The Berkshire Botanical Garden exhibit features over 40 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures created through Community Access to the Arts’ year-round workshops serving children, teens and adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Works were inspired by the vibrant plants, herbs and flowers found at Berkshire Botanical Garden, as well as by the beautiful natural landscapes found across the Berkshires. Each piece was created by artists with disabilities through CATA arts programs at disability agencies, day habilitation programs and schools across our community, as well as in CATA’s studios in Great Barrington.
Opening reception is Friday, March 6, 3 to 5 p.m.
Works are professionally matted, framed and available for sale, with proceeds supporting commissions for the individual artists.
Exhibition hours, through March 29, are Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Join Anastasia Traina for an engaging and creative exploration of color in the world of flowers. Over two days, Feb. 26 and 27, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., we will delve into the fascinating world of color mixing, and to enhance our understanding, we’ll incorporate the psychology of color. As we turn our attention toward the red hues using watercolor and colored pencils, it’s essential to recognize that red is often associated with passion, energy, and intensity. We will also revisit the various shades of greens using watercolor and colored pencils, and consider not only the technical aspects of color mixing but also the emotional and psychological responses that different shades of green can evoke. In the realm of watercolors, we will experiment with creating a stunning rainbow grisaille effect. Grisaille involves painting in shades of gray to mimic the appearance of sculpture or drawing. By combining the technical aspects of color mixing with an understanding of color psychology, students will not only expand their artistic skills but also infuse a deeper layer of meaning and emotion into their botanical creations.
Anastasia Traina is a writer and botanical artist. Her illustrations have been published in the children’s book, BITSY and RAFF, written by David Caudle, a story which highlights the power of friendship and inclusion. She is a member of the American Society of Botanical Art, the Tri-State Botanical Artists of NYBG, the Writer’s Guild of America and the Dramatists Guild of America. Her most recent exhibition, “Alchemy and Innocents” was on display at the BBG’s Leonhardt Galleries in 2023. Commissioned for the Berkshire Botanical Garden to create Lucy’s Garden, featuring topiary animals and other ‘live’ structures on paper. Donated by Lucy and Nat Day.
All flowers hold different meanings, often based on the flower type, the time of year in which they bloom, the flower’s color, or all of the above, but the same is true of the story that makes them so meaningful to us. This Berkshire Botanical Garden workshop, held December 6 through December 8, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., will work with seasonal plants such as tree nuts, winter berries, or mushrooms; since our substrate will be vellum (calf skin), our subjects need to be small. Dry brush is a watercolor painting technique used in traditional botanical illustration. The method involves a “skin” of dried paint on the palette and a small, slightly damp brush. We will also create botanical tints for the base layer, generating shape by adding a luminous shadow. Students will receive a photograph and an outline of the seasonal flora. This workshop will meet for three consecutive days, for five hours each session.
Anastasia Traina, is a writer and botanical artist. Her illustrations were published in the children’s book, BITSY and RAFF written by David Caudle, highlighting the power of friendship and inclusion. She is a member of the American Society of Botanical Art, the Tri-State Botanical Artists of NYBG, the Writer’s Guild of America and the Dramatists Guild of America. Her most recent exhibition, “Alchemy and Innocents” was on display at the BBG’s Leonhardt Galleries in 2023. Commissioned for the Berkshire Botanical Garden to create Lucy’s Garden, featuring topiary animals and other ‘live’ structures on paper. Donated by Lucy and Nat Day. $245 for BBG members, $265 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/language-flowers-vellum
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.
Berkshire Botanical Garden presents “Nest/Emerge,” an art exhibition, through Sunday, April 30. Featuring works by Elizabeth Cohen, “Nest/Emerge” will exhibit in the Garden’s Center House Leonhardt Galleries. The gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
In Nest/Emerge, Cohen explores relationships between natural and imagined forms through layers and patterns, re-contextualizing them. The works invite viewers to experience quiet moments and unexpected delights. Incorporating hand-thrown porcelain, mulberry paper, wasp nests, and other materials found in nature, Cohen’s art beckons the viewer to connect with the botanical world.
