Missing the Trees for the Forest
Opening May 3, 2025
Opening Reception
Monday, May 3, 2025 | 6:00pm
Gallery Hours
Sunday, May 4, 11, & 18, 2025 | 11:00am - 3:00pm
By appointment admin@WhittemoreCCC.org
Artist Talk
Monday, May 19, 2025 | 6:00pm
Hosted by Alix Bacon & Susan Mania
Featured Artists
Artist Statement
From long practice, Alix has established a balance in her painting between rendering the texture of actuality and working with pictorial conventions. She has a method for translating the experience generated by particular locations into representational schemes. In her work, the world surfaces as a fluid color substance assembled into discernible familiar patterns. Smoothing the specificity of local features into broad color schemes simultaneously idealizes and erodes, a telling duality. This duality clues us into an aim inherent in the works.
Alix speaks of sketching quickly on site, seeking the experience of being present in a particular place, stalking the genius loci, the protective spirit of a place. She later refines the sketches in the studio, intensifying the moment. The resulting images evince the complex temporality that imbues the landscapes she takes as her subject.
Over the past few years Alix has been focusing on Trees. Alix has been painting in the forest. Beyond their cultural, symbolic and mythical significance, trees have an impact on every aspect of human life from the air we breathe to the food we eat to how we live. We must learn to live in harmony with these giants and the wood wide web that connects the forest community with our community.
Artist Bio
Born and raised in New York City, Alix studied painting and literature at Yale and received a BA in 1980. She spent the next 4 years studying and painting in Italy. Those years were formative to her sense of composition, color and painting techniques. She is a landscape painter living and painting in Hunterdon County, New Jersey where she also works for the New Jersey Conservation Foundation protecting agricultural and woodland landscapes. She has shown extensively in the Delaware River Valley and in Deer Isle Maine, where she is represented by the Turtle Gallery.
Website:www.alixbacon.com
Artist Statement & Bio
Jeanne Cameron is an environmental artist and photographer whose art is dedicated to exploring our spiritual connections to nature. Her unaltered photographs document her installations which she creates with masks she has cast from life placed in natural landscapes, creating visual narratives that celebrate life energies.
Jeanne Cameron was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1933. As a child, she spent hours alone in the neighboring forest preserve connecting with the energies of trees, plants and water and communicating with nature spirits. Educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago, specializing in the history and symbolism of flower decoration and mythology, Cameron spent many years creating inspiring environments for museum exhibitions and events a the White House, US embassies in Paris and Moscow, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC and other venues throughout the United States. She has studied shamanism and herbalism with Lakota, Tewa and Navajo elders. Her photographic practice enables her to unite all these talents as a way to connect with nature and create work that reveals a true sense of place.
“What is evoked in pictures like those by Jeanne Cameron, which nod to Pictorialist precedent, is a classical sense of beauty and proportion that persist in dance, architecture and painting much more strongly than in photography.” Andy Grunberg, formerly photography critic for the New York Times and Director of the Ansel Adams Center
Elizabeth Frolet
Artist Statement
Showing with my long-time dear friend Alix Bacon is an immense pleasure, specially that she asked works that are directly linked to my actual research profoundly oriented towards the representation of nature as intrinsically united with humanity.
Nature is our magician and we have to relearn its magic and believe in its absolute creative unity.
We can only adore nature, and rediscover its mysteries.
Artist Bio
I was born in Madagascar where I spent 12 years, then left for Japan where I learned the language and calligraphy.
In 1974, I graduated in Japanese languages and cultures at the Institut des langues orientales in Paris before leaving for New York where I obtained a master's degree in Political Science with a specialty on Japan at Columbia University.
In 1977, I returned to France and began a freelance career in art journalism.
In 1982 I began my doctorate in contemporary art history at the Sorbonne University.
In 1984, I was awarded the Shibusawa-Claudel Prize for a thesis written on a Japanese artistic movement of the 1930s.
I then published a book on the same subject published by Publications de la Sorbonne. At the same time, I worked in the artistic field and I began to show my sculpture and painting work in various galleries in France, Japan and Italy.
Since 1985, I have settled in Rome where I mainly work as an artist. A sculptor by training, my work is mainly centered around the theme of the body, its fragility and its precarious balances. I use all possible materials for this: paper, writing, lead, gold, wood, fabric, ceramic or light.
According to me it is important to convey the tension and poetics of man stretched between heaven and earth. His link with mysterious forces and specially nature.
Photography and video are also part of my language and serve to complete my vision of the suspended human being who questions his destiny.
I love magic and tarot cards.
But I am mainly oriented towards poetry.
Writing, signs and poetry serve to reveal the invisible forces and energetic configurations of man.
I produce many artist books, composed of drawings, paintings and poetry.
Artist Statement
I paint and draw about place through direct observation and memory. I begin with something that catches my eye during daily walks in the woods, my ambles along the shore, or from a place I visit. My paintings reflect the experience of looking at the natural world around me every day. I work in oil on linen and charcoal, pastel and watercolor on paper.
