art: Open Studios stand-outs

© tracy taylor grubbs, 2007

Belcher Street Studios artists hit a really high standard:

• Hadley Northrop, such evocative portraits of warm people in cold climate
• Tracy Taylor Grubbs' Impermanence paintings of cars gently but inevitably disintegrating into the background are great, Impermanence Blue #2 (no picture available yet, but it's like the one above) is my favorite of the hundreds of works I saw (from only a handful of studios). It's a perfect mix of realism and abstract techniques in a cool take on big hardware in an indeterminate landscape.
• Carlo Abruzzese, imposing an architect's view onto the landscape
  
  © Carlo Abbruzzese, 2007

Also Emily Clawson and Jhina Alvarado working in encaustic, to reveal landscapes of indeterminate scale. The luminous depth from the layers of wax isn't apparent in pictures, it creates an involving personal object from a 2-D representation of the artist's concerns.

© Emily Clawson, 2007 

© Jhina Alvarado, 2007

Hmm, "landscape" and climate reoccurs in all these, implicit ecology.