New Work from me, Tim Barner, and Susan Aaron in:
Fall07 opening Thursday, October 4 at 13FOREST Gallery, in Medford, MA.

Please join us for any or all of the follow events:

Opening Reception Thurs., Oct. 4 6pm - 9pm
Artist Talk (me!) Thurs., Oct. 25 7pm - 9pm
Closing Reception Thurs., Nov. 15 6pm -9pm

For Directions or more information, see www.13Forest.com.

Hope to see you there!

from the show announcement:

In the spirit of being here now, 13FOREST Gallery is presenting a fall exhibit of paintings and works on paper by three artists whose aesthetic philosophies have developed through career changes, experimentation and chance. The show, titled FALL07, features artists Rachel E. Mello, Tim Barner and Susan Aaron through November 15.

Rachel E. Mello began her artistic career as a set designer who cut and painted materials to create new worlds. She adapts this craft as a painter by building images onto surfaces that have been cut and shaped into silhouettes. The results are paintings in which space is physically real and the form of missing objects is emphasized. Among Mello's works at 13FOREST is Charlie's Birthday, where sky and clouds hover above urban houses, telephone poles and power-lines that are linked in a landscape by their absence. In Waiting for the Red Line, Waiting for Spring trains in blurred colors move past the empty outline of passengers standing on a platform. Though they could be anyone, their being rendered in negative space emphasizes their presence, as though they are a permanent part of urban life no matter how quickly it moves on. Recently Mello took her aesthetic explorations into the world of printmaking by using her cut canvases as ink surfaces. In the print Static Mirror II a woman enters a composition in which a man bends over groceries on his front porch. Printed in a single tone, the composition in one coherent silhouette is the mirror opposite of its parent painting, where solid objects are voids and space finds solidity.

Tim Barner is a landscape architect whose abstract paintings are unbounded by the representational precision required by his day job. Still, they contain hallmarks of excellent design: balance, varied texture and form, composition-defining color, and the ability to rouse one's imagination. At 13FOREST Barner presents large and small oil paintings that document where he has traveled as an artist over the past two years. Opting primarily for the quickness of a palette knife, but not adverse to using sticks, flower buds or his fingers as tools, Barner sometimes thinly stains his canvases and scratches images into them; other times he layers deep color fields that evoke images of the natural world without actually depicting them. With In the Shade, for instance, Barner manages to abstract the feeling of daytime coolness beneath a fir tree, while in Red Field he portrays the patterning of light and shade on fallen leaves but without using the objects as reference points. The Plain contains ethereal images from the artist's sleep. With Untitled, 07.06 and Untitled, 07.07, Barner continues his explorations into building canvas surfaces by incorporating wood chips and sawdust from a recently felled tree, as well as charcoal, ash and dirt into deeply saturated paint. At times reading like topographical maps in their texture, these paintings quite literally contain the world that continues to inspire Barner.

Susan Aaron set out to be an artist who would methodically plan drawings in her mind before committing them to paper. The results were frustration and a growing number of doodles and freeform experiments she had made to keep herself from putting down her pen and brush altogether. To Aaron's surprise in these diversions she found appealing, spontaneous forms and an unselfconscious relationship between them and their paper boundaries. This marked the beginning of Aaron as an explorer, which is well documented in her collection of drawings and watercolors at 13FOREST Gallery. In three works comprising the Blue Lantern series, she envelops well-defined structures in various saturations of Prussian blue watercolor to produce the weightlessness of objects surrounded by fog and clouds. In much the way she began liberating freeform designs from paper margins, the artist has cut each of these three works from a common whole. She uses the same editing process in another series in the show titled Tidal Pool. Here the origin of each of its component pieces was a line that Aaron first associated with the zing and zap of Japanese anime and then interwove with green seaweed-like forms to create images that are graphically bold but without doubt organic. In homage to Surrealism, the drawing Swiss Miss is an image of a cuckoo clock that Aaron imbued with the humor and spookiness she finds in a bizarre object that over the centuries has been relegated to the mundane.