The Canfield Gallery located at the Martha Canfield Library in Arlington is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibit of local teacher, author, painter and cartoonist Rachel Barlow from Sandgate, Vermont. The exhibit will run from June 15 - July 18, 2024. An artist reception will be held in the gallery on Sat. June 22 from 3:00-5:00pm with refreshments being served. All works will be for sale, with a portion of the proceeds to support the Martha Canfield Library.
Rachel works mostly in oil but also in watercolor, doodling constantly as a kid. After a decades-long hiatus she came back to art to illustrate her award-winning blog "Picking My Battles" (www.pickingmybattles.com.)
Since then, she has had exhibitions of her Vermont and Lake Michigan landscapes in watercolor and oil. Rachel said "In 2022, I began studying abstract painting with nationally recognized painter Marianne Mitchell. The year-long study opened new avenues for expression in both realist and abstract themes, feeding the analytical and expressive sides of my work. My art, like my heart between places and my head between the abstract and the concrete, is infinitely split between the emotional and the analytical."
Rachel has lived in Vermont longer than she ever lived any other place, but Lake Michigan is her "ancestral" home. It is where her grandparents met, where her immediate and extended family has gone to be with family for decades. "The power of family and the lake and the mystery of the mountains feed both parts of my soul and my heart. It is only recently that I realized that the practice of finding one's artistic voice is less about settling on a genre and more about continued exploration and experimentation. It is why the abstract and the representational will always coexist in me and my art."
The Canfield Gallery, located on the first floor of the Martha Canfield Library at 528 East Arlington Road in Arlington, is accessible through the ground floor entrance on the side of the building. Please call the library at 802-375-6153 for questions or more information.