“I find inspiration everywhere: the natural world, microscopic images, landscapes, shells, bugs, bark, leaves, pods and seeds,” she said.
A studio potter living Wellesley, Massachusetts, Cohen explores cycles of birth, life and death, growth and decay, rhythm and change. She explores varied metaphorical nuances, such as family, security and comfort, through nesting sets.
She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a minor in Japanese Studies from Tufts University and a master’s degree in teaching from Simmons College. Her work has been exhibited in recent years at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, Boston; The Mill Contemporary, in Framingham; Worcester Center for Craft; River Oaks Arts Center, in Alexandria, La.; and Fuller Craft Museum, in Brockton. For more information, visit BerkshireBotanical.org.
New York-based artist Marc Dennis, known for his hyper-realistic and strikingly detailed paintings, presents a collection of two dozen paintings in oil-on-canvas and watercolor, many of which were created expressly for this Berkshire Botanical Garden show, running through Monday, September 6. Says Dennis of his work, “I’ve always been fascinated by my own silence while spending time in the woods. As a painter I create a kind of silence as well. My paintings are filled with exuberance, color, shape, form, beauty, mystery, often a sense of narrative and almost always an explosiveness, yet they remain silent. My work for the exhibition REVOLUTION was inspired by my admiration, intrigue and interest in the natural world and my own silence within that world. My artistic intention for this body of work is to communicate beauty as a series of experiences – each painting providing a place for contemplation, journey and exploration…I create hyper-realistic paintings that celebrate beauty as a kind of tension between the classical and the contemporary based on my experiences in nature. Artistic intention is often derived from exploring the charged subjects of perception, memory and pleasure with paintings that strike the eye and seduce the mind. I paint in order to convey my love for life. It’s that simple.” Dennis is represented by Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles CA, and Palm Beach, FL.
The Leonhardt Galleries are open free with Garden admission daily, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. and are COVID compliant based on state and federal mandates. Masks are mandatory while visiting the Garden and its galleries.
Berkshire Botanical Garden is a COVID compliant facility. Masks are mandatory while on on the grounds, and timed ticketing is required. Reserve tickets here!
Renowned collector and friend of the Berkshire Botanical Garden Beth Rudin deWoody has curated a marvelous collection of sculptures by notable and emerging artists, each offering a unique expression of our Taking Flight theme. President of the Rudin Family Foundation, deWoody is known for her vast art collection — some 10,000 pieces— which she houses and exhibits by appointment at The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, Florida. She is a trustee at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The New School University and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City; The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; Design Museum Holon in Israel; and Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. For Taking Flight, deWoodyinfo@berkshirebotanical.org presents five sculptors whose work will be featured throughout BBG’s Gardens from summer through fall: lindenwood bird by Concha Martinez Barreto, “Spotted Owl Icon” by Peter Gerakaris, Rachel Owens’ “Groundswell,” a collection of birdbaths by Ian Sordy, and “Bird on a Nest” by Imml Storr.
New York photographer Gregory Crewdson departs from the work he is most known for—elaborately staged, cinematic photographs of suburban scenes, for which he employs an entire staff including a director of photography—with this deeply personal exhibit of photos created during a time of solitary introspection in the Berkshires.
In the summer of 1996, Crewdson spent two months in solitude at his family’s home in Becket, MA, during which he ventured out into the surrounding woods at dusk to photograph the lights of fireflies. Twenty-five years later, a selection of these small-scale black and white images will be on display in BBG’s Leonhardt Galleries.
