The Kershner Gallery in the Fairfield Public Library invites the public to “Places to Wander”, a reception for the artwork of Jason Pritchard, Rebeca Fuchs, and Kate Henderson on April 27 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. The artists will talk about their work at 6 pm. The show can be seen from April 22 to June 17 during library hours. For questions, email bskgallery@gmail.com or call 203-246-9065. 

JASON PRITCHARD grew up in the UK, in a region that inspired British landscape painters such as John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough who he greatly admires. In his 20’s he moved to London and took up watercolor painting, before moving to New York in 2005 where he studied oil painting at the Art Students League. Recently. he was selected as a 2020 Emerging Artist by Cape Cod Art Magazine, for his growing body of Cape Cod seascape paintings. He has exhibited work in New York City, Long Island and his home region of Connecticut.

Jason says, “I work using the medium of oil to capture atmospheric coastal scenes, which aim to capture a sense of space and connection to the New England region that I love. I practice en plein air painting for smaller pieces and often use these as preparatory studies for larger paintings combined with photographs that I take while visiting, before completing the final piece in my studio. Few things make me happier than taking a nice long walk along a beach, hearing the sound of the tide crashing nearby as I explore both physically, then later in my minds eye, the thoughts of my experience back into my painting. I embrace the process of unpacking those memories and calibrating the colors, the shifting light and changing weather elements back in my studio. These variables prompt the type of brush movement; hues and tones I enlist which are often then wrapped under an impressionistic skyline, intending to heighten the mood of my seascape further.”

REBECA FUCHS was born in Madrid, Spain, where she graduated with an MA in Furnishing Design. For almost two decades, she developed a successful career as furniture designer, working and living in Italy, Bali and the US. In the US she attended drawing and painting workshops at the New York Academy of Art and others, and started to combine art and design projects; after motherhood, she decided to channel all her creativity into painting. She has shown her work in several galleries in New York and Connecticut and has won the Juror’s Choice at the New Britain Museum of American Art.

Rebeca says, “I paint to make you notice the beauty around you, beauty from Nature and from human interaction. Above all, I paint to make you feel alive and loved. My landscapes explore the raw, definitional forces of Earth, the geological changes that affect and transform the continents and all life forms. My depictions of wildlife explore how consciousness and intelligence manifest in other life forms. My human subjects are glimpses into the intimate moments when we search for our true self.”

KATE HENDERSON is a visual artist, educator, and Director of Kehler Liddell Gallery in New Haven. She also currently teaches at Paier College and in workshops around CT. Before being the Director of KLG, she was a Program Director at the Yale School of Medicine, responsible for graphics, bio-imaging, and ITS. Kate received her MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University and a BFA in painting and a BA in art history at Indiana University. She has received many awards for her pastels and digital artwork. She has been featured at Creative Tech week NY with the a Lumen Prize as well as in many shows around the New England area.

Kate says, “Painting to me, is about creating a sacred place that uses forms of the natural world and describes the mysticism and the narratives of life. I work between realms of the reactive and the intuitive, nature versus the intellect. Frequent themes in my paintings include feminism, mythology, passages, and memories. I often work by looking for a memory that can’t be put into words, something trapped in our collective experiences. Using a combination of gestural and contour line, I translate elements of the natural world into a place of imagined passages… For me pathways act as a metaphor for passages into the human condition…When walking a path there are choices, forks, crossroads, bridges; transitions of the landscape, going from the light into darkness and out again.”

Upcoming Exhibit