WESTPORT — The 1867 Old Schoolhouse Gallery in Essex hosts an exhibition of watercolors by award-winning artist Ann Pember through July 28.
The Adirondack Art Association show, which features framed works and matted prints, is a 40-year retrospective of the artist’s landscapes, floras, animals and one figurative work in a variety of sizes.
“Some of the earlier pieces might look a little different from how I’m handling things more recently,” Pember, who works in her Water Edge Studio in Keeseville, said.
“The papers and boards that I use now allow me a lot more capability to alter the edges, so that they’re not all hard because when we look at things in life, there are areas that are softer than others.
“Ultra realism is not my goal. Typically, artists who are doing that have more hard edges. Its more about trying to create a mood.”
A foundational work is “Geraniums,” which depicts the flower in a clay pot.
“It’s not the way I would handle it now. It has more of a full overall lighting, and now I do a lot of back lighting and side lighting to create shadows and emphasize light effects on the subject,” she said.
The show includes a recent painting, “Glorious Gloxinia.”
“It has a very moody kind of lighting, so the darks create transition from the flowers to the leaves,” she said. “So it’s a much more different look than the one of the geraniums for instance that’s all brightly lit.”
Pember’s palette has transitioned over the years.
“I discovered certain kind of pigments that I prefer. Over the last I would say 10 years or so, I’m using something called mission gold. It has a very strong pigmentation, so you get more color,” she said. “You have to thin it more with water if you want a lighter kind of look.
“I’m still using Windsor and Newton paint that I used way back because they’re very durable. They’re light, fast, and that’s important to me. From early on, I determined I would use paint that I knew would last because paint can fade if it’s under strong light.”
Besides changes in her technique and palette, Pember’s tools have changed from good-quality round brushes to flat brushes and back to round brushes.
“They all work. It’s just what feels right to you that determines what you wind up using,” she said.
“I would suggest to anyone painting to definitely try different things. I think with buying paint, I discovered when I was teaching workshops so often students felt they had to buy every possible color you can imagine instead of mixing them.
“I prefer to use a warm and a cool version of the main red, yellow and blue and mix all the additional colors using those. I find them to be much more pleasing to look at,” she said.
The show also includes matted prints.
“I had tried doing some high-quality color prints years ago. It’s not something I wanted to do a lot of, so I have some of them left,” Pember said.
The 1867 Schoolhouse is located at 2728 Route 22 in the former ECHO building.
“It’s a satellite gallery of ours … The old schoolhouse is being built on and refurbished. They are letting us use two rooms in their building for our art gallery,” Adirondack Art Association Director William Gillies said.
“We were asked by the owner Russ Shapiro to come into his building as a gallery. We wanted to present sort of a different type of gallery, so that’s what we’re doing. We’re having more one-person shows.”