren’s recent works are intimately scaled oils that relate person and place.

“Together, we are helping each other understand our own creative processes in this group show at 118,” Farwell said.