LANE WILLIAMSON

Out in the Open Secrets

April 29th - June 2nd

ARTIST RECEPTION: Saturday May 17^th, 5:00 -7:00 PM

The Firehouse Center for the Arts is pleased to present Out in the Open Secrets, the debut of new work from Maine painter and former Rings Island resident Lane Williamson. 

Williamson, who lives and paints on an island several miles out to sea, creates landscapes lauded for their searing beauty and turbulent emotion.

Known for her large works, Williamson has recently undertaken a series of small paintings that reveal ordinary, in-plain-view subjects as extraordinary.  One canvas exposes the cavernous insides of an ancient tree, filled with water, detritus, moss and leaves; in a canvas titled Umbilicus sinuous roots encircle worn rocks protectively…or is it menacingly?  One of the large drawings offers an intimate view of a gigantic, barnacle-encrusted boulder slathered with rockweed and marooned on a beach at low tide.  Each work is at once comely yet palpably, deliberately melancholy.

In Out in the Open Secrets Williamson restructures nature’s architecture and tempts the viewer to reorganize their own assumptions about the visible world.  Here is the stark orderliness of nature collapsed and made chaotic by time and the elements.  Williamson repeatedly creates a suggestive spiritual atmosphere that implies there is something here of biography as well as portrait.  She balances formal structural issues with an internal imperative to restrain the amount of information available to the viewer, asking them to follow her instead deep into one space, finding paths, chasing mystery. 

Williamson’s work is extensively informed by nature and also by decades of using art as a modality for healing, and teaching students of all ages in formal and informal venues.  She is a graduate of Boston University, earned her graduate degree at Tufts University and has also studied at the University of New Hampshire, Maine College of Art and privately.  Her work is held in corporate and private collections.

More information about the artist is available on her web site, www.LaneBWilliamson.com

Participating Art Walk Galleries include:

Bridge Gallery

Chameleon, 18 Liberty St., 978-463-7623

Child At Heart Art Gallery, 48 Inn Street, 978-462-5554

Connor Summers Gallery, Market St.,

Indigo Artist Studio

The Churchill Gallery, 6 Inn Street, 978-462-9891

The Ferry Wharf Gallery

The Firehouse Center, Market Square, 978-462-7336

Lepore Fine Arts, 58 Merrimac St. 978-462-1663

Newburyport Art Association, 65 Water Street, 978-465-8769

Off the Wall, 57 Pleasant St., 978-462-9009

Somerby's Landing Sculpture Park, (near the boardwalk)

Spirit of Newburyport Gallery,

Valerie's Gallery, 12 State Street, 978-499-8444

The Walsingham Gallery, 47 Merrimac Street, 978-499-4411

Firehouse Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 12 pm to 5pm - Extended viewing hours on performance nights until curtain time.  See our Home Page for a listing of events.