Open Studios Tour

Will Offer Access To Six Artists’ Havens

On Saturday, May 16, Newtown Woman’s Club will offer a Self-Guided Open Studio Tour.

Six Newtown artists, all of them well known and award-winning in their field — Pat Barkman, Betty Christensen, Robert Cottingham, Dick McEvoy, Ruth Newquist, and Virginia Zic — have agreed to open their studios between the hours of 11 am and 3 pm. Tickets are $15 each and maps will be available to help ticketholders find the studios on Saturday.

Tickets can be purchased in advance at Drug Center Pharmacy, 61 Church Hill Road, or at the front desk of C.H. Booth Library, 25 Main Street. Call Marianne Scanlon, 426-5283, for additional information.

The Artists

Patricia Barkman has lived in Newtown for more than 40 years. She is a strong supporter of the preservation of Newtown’s open spaces and the protection of the environment, and her love of nature shows in much of her art, which regularly features spaces in Newtown. A retired college teacher, Mrs Barkman has become a watercolor artist with an eye that celebrates natural beauty.

About eight years ago Mrs Barkman and her husband moved from the center of town to Taunton Lake Road, and Mrs Barkman was able to create a permanent gallery space, Lakeside Gallery, for her work. She opens the gallery for one weekend each year, usually in June, and the public is invited in to see the latest originals alongside favorites from her oeuvre.

The Gallery at Kent Art Association presented an Award for Excellence to Betty Christensen for one of her oil paintings in the association’s most recent exhibition, “Early Members Show & Sale,” which was on view in March and April 12.

Mrs Christensen has lived in Newtown since 1953. She did watercolors for 45 years and then started working in oils about ten years ago. She also works in pastels. Many of her works feature Newtown, which she feels is a very special place.

Mrs Christensen is a former curator of art for Booth Library, and has been the library’s featured artist a few times. She has also participated in has participated in dozens of shows and exhibitions, is an active member of The Society of Creative Arts of Newtown, Kent Art Association, Hudson Valley Art Association, and is an artist member of American Watercolor Society.

Robert Cottingham is a highly regarded American artist and a first generation photo realist. He often paints extreme  close-ups of commercial signage and theater marquees, although at the beginning of this decade he began a series that depicts a favorite subject: manual typewriters. A 2004 show at Forum Gallery in New York features seven watercolor and gouache works, two graphite drawings on vellum, five large (some as tall as seven feet) oils, and a series of six large (40 by 60 inches) paper pulp paintings. That series, called “Components,” done in 2003 during a 12-day stint, showed cropped and rotated typewriter parts.

Mr Cottingham established himself in the early 1970s among such renowned artists as Richard Estes and Chuck Close. Born in Brooklyn in 1935, he studied at Pratt Institute and began a brief career in Graphic Design, which later inspired him with his painting of American urban signage.

Dick McEvoy has lived in Newtown for 28 years and has painted all his life. He also has a successful business consulting practice in strategic planning. In December 2005, Mr McEvoy and his friend, the artist Frank Federico, were featured in an exhibition called “American Impressionists in France” at the former River Glen Fine Arts Gallery in Sandy Hook. The exhibition featured new works in pastel, watercolor and oil by Mr Federico and new works in pastel and oil by Mr McEvoy — the result of a ten-day trip to France to two men took earlier that year.

Painting has been a lifelong journey for Ruth Newquist, who told The Bee in January 2004 that it was a childhood inspiration for a love of art that led to her decision to attend Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, where she earned her fine arts degree. She also attended Art Students League in New York City for one year, studying under such distinguished artists as Randolph Bye, Reginald Marsh, and Frank Reilly. She also holds a master of science in art education from Southern Connecticut State University.

Today Mrs Newquist is a signature member of the National Watercolor Society and an artist member of The Salmagundi Club, an elected artist member of Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, and a member of Hudson Valley Art Association and North Shore Art Association (Gloucester, Mass.). She is a fellow in the American Artist Professional League.

She is known for her SoHo cityscapes as well as New England rural and urban landscapes.

Color and dramatic light energize the paintings of Virginia Zic, who often finds inspiration for her art from her travels, locally and abroad. A visit to the Galapagos Islands, where ancient primeval upheavals produced magnificent rock formations, fueled her imagination for “Earth Fragments,” a series of watercolor “portraits” of the earth’s surface the artist debuted at C.H. Booth Library in 2005.

Ms Zic earned an MA in painting at Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Art in Florence, Italy, and an MFA from Syracuse University. She is professor emerita in the department of art at Sacred Heart University. In her tenure at the university she established the department for art and design and taught a variety of courses in art history, fine arts and graphic design.