A prolific painter and printmaker, Susan Hambleton’s work nurtured a lifelong fascination with the natural world and the beauty and idiosyncrasies of the human figure.
Obituary
Recent posts: Two Coats of Paint
Three colorists at Bernay Fine Art
Contributed by Leslie Roberts / In “Polychrome,” Bernay Fine Art presents paintings by three painters – Jenny Kemp, Audrey Stone, and Deborah Zlotsky – who all create striking chromatic relationships by organizing color in structures of parallel strips. The show makes clear how much lurks beneath these general descriptions. It’s a pleasure to study these paintings side by side and consider each artist’s singular use of color and paint.
Mattatuck Museum: Diversity as Americana
ontributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Celebrating the 250th anniversary of a country putatively vaunted for its liberal pluralism when in fact it is nearly as bitterly divided as it was during the Civil War has been a fraught affair, by turns sheepish, rueful, and obtuse. It is difficult to find a cultural sweet spot in the absence of a palatable center. Waterbury’s Mattatuck Museum rises to the challenge with the portrait exhibition “About Face,” which spans the eventful quarter-millennium and presents multiculturalism not as a political accident subject to debate and correction but as a rooted and immutable structural feature of the American polity. Impeccably curated by Rebecca McNamara – the museum’s chief curator – in her inaugural effort, the show is a triumph of sensitivity and finesse.
Abstraction, playful Post-modernism, and provocation at the Lyman Allyn Museum
Contributed by Sharon Butler / I was born in New London, Connecticut, still known as “The Whaling City,” having trailed only New Bedford in vessels and voyages in the late nineteenth century and amassed much of its wealth from that maritime oil trade. Sea captains were the sturdiest pillars of the community and their grand homes punctuated the city’s streets. One was Captain Lyman Allyn (1797–1874), who commanded a whaling ship at age 21 and went on to serve as director of a bank, an insurance firm, and a railroad. Harriet Upson Allyn (1840–1926), the youngest of his six children, spent her entire life in New London. In her will, she dedicated funds to establish an art museum, prospectively naming it after her father. I’ve been enjoying the Lyman Allyn for years, and it’s a terrific regional museum – small and stately with a permanent collection of roughly 20,000 works, spanning paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts. While its strongest suit is American painting and decorative arts from the eighteenth through the twentieth century, it is now fielding several winningly divergent shows.