Says Crewdson about Fireflies, which were originally shown at Skarstedt in New York in 2006, “For some almost unknowable reason, I was drawn to photograph the fireflies. To me there’s something so beautiful and mysterious about how they lit up the night sky in twilight. Of course, the light of the firefly is a mating call. So, I was really drawn to this idea of light as meaning, light as desire, and light as in again the most elemental way, as telling the story…we’re in such a different time now, we’re in a time of Instagram and cell phone pictures and selfies, and photography exists in the mass culture in this very democratic and very omnipresent way. These pictures are so removed from that because it’s just film and light, and to me it’s a kind of reminder that can be very meaningful, very profound.”
Fireflies were also part of a traveling European survey called Gregory Crewdson: In a Lonely Place, and then shown as a full set at Wave Hill, and SITE Santa Fe, followed by FRAC Auvergne in France in a show called Gregory Crewdson: The Becket Pictures. In BBG’s Leonhardt Galleries, the photographs will be presented in a darkened environment to evoke for visitors the atmosphere of nighttime firefly-viewing that inspired Crewdson all those years ago.
Berkshire Botanical Garden is a COVID compliant facility. Masks are mandatory while in BBG buildings, and timed ticketing is required. Reserve tickets here! RSVP for either or both receptions by June 9: info@berkshirebotanical.org
Berkshire Botanical Garden proudly presents UNBORN SUN, THE PAINTINGS
OF JOHN GORDON GAULD on display through February 7 in the Center House
Leonhardt Galleries.
Please join them for a “Meet the Artist” Gallery Presentation and Tea Service on Sunday, January 19, 2-4 p.m. in the Leonhardt Galleries. Free admission.
A New York City based artist, John Gordon Gauld’s compositions depict assemblages that seem unintentional at first, but with sustained attention, reveal a myriad of calculated, symbolic associations. Gauld incorporates water gilding into his work, a labor-intensive process requiring many steps to achieve the desired effect, and for many of his works, the he employs rare, historic pigments—cinnabar, lapis lazuli, malachite, and madder root, to name a few. In combination, these pigments produce a unique visual experience that beckons time-honored, firsthand observation as he references an artistic timeline spanning more than four thousand years. “My painting practice is founded on technique and allegory. I am connected to the past through the rituals of the old masters and to the present through an investigation of life’s contemporary issues.”
This Berkshire Botanical Garden workshop is complementary to BBG’s current exhibition, Shimmering Flowers: Nancy Lorenz’s Bronze and Lacquer Landscapes. Participants will have the opportunity to learn about the artistic medium of gold leafing and deepen their understanding by creating their very own gold leaf jar. Facilitated by BBG’s art education intern Mariah Baca. This workshop begins at 2 in the Center House Leonhardt Galleries, 5 West Stockbridge Road in Stockbridge, and is open to all ages and is free with Garden admission. Come learn by creating! For more information visit www.berkshirebotanical.org. Workshops will take place weekly through July 24.
Plant Shadows explores print making through cyantotypes — objects arranged on light-sensitive paper and exposed to UV light or sunshine, to produce images. This plein-air process vividly captures the silhouettes of plants, weeds, and shrubs from artist Joan Dix Blair’s garden in the Berkshires. Influenced by the botanical work done in the 1840s by Anna Atkins who recorded seaweed plants using cyanotype, this form of expression is a new medium for Joan Dix Blair, a printmaker whose solo and group exhibitions include Northeastern University’s Gallery 360, Boston, MA, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, MN, and the Washington Printmakers Gallery, Wahington, DC. Her exhibition at the Garden brings together a current body of work created over the past two years in her Williamstown, MA studio. Image courtesy of Daily Hampshire Gazette.
A gallery reception is scheduled for Friday, December 14, 4-6 p.m. at theBerkshire Botanical Garden’s Center House Leonhardt Galleries, 5 West Stockbridge Road, Stockbridge, MA. The exhibition will be on view from December 15 at 11 am through March 1, 2019 at 4 pm. For more information visit https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/plant-shadows-cyanotypes-joan-dix-blair
