Arty party
Featherstone Center for the Arts is celebrating its 15 years of serving the Island cultural arts community with a y’all come, free afternoon to night birthday party Saturday, Aug. 6, 3 to 8 pm. The festivities include music, a barn dance, open studios, poetry, and all variety of art activities. The Art Cliff Diner food truck will be selling lunch and dinner treats throughout the day.
At 6 pm, there’s an opening reception of the 15X15 gallery show. It’s birthday cake (Cakes by Liz) from 6:30 to 8 pm, with The Flying Elbows playing for a old fashion barn dance with Kansas Brew as the caller.
Featherstone Center for the Arts, off Barnes Road, Oak Bluffs. 508-693-1850.
Critical mass
On Thursday, August 4 at 6 pm, Ned Reade, a plein air watercolor painter, and Rosalie Shane, who paints impressionistic still lifes of fruits and flowers, will give a Martha’s Vineyard Art Association (MVAA) gallery talks at Old Sculpin Gallery in Edgartown. The talks will be followed by a wonderful opportunity for artists to advance their work. In a salon-style atmosphere, artists of all ages and abilities are invited to bring in up to five pieces for critique. Art critiques are moderated by the MVAA’s adult and teen painting instructor, Eva Cincotta. Open and free to the public.
The opening reception of new photography by Louisa Gould and watercolors by Paul Beebe is Sunday, August 7, from 5 to 7 pm at Old Sculpin Gallery, Dock Street, Edgartown. 508-627-4881
Well stacked
Art in the Stacks is an initiative of The Friends of the Vineyard Haven Public Library who have initiated a program to provide individual artists an opportunity to show their work, and for library patrons to enjoy art at the library throughout the year. During this month, Art in the Stacks is presenting Tuscany Landscape Studies by Susan Johnson. The exhibit will be on display during regular library hours throughout the month of August.
Ms. Johnson holds a BFA and MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute, and will complete an MA in Art Education from Boston next year.
Making a splash
On Thursday, Aug. 11, from 6 to 8 pm, Eisenhauer Gallery’s new show, Swimming in Colour, opens, featuring the paintings of Carol Bennett, Jylian Gustlin, and Sherri Belassen, all brightly colored figurative paintings interpreting water scenes.
Carol Bennett paints the world below the surface; in multiple layers of paint and varnish, she depicts the weightless swimmer in the swirls and eddies created by the body moving through the water.
Jylian Gustlin’s mixed-media figures strike a pose in a blend of paint, metal leaf, crayon, and other mediums, under a surface of crystal clear epoxy resin. She envisions a world of figures built out of rectangles and shell spirals. Bright reds, yellows, blues, and oranges are used to create her forms.
Sherri Bellasen’s paintings of California are mosaics of bright color and pattern that collide against a backdrop of simple geometry. Surfers stand at the end of the canvas pointing out to the sea.