Trees have long held my attention, captivatng me and serving as a recurring subject in my work. My paintings are observational and improvisational with an oFen paired down composition and limited paleDe. Focused on nature and the environment, I create this work to connect with and celebrate the world around me.
Artist Bio
Eileen Gillespie (b. 1963, New York, NY) is a painter living and working in Maine. She spent a year in Rome studying with the European Honors Program at Rhode Island School of Design for which she earned her BFA in 1985. Her time in Rome marked the genesis of a career long interest in structure in nature, architecture, and a sense of place as a subject for her drawings and paintings. She continues to create work based on place, observation, and memory. She received her MFA in painting at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990.
Gillespie’s awards include a Visiting Artist position at the American Academy in Rome, residencies at Hewnoaks, Millay Arts, The Hambidge Center, The Vermont Studio Center and a Fellowship at Carina House on Monhegan Island, Maine. She is the recipient of a 2004 Artist Fellowship in Drawing from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Gillespie has exhibited in dozens of exhibitions throughout her career including group exhibitions at the Farnsworth Museum, the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston Athenaeum, the University of Maine – Augusta and Cove Street Arts, Portland. Solo shows include Pepper Gallery, Boston, June Fitzpartick Gallery, ME, Harmon’s Market, ME, O’Farrell Gallery, ME. Her work is in the collections of American Airlines, Boston Athenaeum, Fidelity, Hertz, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Wellington Management among others.
At present she is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Portland Museum of Art where she formerly served as Chair of the Collection Committee.
Artist Statement
To discover more of nature’s mute secrets, I open myself to the natural world.
Through direct observation of the landscape, I can sense the natural world’s changing moods, a language alive in feeling. Working seasonally through a place study methodology allows me to observe changes in environmental impacts from year to year. Both in the garden and out afield I work with plants, making dyes, inks, and paints that offer me a kinship with nature. These are essential ways my artwork expresses the language of landscape.
From the many natural elements that arise in my work, flora, seeds, soil patterns, or fallen trees, aspects are re-mixed, bringing a new interpretation through layered composition and a diverse color palette. While striving to connect with the ‘spirit of place’, my work is not a direct rendering but a reflection of the interplay between plant life, geography, atmosphere, and color, all in service of listening to and conveying a story of the environment, as an intuitive exercise that speaks to our relationship with the land we call home.
Artist Bio
Susan Mania is an American contemporary artist. Her paintings and works on paper explore observations of the landscape and its changing dynamics in soft dimensional color and a flexible re-working of organic elements.
Mania attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City (AAS) where she was exposed to the world of fiber as a medium for fine art. Her study of botanical pigment extractions helps her form a connection with nature, creating paints, inks, and collage materials. Following FIT, she attended the College of New Jersey (BFA) and Philadelphia College of Textiles and Sciences (MA Program Design).
Mania has exhibited throughout the United States and served on the faculty of several schools, including the College of New Jersey, the Waldorf School of Princeton, and the Princeton Junior School. She is currently a founding member of the Steamroller Group Artist Collective, connecting and exhibiting with artists in the Delaware River region.
She lives and works on the banks of the Lockatong Creek preserve in Stockton, New Jersey.
Artist statement
There’s an accessibility to figurative painting that can elicit both an esthetic response to imagery and an expectation of metaphor and meaning. My work builds on memory and sense of place to connect people with their environment. Over the past decade this investigation has focused on landscape and, in my most recent work, on trees and forests.
I use photos from walks and hikes I have taken, recording an experience in a specific time and place. I revisit that moment in the studio through the process of making a painting. In an age when so much image production is immediate, building a painting remains slow. It relies on faith that the time put in every day will add up to something more than the sum of its parts. This element of time also extends to trees as my subject. Their slow growth, marker of decades as well as of movement through the cycle of seasons, is a reminder that not all change is sudden or even immediately perceptible.
In these paintings I place the viewer squarely in the woods. “A drawing of a tree shows not a tree, but a tree being looked at” (John Berger). My subject is as much the interconnectedness of the forest elements as it is our place within them and I often include references to human presence and stewardship through trail markers or paths. Although the imagery starts from my relationship with actual trees in a specific place, each painting stands in for the more general experience of moving through such an immersive environment, and all the wealth of associations we have with the very idea of forests.
Artist Bio
Alexandra McGovern (b. 1961, NYC) is a figurative painter working primarily in oil. Her paintings build upon a sense of place. They seek to find meaning in seemingly ordinary moments with special interest in connections between people and their environments. Alexandra was a painting major as an undergraduate at Yale and earned her MFA at Pratt Institute. She lived and worked in Rome for two years before moving back to NYC, working with artists projects in Public Schools and teaching at the New School for Social Research. For the past 25 years she has been teaching Painting and Drawing at the University of Texas in EL Paso and has recently moved back to the East Coast to Cold Spring NY.
Her work has been shown in Europe and in the United States both in group and solo shows. Her paintings have been purchased by the city of El Paso and many private collections.
