Eye on Art: The Brush features artists who share common subjects

Lowell’s art scene is alive and well and thriving despite the cold and snow.

The Brush Art Gallery and Studios, 256 Market Street, presents “Bethany Peck & Janis H. Sanders,” an exhibit featuring two painters who share common subjects but have distinctly different styles. It opened recently and runs through Feb. 28. A reception is Saturday, Jan. 24, 2-4 p.m., with a snow date on Sunday, Jan. 25.

Bethany Peck is an abstract and modern impressionist painter who holds a BFA from Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts. Her work is deeply inspired by nature, particularly the captivating beauty of Maine and the New England coastline.

Peck uses landscape as a guide to explore light, emotion, and atmosphere. Her paintings seek to capture moments that feel suspended in time — suggesting that something has just occurred or is about to unfold. Her color palette, subject matter, and methods shift organically with the seasons, reflecting the ever-changing rhythms of the natural world.

Working both in the studio and en plein air, meaning painting outdoors, Peck uses a variety of media including oils, acrylics, watercolor, and mixed media. Her goal is to create work that invites the viewer into a fully immersive experience, encouraging a deep emotional connection to place.

Bethany Peck is represented by Blue Raven Gallery in Rockland, Maine; Threadneedle Gallery in Newburyport, Massachusetts; and Shop Home in Acton, Massachusetts. She is also a juried artist member of the Rockport Art Association.

Here is her Artist Statement: My work is driven by a love of light and the emotional resonance of landscape. I am drawn to moments in nature that feel transitional, quiet, charged, and fleeting. Using nature as my guide, I paint intuitively and emotionally rather than descriptively. I am less interested in replicating what the eye sees and more focused on expressing what a place feels like. My approach allows the work to evolve naturally, with colors, techniques, and subjects shifting in response to the seasons and my surroundings.

Through my paintings, I aim to create a sense of immersion and connection, inviting viewers to pause, reflect, and experience the landscape as an emotional and sensory space.

According to Sanders, her expressive Intention is ” salt air, salt spray, sweet smell of summer grass, verdant marsh, an old house at the water’s edge, wind in your hair, sun on your face. These elements draw me outdoors, to the grassy dunes of Truro, the calm marshes of the North Shore, to the rugged cliffs of Maine.”

Many of her paintings are done “en plein air,” a method introduced in the mid-1800s by Boudin and other French artists, and pursued vigorously by the Impressionists, a name coined by an art critic in response to Claude Monet’s work, Impression, Sunrise, 1872.

She continued, “Each of my works is done as spontaneously as possible, with only minimal blocking in of forms. I begin each painting with the sky, to me the most important element. The sky IS light, some days slightly purple, sometimes hazy cream, clear aqua, rosy, peach, celadon; we are immersed in it. Sky is the key to determine the entire atmosphere of the painting, and visually and practically provide the backdrop for the other objects in view.”

Her self-assigned task for each work, she said, is to convey the ethereal ‘thing’ of light in paint, as the sun casts its breath on the world. I paint vigorously, expressively, physically, applying paint with a palette knife in blocks/area of color, smoothing/blending minimally to keep the paint fresh and say the essence of the ‘thing’. I take tremendous joy in the attempt, and the subsequent sharing of the result with you.

Visit www.TheBrush.org for info.

Nancye Tuttle’s email is [email protected].