This summer, Berkshire Botanical Garden has become a sanctuary for art lovers with “DayDream,” a captivating exhibition showcasing works by celebrated contemporary and modern artists. As part of the exhibition’s summer programming, curator James Salomon will host a special evening of conversation and exploration on Saturday, July 26, from 5 to 7 p.m. Salomon will be joined by a selection of featured artists — John Gordon Gauld, Peter D. Gerakaris, Ann Getsinger, Cate Pasquarelli, Anastasia Traina, and Cynthia Wick — for an engaging gallery talk that delves into the ideas and inspiration behind their work. They may even read passages from the exhibition catalogue, where every participating artist contributes their personal daydreaming stories and insights. For more information, and to register, visit https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/daydream-curator-and-artist-talk
Using a selection of potted plants from Berkshire Botanical Garden’s greenhouse, Ann Getsinger will demonstrate the act of combining perspectives to create a cohesive connection between near and far, foreground and background, to create engaging compositions. This class, held on Saturday, June 15, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., will examine ways to create the appearance of space and relationship using light and dark forms, repeated shapes and colors, shadows, soft and hard edges, and chromatic layering. The emphasis will be on experimentation, imagination and play. A materials list will include colored pencils or a water-based medium of your personal preference (watercolors, acrylics or gouache); a surface to paint on; a palette; a variety of brushes, including a small mop brush; and a fine pointed brush. Bring along any materials that you enjoy working with.
Using traditional realist skills, Ann Getsinger observes various natural objects, placing them life-size in landscapes, often of the imagination. Her solo exhibits include Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland, Maine; Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, N.Y.; and Koussevitzky Art Gallery in Pittsfield, Mass. Her work was recently featured in Orion Magazine and on the Laurel Hill Association’s online series, Artists on Nature. Ann’s home and studio for the past 33 years is in New Marlborough, Mass. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Berkshire Botanical Garden presents “The Garden of Curiosity” art exhibition, open now through Nov. 19, in its Leonhardt Galleries. The exhibit features works by Ann Getsinger, consisting primarily of oil paintings, mixed media drawings and sculptures.
“Creating visual art is the closest I’ve ever come to having my life make any sense at all. It’s both indulgent and essential,” Getsinger says. “It’s about balancing freedom and discipline in order to explore this temporary existence, to consider the meaning and sensuality of nature and my personal connection to it. I’m always challenged to go deeper.”
The New Marlborough artist presents carefully observed and freely rendered objects in a range of outdoor settings, times of day, seasons, and weather. Oscillating between real and imaginary, each completed work is a fresh invention. Referencing her deep interest in natural history, subjects such as bones, insects, plants, seashells, fruit, leaves, vegetables, or the artist’s signature choice of orange peels, are often centrally placed at or near eye level — and life size to inhabit the scene.
The Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts are often referenced in the backgrounds along with occasional ocean sites inspired from the artist’s roots on the coast of Maine. The context presented between object and location becomes a question serving both artist and viewer as a starting place for curiosity to flow. Her work is lyrical, sensual, suggestive, scientific, romantic, conceptual, poetic, and ecological. This exhibit will also feature a small collection of Getsinger’s “odder work,” where subject and background lean towards a more overt metaphysical surrealism.
“Subjects are chosen for their capacity to delight me for any number of intentionally unexamined reasons,” Getsinger says. “They are chosen often because of an oddness, or subconscious suggestion, maybe a frilly edge or an orb-shaped object the size of a human head, or something off balance, out of scale, smaller or larger than expected, a rutabaga’s waxy exterior, or an antler for its specific way of tapering into a beaded riffle where it attaches to the deer’s head or the beauty of the shadows it casts, as if the bones and shadows contain every motion of the creature they once were.”
Ann Getsinger is a longtime collector of antique natural history prints and books. She enjoys finding resonance between seemingly different objects, scenes and subject matter. She says her inspiration comes from being in nature and through meaningful aspects and events of daily life. Her home and studio is in New Marlborough, Mass.
Hours for Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Leonhardt Galleries are 9 to 5 p.m., seven days a week.
