Thursday, May 23, 2013

By Tamar Russell
Published: June 4, 2009

Nora Charney Rosenbaum, Marilyn Ruseckas, and Dennis Lucas are the artists being featured at Dragonfly Gallery's new show, "Interpretations," this weekend. The Oak Bluffs gallery will host an open house showcasing their work.

Nora Charney Rosenbaum, a Boston-based artist
who paints oil on copper, with one of her works at Dragonfly Gallery. Photo by Susan Safford

A Massachusetts native who currently lives in Vermont, Ms. Ruseckas is a long-time landscape painter. She graduated from the School of the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester in 1980. None of the work she will show this weekend has been seen on the Vineyard.

Using mostly pastels, the artist describes her work and palate as bold. "I like to push the medium towards rich and bold in both design and in color," she writes on her website. "The character of my work oscillates between realism and abstraction."

Dennis Lucas, a traditional Cape School oil impressionist and plein air painter, celebrates his fourth season with the Dragonfly Gallery. At 2 pm on Saturday, Mr. Lucas will be outside the gallery, brush in hand, to demonstrate his style and discuss his work. Mr. Lucas prefers on-site, or plein air, painting. "I will work from photos in the winter, but sometimes even in the winter I paint outside," he says.

Though an artist since childhood, it wasn't until the early 90s that Mr. Lucas made art a priority. After working in an office for many years, he enrolled in Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1992. "It was time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life," he says.

Marilyn Ruseckas's "Grand Passage," will be among her paintings displayed at Dragonfly Gallery through June 14. Photo courtesy of Dragonfly Gallery

Mr. Lucas spent a good deal of time on Cape Cod in Truro and Provincetown. His studies of the Truro cottages will be displayed in the show. "These cottages are very popular and iconic, so the paintings are very powerful," he says. Completed in the sunlight, the images are warm in tone. To create a contrast, he will also display a collection of cooler colored, grey-day studies, along with Vineyard images.

The work of Boston-based painter Nora Charney Rosenbaum, the third participating artist, has shown Dragonfly for the last five years. "The Dragonfly Gallery is a lovely place and I am happy to be part of it," she says.

Like Mr. Lucas, Ms. Rosenbaum attended Massachusetts College of Art and Design, graduating in 1994. She worked as an elementary school teacher, before deciding to take a leave of absence. She refers to her current life as her "next life."

Ms. Rosenbaum paints oil on copper, perfecting her technique through years of trial and error. The use of copper as a canvas is not a new idea. In her artist statement she describes, "During the Renaissance and the Baroque periods in Europe, artists painted on copper, utilizing the reflective qualities inherent in the metal to accentuate a sense of spiritual luminescence in their two-dimensional works."

Ms. Rosenbaum will discuss her process and the influence she obtained from her late father, meteorologist Jule Charney, in the gallery at 2 pm on Sunday. Mr. Charney, an MIT professor, was fascinated with developing mathematical equations of atmospheric motion to establish a basis for numerical weather prediction.

"I saw that I was influenced by my father's work," says Ms. Rosenbaum, who spent years sorting through thousands of slides of weather patterns and skies amassed by her father. Shot in the 60s, the images provided the basis for Ms. Rosenbaum's cloud studies, which will be displayed in the show. u

Open house reception, Saturday and Sunday, June 6 and 7, from 11 am-6 pm, at The Dragonfly Gallery, Oak Bluffs Arts District. Artist demonstrations are at 2 pm on both days. Through June 14. 508-693-8877; mvdragonfly.com.